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very old school- Radeon 8500 vs 9600XT

almoststew1990

almoststew1990

almoststew1990

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For ten pounds on the MM I picked up a P4 system and it has a 9600XT in it. Lots of my old games from the 2003 2004 time recommend a minimum of a Radeon 8500. How does the 9600XT compare to the 8500 performance wise?
 
CAT don't you 9700 Pro.....;) 9600XT was awesome card; I do believe some of them could unlock to 9700 pro.....one of them did
 
Yeah I had a fx5200 back in the day that was all levels of awful:D

Cat the fifth- Do you mean the 8500 could just about compete with the 9500 PRO?

Is thr XT better than the Pro?
 
Normal < SE < Pro < XT

So yes, XT was the best at the time.

9600XT is easily twice as fast as the 8500, probably more. The mid/high-end 9000 series were also DX9, whereas the low 9000 and 8000 series were DX8, as I recall.
 
ah that's good. I hoped that the Radeon 8500 was cropping up as the minimum requirement a lot in the same way that the Nvidia 6600 used to be for absolutely ages (which was because of Shader 2.0 support or something?), rather than raw performance.

It's good to hear i've got my hands on a quality card then! I'm normally the sucker who buys the Nvidia 8500GTs etc :p
 
The 9600XT was from a generation later than the 8500. With the jump in performance the R300 series offered even as a mid-range the 9600XT would be a faster card. Ah, that was a golden era, things have stagnated so much since then. I wish I'd kept my Athlon 2600+ and 9800 PRO system...
 
I remember ATI was the way to go if you wanted to properly play Half Life 2 back then (sure it was bundled with some 9600XT and 9800XT cards). The Nvidia FX range was just terrible!
 
meldarthx said:
CAT don't you 9700 Pro.....;) 9600XT was awesome card; I do believe some of them could unlock to 9700 pro.....one of them did
Click to expand...

The 9500 non Pro could unlock. The 9500 Pro was a 9700 Pro with a 128 bit memory controller. The 9500 Pro was expensive to make and was replaced by the 9600 Pro which was slower. The 9600XT raised clock speeds so tended to trade blows with the 9500 Pro. Both were DX9 capable and were much faster than the DX8.1 capable 8500.
 
I remember people sniping back and forth about Image Quality in HL2, supposedly power lines being more aliased under NV, then there was FEAR with texture shimmering... I'd have been very happy never to hear about that. Drove me nuts when I noticed it.
 
Orangey said:
I remember people sniping back and forth about Image Quality in HL2, supposedly power lines being more aliased under NV, then there was FEAR with texture shimmering... I'd have been very happy never to hear about that. Drove me nuts when I noticed it.
Click to expand...

The FX series were much slower in the game and had worse imagine quality as their DX9 implementation was not standard.
 
They clock pretty well too, the 9600 XT used a slightly newer process to the earlier 9600 PRO so you might get a 20% core clock bump out of it.
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
The FX series were much slower in the game and had worse imagine quality as their DX9 implementation was not standard.
Click to expand...

The FX range and the MX range were awful (particularly the Geforce 4 MX which was basically a Geforce 2). ATI cards were pretty decent, but they still had a problem when it came to rendering fog in some games (such as the Thief games).
 
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