radeon 4830 vs. radeon 1950 pro (512mb)

Welcome the forums my friend.
Holy cow kiskaly, I upgraded from a 1950pro to a 8800GTS (G92) OC about a year ago. The difference in these 2 cards is night and day. My 3dmark score over doubled, as in from 4500 to 9800. with a little further overclocking, I can get well over 10,300. And that is with an AMD 4600 X2 running at 2.8ghz
A 4850 and my card run neck and neck, and I expect the 4830 to run at about a5-10% handicap to a 4850.
Here is a review with some benchmarks:
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardwar [...] rformance/
But really, that 1950pro is showing its age. It simply will not even compare with a 4800 series card, you will see a big, big difference. And yeah, benchmarks aside in the real world, you will see a big, big difference. The cards are just that far apart in performance level.
But remember also, how much improvement you see is also somewhat dependant on the rest of your hardware. If you are still running a Pentium 4 and 1 gig of memory, you are not going to see near the improvement as if you are running a dual core processor with at least a couple gig of memory