Graphics card Rankings

[zedman3d]

Actually, from what I've seen the Phenom II chips scale incredibly well, it's just that they don't clock anywhere near as high for 24/7 usage yet.

Anyway, my 4890 has just come so I'm going to go have a play w/ it

Sucks to be in England? How much did you pay for it in USD??

 

[gurusan]

262 usd, but you can't really compare that way as the whole economy is different.

I paid 164.99 GBP which is a damned good deal.

 

[zedman3d]

260usd is decent anyway.

 

[hikaricloud]

ATI really doesnt get the respect they deserve, most people would rather a gtx 260 over a 4870 1 gb becuase nvidia puts its name out there more, or a gtx 275 over a 4890. I wouldn't say one companies cards are hotter then the other, and all different series have had their let downs. ATI simply doesn't have the commercial statud nvidia does, but they are still doing a *** good good with the new series.

Depends on what era you're talking about...remember the 9800 Pro? Huge card. Wouldn't have minded owning one if my old mobo didn't have an nForce chipset, lol...

 

[gurusan]

not to mention x1800/X1900 series

 

[hikaricloud]

For their time, they were great.

 

[zmatt]

Yeah, the 9800pro was the best card of its generation hands down.

 

[baron5]

that was a whole era i would have missed, just before i cam into the computer world, would you say the 9800pro was similar to a 8800gtx or just the g80 series when it came out?

 

[hikaricloud]

Okay, are you thinking the 9800pro is a nVidia card? Because it's an ATI card from a while back.

 

[zmatt]

Okay, are you thinking the 9800pro is a nVidia card? Because it's an ATI card from a while back.

I think what he meant is, when it came out did it have a similar impact.

To answer the question, the 9800 was the fastest card you could get at the time. Multicard setups didn't exist then and we were all on AGP. That, with a 2.4ghz Athlon XP and 1gig of ram was a dream machine. The 9800pro was the best of the best. Nidia's competing cards, the FX5xxx cards were crap. They used dual slot coolers, cost more and the FX5800ultra was famously noisy. The Radeon 9 series also shares something with ATIs current cards, uber AA performance. Before then AA and AF were features that you could really only enable by sacrificing other graphics aspects, with the 9800 you could turn them on with no performance penalty. It was so good at it and the Nvidia cards so bad at it that in some games the 9800 was literally twice as fast as the competition. You don't see those kind of numbers anymore.

This was back in 2003, before the Athlon 64, before SLI, and way before Vista, DX10 or any of the other cool things we have now. Back then your cpus were 32bit and single core. Your memory was single channel, and DDR was a pretty new thing. Only 2 years before the P4 launched with RDRAM, and I think we all remember how well that went. It was a different time, a simpler time. Where a man was judged not by how many threads he could run, but by how many megahertz his chip ran. Sometimes I miss it. The days when we could call a Northwood "fast". Now the Atom is faster. We sure have come a long way.

Man, all of that makes me feel old.