As a former Ti4200 user who went to a 9700Pro, I'll try to help out.
It was definitely a huge step up for me in IQ - I had a 3dfx Voodoo5,
so good FSAA is a must ;). Initial reports on the X800 are *very*
positive on the performance at high res w/ FSAA. Note that these
comments are for the current gen cards/drivers - who knows what will
hold for the X800:
> Hi,
> Looking at the latest X800 I might make a move towards ATI from my GF4
> Ti4600. I would like to know from ATI owner if there are known problems,
> mainly with FSAA with these racesims (My goal is highest resolution with
> FSAA):
> GPL
Very good - with the caveat that the latest drivers break FSAA unless
you turn off direct mirror rendering (which has a performance hit for
some people). I run GPL on 98SE with an older driver set for this
reason. There are also menu corruption issues, but none that make the
sim unusable. D3D only - the OpenGL renderer seems to only work well
w/nVidia cards.
D3D only, again. OpenGL works but is slower. Still very good. I run
in XP with Omega's 4.2-based drivers and FSAA is very nice.
Again, very good in my XP install. I actually turn down the texture
quality, but I think that's because the Omega's adjust the mipmap
levels for higher quality textures, but that leads to a little texture
aliasing in distant objects. I don't crank the Aniso to keep
performance up.
Oh - and GTR is F-ING AWESOME :)!
Don't have - don't plan to ;)
Very good also - the latest patches have continued to improve
performance.
Nice last time I ran it, but haven't fired it up in a while.
Well - Mafia is a performance hog, but the latest patches (which can
be hard to find) and the 4.x ATI drivers have made it pretty good.
BTW I'm running an AMD XP 2400+ OC'd to 3000+ specs, 512mb RAM,
9700pro OC'd to 350/350 - love that VGA Silencer :) - Audigy2 sound
card (recent upgrade from Live!, and worth it!).
I really can't see alot of downsides to the ATI cards - the 9800's are
a *steal* - much less than what I got my 9700 Pro for. Most of the
complaints about drivers can be solved by just using the excellent
Omega drivers (*much* cleaner install, built in tweaks, settings
launcher, etc.)
HTH,
Kendt