ATI Radeon 9600 XT: Video Card Question

[illippinno]

Ok, I recently upgraded my video card from a GeForce 4, to a GeForce FX 5200, which I now exchanged to an ATI Radeon 9600 XT. I was contemplating whether or not to do it, but I finally cave. I figure, for a $100 more, plus a free game voucher of Half Life 2, I'm sure the quality would be a lot better.

But this might be a stupid response, but... I don't see much of a difference really. Maybe I'm naive, or just don't notice the difference right now.

But anyway, to what I meant to ask before I rambled on:

1. What are some features of this video card?

I know it's listed in the box, but, in Lamen's terms, is what I was trying to look for really =]

2. A friend of mine told me that the XT series has a automated overclocking sensor. Is that true for the 9600, or is it only for the 9800? Or is that even true?

 

[Shakie]

2. A friend of mine told me that the XT series has a automated overclocking sensor. Is that true for the 9600, or is it only for the 9800? Or is that even true?

This is true... kinda. The sensor is based on the heat inside the case. So technically it's supposed to work like this:

Colder Case and Vid Card = Faster Vid Card

However, we are not talking a significant amount of speed here. You won't even notice.

 

[Martin]

Half-Life 2 currently yields poor DirectX 9 performance with FX cards - the jump from the FX 5200 (entry-level) to a 9600 XT (mid-range) card will give you a large performance gain, especially when bandwidth-eating features such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are enabled.

I find the ATI card to have better 2D quality as well, but I guess it depends on the manufacturer of the card.

Specs are listed here:

http://ati.com/products/radeon9600/radeon9600pro/specs.html

Key features are Smoothvision 2.1 (multi sample anti-aliasing), Truform 2.0 (higher order polygon tesselation by using N-Patches, and I believe NVIDIA cards do this with RT-patches); HyperZ IIII (memory bandwidth controller) and the Videoshader feature, which supposedly improves video playback quality

I generally don't pay too much attention to the specs; it's how the card works in the real world is what matters.