Anyone gone from a GF4Ti4600 to a Radeon 9700Pro?

[Guest gasebah]

Hi guys I have a GF4Ti4600 right now, but I can get a Radeon 9700 Pro for a very reasonable price. I have a fairly fast computer (XP2700+ oc'ed to 2350 MHz) so I guess I could take full advantage of he card.Question is does it make an sense, or will there basically be no difference. With all my add-ons I am no running my GF4 at 1600x1200x32 AF4 no AA, at very reasonable framerates. If I could at least run AA4 with the same fps I would go for it.I would love to hear a short report frm someone who did the change. I am not interested in "what you would expect" but wanna know from someone who has the real life experience. And please don't gimme that ATI/Nvidia-Fan BS :-).Anxciously anticipating your advice. Thx fr it.Alex

[Guest]

The long debate among the simmer group is "how much difference does the graphics engine make?

[Guest Bigshot]

Framerate wise, I wouldn't expect to see any real difference between a Ti4600 and a 9700 Pro in FS until you actually turn on FSAA and AF. Once these have been turned on, the Ti4600 will roll over and die and the 9700 Pro will keep on going with little or no effect on framerate. Also, I have no texture blur problem with the 9700 Pro. It runs the sim fine at 4xAA & 16xAF at 1600x1200x32 res maintaining framerates in the low twenties with a great pic with no problems. You just need to match it with a fast enough processor and enough ram. Various generic benchmarks have shown the Ti4600 and the 9700 Pro to be about equal in speed with no FSAA and no AF. They've also shown that the 9700 Pro pulls out ahead of the Ti4600 by about 2.5 times faster when these are maxed out.

[Guest]

Good question Alex. I'm thinking about the same thing. It'll be interesting to see the responses. - Trip

[Guest gasebah]

Bigshot and J.,thx fr the answers. They have been helpful. The FSAA section was what I was interested in. I have a NForce2 board and I am able to run 190 FSB and as I said I have no probs whatsoever with the framerates. I have it locked to 25 and even in populated scenery it stays there most of the time. Blurries are unknown to me and since I crancked up the Ram to 1024MB autogen and highres textures load up almost to the horizon. AF 4 is no prob but FSAA 2x is useless and if I throw in Quincux or FSAA 4x it kills my framerates. If I am able to maintain my 25 with FSAA 4x I am more than happy. Of course I wouldn't expect any considerable change in fps wih FSAA and AF off, so the answer was pretty much as I expected. But it helps to have it confirmed.Thx again,Alex

[John_Tavendale 453]

I made the swap a few weeks ago. I don't regret it at all :)ATI driver support is getting better all the time too :)And since it's a DX9 compatable card, it'll be a good match for the DX9 based FS2004

[Sarge27 0]

I made the change from the Ge4-4600 to the ATI 9700 Pro, and honestly, I'm not so sure it was a good move. Why? Lock up issues. I've turned fast writes off and tried about every version of the ATI and even Omega drivers, and still get intermittent lock ups. I'm not even over-clocked. I just never had these headaches with my NVIDIA cards. Unless something really good happens with the Catalyst 3.3 drivers, I'll probably switch back to NVIDIA. I will give ATI this though...the image quality is better.Frame rates...probably just a tad better with the 9700.

[Guest Tim13]

I have a 9500 Pro right now, and recently ran a GF4 Ti 4200 128mb card in my machine. Average frames for the GF4 were around 20 to 25 with frames locked at 30. With the 9500, I do not know how many FPS I'm getting because it stays right at the locked 30 fps. I will say that the picture quality and color seems better with the ATI card, and when I was playing around with the AA and AF, the more that I loaded the cards, the better the ATI card performed relatively speaking.I know that this isn't exactly what you were asking, but it may benefit others that will peek into this thread.My final impression is that the ATI card gives me a nicer picture than the nvidia card while providing as good or better performance. I personally don't care who's name is on the hardware (i.e. AMD vs Intel, ATI vs nvidia, etc...) only that I'm getting satisfaction for the money that I spend.Tim13Asus P4PE/L moboP4 2.53 GHz proc.512mb Crucial PC2700 DDR 333ATI Radeon 9500 Pro 128mb 350 watt PSU

[kaydub 3]

Well, I just went from a 4200 to a 9500 Pro. Why? Just for the difference with AA and AF. The 4200 ran at 25 fps no problem, and about 15-18 fps with 4X AA. (AMD 2100 no O'C.) I finally went for the Radeon, since a friend on a budget enjoyed buying my 4200. The difference is marked, but only with lots of AA and AF. I lock it at 25, and it never fails to stay there. 4X AA and AF. And it is smooth and pretty. I think the AA works a tad better on the Radeon, and there is no doubt the ATI can sustain good frame rates with AA and AF. BTW, I was forced to upgrade to XP to get the 3.2 Catalyst to work right. I don't know if this is typical, but that is what happened to me. K

[kaydub 3]

Just ran 3DMark. I can't figure it out, but the benchmark is much higher, like 40%, with the Radeon. K

[Guest FPSFREAK]

Having been an Nvidia Fan since the days of the GeForce2 All the way up to the current G4 4600 I feel I can give an opinion on this. After tweaking some of my settings within FS2K2, I can honestly say that at stock clock on either card w no AA or AFenabled the framerates will be basically the same. But now lets put a situation together..1600x1200 All sliders maxxed except for cloud density including 8 lights and Trilinear filtering and the oh so wonderful 4XAA and 8X AF the 4600 which was able to stay neck and neck w the 9700 is now tripping over itself to try to keep up. Wanna see the G4 fall flat on it's face??..Turn the AA up to 6X and the AF to 16X at the above resolution and get ready to catch the drool off of your chin..LOL The 9700 is REALLY that good. Like I said I was an Nvidia fan for quite some time but lets face it. When you turn the wick up the 4600 Just doesnt have the legs. Just for comparison heres some figures to chew on...The 9700 DOUBLES the vertex shader pipelines, has a transform rate 250% greater than that of the 4600, more than TWICE the fill rate and it's AA fill rate is more than 300% greater. Thats just from a purely hardware standpoint. Want some hard numbers..Computer Pilot recently tested the 9700 on both a 1.2 Ghz Duron and an XP2400+. FS2K2 saw a 20% improvement in framerates w the 9700, IL-2 under open GL saw almost a 33% increase w the 9700 and when AA was enabled there was a 25% loss in framerates w the 4600 vs no measurable loss w the 9700. The thing to note about the 9700 and FS2K2 is they both seem very CPU and Graphics card speed dependant. The higher the performance the smoother and faster they all seem to work together. Now granted not everyone has or wants to spend the money on a 9700 ( Although it was the best $349 US Dollars I have ever spent ). But it has recently been seen online for as little as $299. If you want the best sometimes it costs more. There's and old saying that goes.."Speed costs money...How much do you want to spend" In all honesty if you currently own a 42-4600 stay w it. If you own anything else and are looking to step up....Well you know. In my opinion you cannot compare the two once you enable all the Visual goodies so to speak. The 9700 is in a class by itself.Bobby