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nvidia ti4600

I'd get a 9600pro or 9600XT in that price range. The pro's a little less than 150, the XT is a little more. The 4600 is faster on some older games, but on new stuff the Radeons are well ahead. Plus the 9600 series cards don't seem to take as much of a hit from AA & AF.

edit: As an added bonus you won't have to format your HD to clean up after switching between ATI and NVidia.
 
Maybe the 9600XT, but not the pro. I have that 9800 Pro, and I find that it's only moderately better than the Ti4200 I used to have, and that only because of the pixel shader system being twice as fast. With high polygon count, the GF4 has the advantage, and I noticed that even games like Deus Ex: Invisible War still need high polygon more than faster pixel shading as the game ran much better on the Ti4200 I had before. In other words, what I'm saying, is that the Ti4600 should already be slightly better than the 9600 Pro. Some might be thinking that the 4200 is actually pretty decent due to all the overclocking, but according to 3dMark's online statistics, the Ti4200 only beat out the 4400 generally.

As for AF and FSAA, when I ran tests on the best choices, I found I was able to pull off 4x FSAA with 8x ansiotropic filtering (which is just about all anyone really needs anyway) if I used the "performance" setting instead of quality. I'm not "videophile" enough to notice the quality difference between the quality and performance options. Besides, even the quality settings did al ittle better than the nVidia cards, so if all you can do is 2x on each, it's still better than 0 on both.

Anyway, I THINk that you might be better off with a 9700 card if you could afford it. It uses a somewhat better chip from my understanding and, regardless, it's just more powerful than the 9600. I don't know about pro versus non-pro however.


Oh, BTW, I switched from nVidia to ATi and never had to format my HD. Things run just fine.
 
Originally posted by Nazo
With high polygon count, the GF4 has the advantage, and I noticed that even games like Deus Ex: Invisible War still need high polygon more than faster pixel shading as the game ran much better on the Ti4200 I had before
Im not quite sure what youre smoking, but by all means please share.
 
I speak from personal experience having played the game on both cards. I was able to get it to just barely run tolerably on the GF4 Ti4200 when I turned off all shadows and that kind of thing, but when I tried my new card, even with shadows off it was skipping like insane.

As for the polygon count thing, I was just referring to some numbers in 3dMark. Actually, I'm wondering because it calls it the high polygon count test, but, the test is also for the lighting combined with high polygon count. (The one that shows a merry go round and 8 lights moving around.) In that test, it said my current card wasn't quite as good as the GF4 Ti4200 I had before it. I think I had slightly lower framerates in one or two of the other things as well, but I can't remember which if that were true. The pixel shader tests gave nearly twice the score for the Radeon than the GF4, so I believe that games like Deus Ex must still not rely on pixel shaders as much as something else that the Ti4200 did better, which as far as I could tell, was high polygon count + lighting (ok, I forgot that, but, I mean, what game doesn't have lighting these days?)
 
Nazo... you say that you don't have any problems switching from Nvidia to ATI, but then you have games running slow with a faster card. Maybe there is a connection?

In my experience, the Radeon 9600 Pro ties the Geforce4 Ti4600 with basic settings in DirectX7 and DirectX8. The 4200, when not overclocked, has a little over half the memory bandwidth of the 4600.

But maybe I'm just misinformed :p
 
All I'm gonna say is that I'm pretty freakin' happy with my Ti4400 128MB. I run Final Fantasy XI great now that I upgraded my 1900+ to a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz system with DDR400 (what a difference!!). Maybe the Radeon 9600's are great shit in DX9 but there aren't many DX9 games out right now... If I were you, I'd scour the used forums and eBay for cards like a Ti4400 or Ti4600 from some upgrade happy person who bought an ATI. Save yourself some bones, and put the rest in your piggy bank for whatever comes out in a year and a half.
 
I'd suggest a 9600XT. They're in the $160-$170 range.

The Radeon 9500 Pro was just about equal to the Ti 4600 with no AA and AF. Once the AA and AF were enabled, the 9500 Pro pulled ahead by quite a but.

The 9600XT is about equal to a Radeon 9500 Pro in performance, so I'd suggest it over the Geforce 4 Ti 4600.
 
I have a g4 ti4600 and I love it. Im not upgrading until hl2 comes out probably unless I find a buyer for my card now.

If you are going to buy a g4 make sure its a used one. No sense in buying new obsolete equipment right?
 
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