X850 Xt

[klein1jo]

So where does this card stand in the scheme of things. Honestly, what does it's performance compare to. It's normally around $400-450, but I found it on sale for $250. It seems a wonderful deal. How would it compare to let's say a 6800GT or 6800GS?

Thanks and please give me honest opinions and not just nVidia is always better stuff

 

[Alex81388]

It is a fast card. But is in no way worth its normal price.

For 250, its not a bad deal. The only thing with ATI is they seem to quickly become inapt against games which developers make for nVidia, this draws me away from them.

TomsHardware.com should have some good benchmarks for you.

 

[beedubaya]

If you can spend $250, just get a 7800Gt which is much better than an X850XT. Also, as Alex said, game developers develop games for Nvidia, so much of the time games are developed to use shaders and features only Nvidia cards have. It is a problem with the X800 series because it does not contain Shader Model 3, which is today's DX9 standard, so you will lose out on much eye candy. Go 7800GT.

 

[klein1jo]

I see. I looked at the benchmarks. It is one **** of a card. For $300 it's a pretty good deal cause it came out on top of the 6800GT which would make it better than the 6800GS.

However if it doesn't have SM3 it would be quite limited in the future I would think. Sucks that I have no PCI-E so no 7800 for me. Thank you both for the unbiased honest info. I appreciate it. Now I just need to decide if SM3 support is important enough or if I get the 6800GS.

 

[weringo]

As Alex said, it's a fast card and is the second most powerful AGP card out there after the x850XTPE.

There is solid proof of this at tomshardware under the VGA benchmarks, the x850xt outperforms even the 6800ultra on all games except for Pacific Fighters and Chronicles of Ri**** (both sucky games anyway) and the 6800ultra definately outperforms the 6800gs especially as the AGP version has been downclocked.

If you can get it for $250 I would say this is a good buy.

 

[klein1jo]

Ya, it does look pretty good. I just don't know if SM3 is worth taking the hit.

I only have a P4 2.4 Ghz and 1 gig PC-2100 Ram which is the max speed my comp take. It was king of the hill 3 or 4 years ago, but if I want faster I definately have to start from scratch. However, with all the industry changes occuring I'd like to stretch this one out 2 or 3 more years by which 64bit should be mainstream and all other changes have been finalized.

With the above said a 6800GS is prob already overkill on my comp let alone the ATI card. So if I can extend my comp and have SM3 that might be better, but for $30 more that ATI card is looking pretty impressive. Just sucks of not having SM3 will really limit me.

 

[Ridlyn]

If you wnt your computer to last more in the future i suggest 6800GS because games are becoming more and more dependent on the SM3, i suggest saving the money and putting into another gig of ram if you mobo supports it.

 

[beedubaya]

For Unreal Tournament 2007, you will definately want SM3 to play at decent settings at a 1024x768 resolution. They will probably have a DX8 fallback mode for those without SM3, but you wont want to have to resort to that.

 

[weringo]

For Unreal Tournament 2007, you will definately want SM3 to play at decent settings at a 1024x768 resolution. They will probably have a DX8 fallback mode for those without SM3, but you wont want to have to resort to that.

It is true that you will need SM3 to play with decent settings but as the 6800gs is quite a weak video card compared to what will be out when UT07 comes out, its not going to be playing very well anyway.

I would say the 6800gs when UT07 comes out, is going to be the equivellent of the 6600 right now.

 

[Alex81388]

Save the money and upgrade other components man.

Worry about the card later, ger yourself a faster processer and a new motherboard with that money. Jump on an AMD64.