rec.autos.simulators

The benchmarks at Tom's Hardware site look very promising, especially
when you consider the price of this card (120 euro  / $135 !).

I know that the 9700 or 9800 is better but I just got married and now
I've got quite a lot of bills to pay :-/ so those cards are a bit out
of my budget right now.

I'm especially curious about driver experiences with this card. It's
mostly used for sims like N2003, GPL and F1C so those games should
work without problems with this card.

Any comments or suggetions for alternative cards are mostly welcome :)

Andre

I have no experience of the 9500, but the 9500Pro (now discontinued) seems
to be the "best bang for buck" people have been recommending. The
replacement 9600 is slower, I believe.

What I will say though is that Ati have certainly produced some decent
hardware recently. I bought a second hand 9700 Pro a month ago (in a
moment of extreme weakness) and have been very impressed by its speed on a
cheap AMD 1700+ overclocked to 2.2GHz. I can run with x4fsaa, x16aniso,
all 42 cars drawn ahead/behind in N2003, 1280x1024, and never see the
frame rate drop below 30fps. Ok, I don't have all the
shadow/sunlight etc settings turned on, but it's really rather impressive
to see in action with a full field, and 1600x1200 doesn't seem to slow it
down much either. So it's been worth the money (150ukp) IMO and the
only slight disappointment is that while the antialiasing *is* better than
Nvidias, it's still not up to V5 standards. Being rather a lot faster than
the V5 kind of makes up for this though!

Anyway, I'm not sure I'm helping you much here, but maybe this *will
help...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3065227.stm ;-)

Andrew McP

Andrew McP

Ati has cleaned up it's drivers, the 2D is heads above your current
card, as is the 3D, but that's only to be expected

AA and AF is better than nVidia's

Beers and cheers
(uncle) Goy
"goyl at nettx dot no"

http://www.racesimcentral.net/

"A man is only as old as the woman he feels........"
--Groucho Marx--

Yes, the 9500 pro is a tad faster according to Toms Hardware site, but
I must have called about 20 stores today and all of them told me it's
not available anymore :(
To my amazement I also read that the 9600 Pro is slower than the 9500
Pro, even though it's more expensive. I'm curious how the 9600
compares to the 9500, but I couldn't find benchmarks for that on the
internet.

That's good.. 30 fps is about the max I get with 42 cars in 800x600 :)

LOL :) Well I allready found that out after 4 weeks.. but I must admit
that the garden and my house look lovely now with all that new stuff
in it ;)

Andre

I find this quite worrying, because it's exactly the kind of thing we've
come to expect from Nvidia, playing games with the names to give the
illusion of speed. Having said that, I haven't researched this properly
and it's possible the 9600 is better in some ways. It would be nice to
see a side by side comparison with the card it's replacing.

800x600? I didn't realise they still made pixels that big! ;-) Forget
that garden, you need that new graphics card mate!

Andrew McP

Andre

Andre

I ordered the 9700 today for 200 euro, maybe I can run in 1024x768
when I have installed it ;)

Andre

I used to have a 9700 PRO though, Hercules, guy came into the shop,
pointed at the box that I had on display and said I want that card, told
him it was just an empty box and that I was all out, and he goes, well,
where's the card that used to be in that box, told him it was in my
personal computer and that he would be welcome to have a look at
3Mark2001 running on it, just so he'd know what to expect and I could
order one for him

He said he didn't mind that the card had been used and he was prepared
to pay the full price, but he wanted it there and then...."only" thing I
had lying around to replace it other than the odd GF4MX card was this
9500 PRO, never gotten around to replacing it and don't think I will
until the next hot card comes around

I think you'll be happy with your R9700, the first time you fire it up
after you've installed the driver, have a good look at the 2D picture
quality

Beers and cheers
(uncle) Goy
"goyl at nettx dot no"

http://www.theuspits.com

"A man is only as old as the woman he feels........"
--Groucho Marx--

One word of warning before I forget, these cards churn out a lot of
heat, so you may need to add a bit of extra ventilation to your case. I
run with the side off mine and currently have the 9700 cooled by an 80mm
fan and an old (and noisy!) CPU fan. This may be a bit over the top, as
these cards are obviously designed to run hot. But I feel happier
keeping it a bit cooler. Even at "only" 150ukp it's still 1.5 times what
I usually like to spend on a vid card upgrade.

The noise of the extra fans isn't really a problem in the middle of a
pack of 42 cars though :-)

Hang on, did I say middle? I meant at the back of 42 cars, obviously.

Mmmm... it occurs to me I probably owe your wife a bunch of flowers for
tempting you into spending more money than planned! ;-)

Andrew McP

PS I haven't looked at too many tech demos for the 9700, but I was very
impressed (in the usual sad, silly little way) by the "Rendering With
Natural Light" demo on http://www.ati.com/developer/demos/r9700.html

If your 9700 box runs XP you might also be interested in...
http://www.rage3d.com/articles/atidawning/

Andrew McP

Thanks for the other tips ;)

Andre

Andre