How To Best Spend $250 on Upgrading Your Rig

The Results

UT2004

In a game like UT2004, you can tell that the other system components are the bottleneck when the scores are consistent. This is the case with the 9800 Pro. The Ti4200 has no chance keeping up with it older core and memory. You can see that as the resolution is raised, the performance is impacted.

Half-Life 2

Moving to a newer game, you can again see the outdated core get beat up. This is not to say that the Ti4200 is a bad graphics card, only that it can be replaced. It is clear that the 9800 can do well with frame rates above 30 in HL2.

Doom 3

Here you can clearly see that the engine in the Ti4200 cannot handle complex lighting of Doom 3. In high quality where 8x anisotropic filtering is enabled by default, the 256 MB of graphics memory as well as the memory bandwidth make the 9800 stand miles apart from the 4200. Only when the resolution is turned up to 1600x1200 the 9800 starts to show its age.