iraklis2000 Posted November 21, 2001 Share Posted November 21, 2001 This debate has been going back and forth ALL week. i decided there was only one way for me to decide which card i should get. Both GF3Ti200 and ATI Radeon 8500 can be found for around $170 online. Their prices differ ALOT at you local retailer, but I used my Amex BLUE, with the intentions of price matching the one i decide to keep. i went to my local BEST buy and purchased a VisionTek Xtasy 6564(GF3 64MB Ti200), and an ATI Radeon 8500. Here is my hardware, P4 1.7, 512MB RDRAM(PC800).(Dell Dimension 8100) First the VisionTek. I had this card in my system for almost 4 days, and swore up and down this was God's gift to humans. I tweaked it as much as possible, with my max performance at 220 core/ 440 memory. I used latest XP certified drivers, from NVIDIA's site. The reason for this is that i noticed some funny things going on when I used on of the other 2 non-certified sets of drivers.(ex. In Madden 2002, menu screen is very slow and pauses. this doesn't happen with ver. 21.83) My best result in 3dmark2001 was 6625.(this was with a 32bit Z-buffer.) i tried with 24bit z-buffer and the results only flactuated 10-15 points. http://gamershq.madonion.com/compare2k1.shtml?2032705 Then I went from one Best Buy to the next, looking for these damn Radeon 8500. They are the only retailer that carries them, and they are out of stock everywhere. i wanted to buy from retail, to make sure I wasn't getting an OEM version with lower clock cycles. Plugged this puppy in and loaded ATI's latest drivers released 6 days ago.(These are not certified). No tweaking or anything. Right out of the box. The results were amazing! i got a 7416. I later realized that my Network card didn't like these drives, and would randomly disconnect from the network. I installed the latest certified ATI drivers. the result was still an amazing 7031! Ohh, the Radeon doesn't support 32bit z-buffer. Non-Certified drivers:http://gamershq.madonion.com/compare2k1.shtml?2037726 certified drivers:http://gamershq.madonion.com/compare2k1.shtml?2037903 My conclusion(accept it for what it's worth), I love NVidia, i went from 3dfx Voodoo 2, to Nvidia GeForce2 MX 400, to......ATI 8500. The latest drivers(although still buggy) showed that ATI's card has A LOT of potential in FPS and the hardware capabilities speak for themselves. On a side note, while on my shopping spree, i picked up ID's latest game, "Return to castle Wolfenstein". It is AWESOME, and I haven't even played multiplayer yet. It is also the FIRST game to support ATI's TRUFORM technology. Very impressive. http://www.ati.com/na/pages/technology/har...rm/truform.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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