3850 to 4850 on 1024x768 (+2xAA) .... Noticable performance increase?

Well, basically, I'm very intrigued by the Radeon 4850 and it's wonder beating the 9800GTX (Which still costs about $400 here) while selling for $200+ here......

But currently I'm still stuck on a 17 inch monitor with a natural resolution of 1024x768, however, the latest game I bought, Race Driver : Grid, has showed me the wonders of Anti Aliasing for video cards. Or least this game shows me how terrible it looks without any AA.

So in short, would there be any bottlenecks if I buy the Radeon 4850 on 1024x768.

My current computer :

Athlon64 X2 5600 @ 3010Mhz (215x14)
GeCube Radeon 3850 256MB
2GB RAM

Currently, Grid on maximum graphical settings at 1024x768 on my system runs about 30FPS. I'm also thinking I might be processor bottlenecked as well.

AA is WAY better on the 4800 series, and the 4850 will be more than enough for your resolution. 4x AA is basically free, little or no performance hit at all.

I think the processor will bottleneck it a bit. 3 ghz looks nice but 215 FSB isn't really that much. If the cpu/motherboard can handle it it's always better to bump the FSB up some and lower the multiplier. guru3d tested the 4850 in Grid and got 70fps at your resolution with settings on ultra and 4xAA.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd- [...] ercolor/19

To check your CPU, try 800x600 and 1024x768 both with and without fsaa. You may want to use fraps and benchmark a lap or two of a race. If you see you hit a wall and get the same FPS regardless of these settings, it's CPU related. If you see performance drops as you increase resolution and fsaa, it's GPU related. Keep in mind some of both may be happening too.

BTW, with the drivers Tom's had, the HD4850 refused to play Grid:
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 57-19.html

The FSB on Athlon CPUs is (as far as I know) deceiving as it is the HyperTransport that does the actual info transfers (I could as always be wrong)

I wouldnt go the 320gts route, as I have one, and it fails in many games, and still has somewhat of a memory leak, and at 320 it really cant afford to leak any heheh. Go for the 4850, and know youre setup for awhile, even if you upgrade your res.

Lets put it this way ATI had to be a big risk taker bother series but the 4xxx they just got it rigth...

Don't skimp on memory. The more memory you video card has, the better it will be with AA. If you only have 256MB of memory on your video card, then you're only getting half the performance of what AA will do on a good 512MB video card. A 320MB video card doesn't cute it. I would go for the 4850 512MB card. The 9800GTX is not as good as the 4850 and also the 980GTX is $10 to $30 more which is over priced. If you have disposable income then go on and get a Nvidia based card.
I don't buy Nvidia based products because I got tired of being screwed over. The way it used to be was. Nvidia had bad video cards and really good drivers and ATI had very good cards but their drivers were a joke. But now it's different. Today ATI has very good cards and very impressive drivers at a very reasonable price which can't be beat when it comes to getting what you paid for.
As for the bandwidth issue: Yeah, The hyper transport has issues with the PCI-E bus due to the PCI-E just being an over clocked PCI slot with no direct memory access for starters. What happens when the video memory gets used up, the system has to use main memory to render the rest which slows your system down to a craw because the CPU has to cycle instruction code 8 to 16 addition times in-order to render the rest of the scene.
That's one of the reason why I always preferred AGP cards over PCI-E.
The AGP doesn't have the same theoretical bandwidth as the PCI-E does but the AGP has 3 advantages over the PCI-E which is Direct Memory Access, 64MB to 512MB Aperture memory which nothing can touch except for the AGP it's self and lower CPU usage. The PCI-E uses 4 CPU cycles for each PCI-E instruction. The AGP only uses one CPU cycle per AGP instruction, the AGP does the rest on it's own without help from the CPU.
The PCI-E is a flawed invention for 3d rendering.
What they should have done was make a 64bit AGP slot with 128bit transfer when side banding was enabled running on a 133MHz bus with a aperture size up to 1GB .
Talk about a screamer. That would last us for 10 years or more.
Why did they short change us on the PCI-E slot?
The answer is simple. The reason why they short changed us is because people are stupid, plain and simple.

Multisampling is just an improved type of anti aliasing. Originally we had FSAA, full screen anti aliasing, which basically just took the finished frame, blew it up to 2 or 4 times its size, then shrunk it back down again. The edges would be smoothed out, but it doesn't look all that good, anti aliases everything including textures and really taxes video memory. So now we have MSAA, which calculates where the edges are and only applies AA to those areas. This way is faster and doesn't apply AA to textures (so they stay nice and crisp). Basic explanation anyway.

As resolution decreases, you are more prone to CPU bottlenecks. You'd be better with a new monitor although as said before, the 4800 series do cope with AA a lot better. Look at 2053BW.

^ yours did increase though at 640x480, so the GPU is limiting performance at 1152x864. If it were all cpu limited, you would hit a wall and fps at each resolution would be the same. But if you up the res and the performance drops, like yours did, then the GPU is limiting. You need to test alot of resolutions with and without fsaa to figure out exactly what's going on. It could be, at 640x480 you are seeing all the CPU can do, but with a 5-10 fps drop, you are certainly seeing the GPU becoming the limiting factor.

Well if you can get $120 for a used 3850, then yeah go for a 4850.

I now want Grid but need time to try the demo before buying. I am a huge sim and arcade racing fan who buys more racers than I have time to play, but I hated the feel to Pro Race Driver (Toca Race Driver) so much that I have shunned CodeMasters racing games since. I looked forward to that game and was so disappointed it felt my car was floating 4 inches off the ground instead of hugging the road. (end vent)