2900Pro Vs 8800 320 GTS OC

I wuold like to have some suggestion about my next buy.
I will need the Video Card mainly to play Lineage II videogame.
The monitor i will buy very soon is

24" TFT Samsung SyncMaster 245B 5ms Wide

The card I'm considering are.

- Sapphire 1024MB 2900Pro GDDR3 PCIe
- XFX 320MB 8800GTS XXX GDDR3 PCIe

That have almost same price

Ty

That's not a fair comparion. HD2900PRO 512 VS 8800GTS 320 are about the same prices. 2900 is cheaper, but it's sold out at most places. egg included. 8800GTS is a bit faster in most game benchmarks for a higher price. Keep in mind newegg jacked up the 2900pro prices due to demand.

If you get the 8800, at least 640mb gts or gtx. Otherwise, at 1200, some game settings have to be toned down.

The 1024 2900Pro has GDDR4 not GDDR3 RAM.
I would suggest to buy the 512MB version of the 2900Pro. I have one myself and i'm very satisfied

If you like using highest quality settings (AA/AF) the 8800GTS/320 will outperform the 2900Pro at 1920x1200.
From www.hexus.net review

From Guru3D review (Other game reviews there as well)

Both the 2900XT and 2900Pro have issues with AA
From Hexus.net review showing AA and No AA results on the same game.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory @ 1920x1200 Also shows 2900 OC potential

XFX 320MB 8800GTS XXX DDR3 PCIe - 229 Euro with the factory overclock and warranty seem like the best value IMO.

Do they say what "hi resolution" means?

In the Far Cry chart above you can see small differences between 640/320 @ 1920x1200

At 2560x1600 the differences become larger.

THG Video charts lets you compare 320/640 versions of 8800GTS

I don't know about you, but if I get the hd2900pro, I'd o/c it to the max. At stock, the gts is faster in most games except 3dmark which isn't a game.

1600x1200 at Very High Image quality yes - at medium image quality not so much. There maybe a GTS driver bug at Very High image quality settings. Its in the 640MB version as well.

The 2900 series is also having some driver issues:

OCing a 2900Pro and voiding the warranty? Or buying a factory OCed 8800GTS?
You'll probably see the same 2900Pro/8800GTS scaling of performance as the non-OC'ed versions.

Just a little interjection, I've heard quite a few comments from customers about how the 2900s run quite loud, and how the 8800s run wisper quiet in comparison. I don't know about you, but I put quite a bit of value in a rig that runs quiet with high performance, so I got an 8800 320mb OC, couldn't be happier, can't even hear it running.

I don't see how you could even consider the HD2900Pro when the HD2950Pro is coming out November 19th.

The HD2950 Pro will be built on the 55nm process
Will use close half the wattage of the current HD2900Pro
Will have a single slot cooling system
and should be a lot quieter and run cooler.

Stick it out for one more month man. This is really a bad time to buy.

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inqu [...] -beat-r600


Also the GeForce 8800GT is coming out also on October 29th. It probably will not be quite as strong at as the HD2950Pro but it may be a better DX10 Budget card:

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php? [...] &Itemid=34

The 8800GT has an awesome looking heat sink to it also.

What month are you pulling those results from?

Unless the 8000GTS is some mythical beast better than the 8800GTS.

The GTS-320 is more often than not slower than the XT (be it 512 or 1GB), the GTS-640 competes with the XT, and they're more head to head than winner/winner (depends of course on if you run only a few test or enough to truely compare).

Now both have the games/settings they play better, but the GTS-320 (the one being talked about here) is nowhere near what you say it is as an outright winner vs the XT, however the main thing is to check the titles in question because from one to the next the lead will easily swap hands favouring either architecture.

The main thing is if your focus is LineageII then look for LineageII benchmarks if you can find them (I haven't bothered to look for any, but the usual suspects are kind of Lineage bare for tests). Knowing that your card is awesome in Bioshock or DiRT or World in Conflict or QuakeWars, yet sucks at the games you play is pointless. Neither will give you BAD performance in general, but you should check into which one matches your needs beause one or the other may be a better fit for Lineage and the settings you favour.

I think you should also consider RWayne's comments about upcoming cards, at least the 8800GT which is a few scant weeks away and will affect this segment so much they are dropping the GTS-320, and be sure to consider any issues you may focus on like noise and power consumption (if power is a concern wait for the refreshes IMO).

Also it's pretty irrelevant which card plays a game @ 1920x1200 with 4XAA at 14fps vs 13 fps, both are pretty unplayable and right next to each other in suckitude, so you'd want to find the noAA results that give you playable framerates. Because when it comes to an LCD for me, 16x10 with 4XAA interpolated on a 19x12 LCD usually doesn't look as good as 2x or 0 AA @ native resolution with 40+fps. Don't get confused by the number that seem better, because a 50% win of 6fps over 4fps is still not going to be something you're actually going to use. So be sure to think if these situations are realistic to use or simply good benchmarking results to test hardware limits, but that no one would ever play at. Look at this THG result as part of the review linked to above, according to it the GF8600GTS is obviously the card to buy because @ 1920x1200 with 4XAA it get 9.3fps versus the GF8800GTS-640's 2 fps and the GTS-320's 1 fps ;



What do results like that tell you about anything? It's almost as consistent at those settings the GF8600GTS-512 outperforms the GF8800GTS-320 by a wide margin when they start to choke, but even the the GF8800GTX is barely playable at those settings , let alone the cards you'd be considering. So while they're good stress tests, they mean nothing if even the top cards become unplayable under those conditions (also see World in Conflict benchies).

I'd say either of your options is fine, but for a long term build expected to last more than a year, I'd be avoiding the GTS-320 and looking to the GTS-640 instead if your tastes gravitate in that direction, especially after the GTS-640 refresh comes out and pushes the 'old' GTS-640 down in price. But the main thing is if others games don't matter to you, then you really should be looking at which game plays Lineage the best, because nothing else really matters.

Unless there's a rush, wait out the end of the month at least, and the ton of benchmarks with the new 8800GT.

It's not so much a direct replacement, but it is a performance value repalcement, and it's something most of us have been talking about for a while. The GTS-320 is expensive to make for a $250 card unless they have enough rejects of their high end parts that they aren't just selling perfectly good G80s as cripples. The GF8800GT allows them to sell a $200 part that costs much less to make per part, and with its speed it'll rival the GTS-320 in performance, and it will be able to add 512MB of memory without competing with the GTS-640 too much, especially if it's revamped with more SPs as rumoured as well. Here's a link among many confirming the commonly held belief that the GTS-320 will be discontinued, but with the more interesting idea that ther'll be a G92 version of the GTS to replace it, either instead of or in addition to the increased SPU model;

http://www.tcmagazine.com/comments [...] 67&catid=6

Just like the R9600Pro replacing the R9500Pro, it doesn't require equal performance to be a better replacement for the mfr.

It should perform below the GTS-320 in some situations, and as seen in the results above, it should perform above the GTS-320 in others. It will depend alot on the areas of bottlenecking, be it the speed or the SPUs or the amount of VRAM, speaking of which....

Yes, initially that's the expectation, but there is also mention of a third option with 1GB of memory, however, nothing has been confirmed on that at all. The availability of GDDR3 and GDDR4 variants is also up for debate. The expectation is that a 256MB and 1GB model would be GDDR3 and the 512MB model would be GDDR3 & GDDR4 for price/performance reasons, the top of the line likely to sport 512MB of GDDR4.

I'd rather see the 3DMark06 scores with a stock CPU & stock GPU. No way to be sure how much the 3.6Ghz CPU is influencing the total score.