Radeon X1600pro or Geforce 6800XT ?

My video card has died and I'd appreciate suggestions on a suitable replacement for under $150.

My current deliberation is between the Radeon X1600pro and the GeForce 6800X, but I'd welcome other suggestions that are also: 512mb, AGP 4x/8x, and under $150.

If you have one of these cards (or another that works well and meets the above criteria), I'd certainly appreciate your input as to it's suitability and preferability.

Thank you for your time .

- Vertex / the currently un-carded / Zenith

Since no one else has answered yet...

I don't know anything specifically about these two cards, but when looking at two equivalent cards, I'd always pick the NVIDIA card over ATI. The general opinion seems to be that NVIDIA drivers support OpenGL better than ATI drivers. And SL runs on OpenGL.

So in this case, without knowing anything about the cards specifically, I'd suggest the GeForce.

Of course, that assumes that the cards are equivalent.

Since the last Catalyst 6.5 driver my ATI card has little problems with sl as I believe that ATI has done a lot of work on the drivers.

My card is an ATI X800GT though it is a PCI Express graphic card.

At the moment I'm fighting the urge not to upgrade my graphic card to an ATI X1900, lol

The NVidia card is a bit faster. The ATI has support for the latest shader features. I'd go with the ATI myself, but it's a matter of where your priorities lie.

Also, the supplies of the 6800XT seem to be drying up; NVidia may be slowing down or stopping production of that older generation of chips. If you want it, get it while you can.

Nvidia and ATI are both great cards, will never put down either..

If you play lots of opengl games, then Nvidia is the way to go..

if you play lots of Directx games, ATI is the way to go..

With the 6.5 drivers and the new version of SL, I gained 10FPS, and my friends with Nvidia dropped a few FPS, now is that do to the new features in SL, or ATI doing a little more for opengl in thier drivers, I don't know.

But both are great cards, but choose by what you do, don't listen to the Nvidia is better, ati is better stuff, it depends on what you do...directX ati kills Nvidia, Opengl nvidia kills ati..

Agreed.

The 1600 isn't a particularly good card.
I'd choose between a X800GTO or the 6800, probably biasing towards the 6800.

Problem you've got is you want AGP which are expensive. I'm assuming you can't stretch your budget to a PCI-E upgrade.

Thank you for your responses. I hope nobody minds my combining of posts to answer a bit more compactly.


Here lies part of my dilemma. I'm able to find plenty of benchmarks for either one, but no consistent testing of both under the same conditions. Does anyone have a site they'd like to recommend?.


Unfortunately (???) the only other "game" besides SL which I play is Civ4, which runs fine even on my old Radeon 7500. If my card hadn't died I wouldn't even be considering an "upgrade".


Sure, but I'd have to raise my prices to compensate... Just kidding, I'm a newbie here and don't have any content to sell anyway.

More seriously, while I don't "want" AGP , I have yet to find a "good" PCI-E motherboard which will support my current socket 478 CPU. Buying a "decent" MB and CPU combo looks like a minimum of ~$150 or so, plus the PCI-E video card. I'm just not ready to spend that for a machine that otherwise does 100% of what I ask. I know, I apologize for my lack of commitment. And yes, I did put on my asbestos underwear before blaspheming so.

Thank you all for your help and advice.

Hopefully this thread will be helpful for others upgrading also.

- Vertex