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9800 Pro 128MB vs. 9800 Pro 256MB?

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Epsil0n00

Golden Member
I am thinking about purchasing a 9800 Pro, but I am curious what the difference is between the 9800 Pro 128 and 256MB versions. The 128 can be purchased for about $200, the 256 for about $300. Historically speaking the extra RAM versions never have enough performance difference to justify the huge price jump... is the same thing true for the 9800 Pro?

Why would someone pay $100 more for the 256MB version? What practical differences in terms of graphics quality and FPS would the extra RAM provide?

Finally, does anyone know of a good benchmark directly comparing the 9800 Pro 128 and 256MB cards?

Thanks in advance for any input and advice!
Epsil0n
 
I've read comparisons at TomsHardware and a couple of others, at the time there was zero speed difference for any games unless at 1600x1200 and AA/AF were enabled. I think some time after that there was at least one game with a tiny speed difference at 1280x1024 with AA/AF.

So a tiny but useless difference, certainly not worth the $100. If you must sepnd more than $200, you might as well wait and get either a 9800 XT or one of the next-generation ATI and nVidia cards.
 
Yep.

Looks like just what I expected. The 128 and 256 perform almost exactly the same and the 256 is almost $100 more than the 128! Given those figures, there is no way I would buy a 9800 Pro 256MB.

Thanks for the sweet link to the 80 card roundup!
Consider this matter resolved--256MB is teh money wast0r!

Epsil0n
 
Quite a few of the 9800 Pro 256MB cards actually have the R360 cores and can be flashed into 9800 XTs! But I wouldn't even pay $100 over the price of a 9800 Pro 128MB for a 9800 XT.
 
Actually, in many instances the 256 Meg performs INFERIOR to the 128.

There is also no chance that it could ever perform significantly better, since a Radeon 9800 Pro simply doesn't have enough juice to sustain such high FSAA/Resolution, regardless of memory.

A next gen card like Geforce 6800U or X800XT would most definately be constrained by less than 256 megs though.
 
Why? The amount of texture data isn't changing by using a GF6800 or X800XT in place of a 9800 Pro. I really can't see how you can say that the next-gen cards will be "constrained by less than 256 megs" using today's games. More memory isn't going to make the card magically faster if it's not being used, and unless you run ridiculous (2048xwhatever) resolutions with full AA/AF, 128Mb is almost overkill for most people.
 
Originally posted by: ForceCalibur
Actually, in many instances the 256 Meg performs INFERIOR to the 128.



There is also no chance that it could ever perform significantly better, since a Radeon 9800 Pro simply doesn't have enough juice to sustain such high FSAA/Resolution, regardless of memory.



A next gen card like Geforce 6800U or X800XT would most definately be constrained by less than 256 megs though.
Click to expand...

Actually, the 6800U sucks when you use higher than 4xAA because of the method it uses, so you're limited to 4xAA, unless you want inferior performance to the 9800XT.
This is accordign to one sites benchmarks where they used a 9800XT at 6xAA and the 6800U at 8xAA (the next mode up from 4xAA for both cards), so the 1600x1200 w/4xAA is the max for any card, and there is not much difference between 128MB cards and 256MB cards at the moment, because the space for the extra data isn't needed yet.

At higher resolutions (2048x1536) with 4xAA it would begin to be more of an issue though.
 
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