GF3-Ti200 vs Xabre 400 vs Radeon 9000

[Woodchuck2000]

I'm looking for a cheap video card upgrade. I can't find any benchmarks comparing the Xabre and Radeon to the GeForce3. Does anyone know what the relative performance is? I'm leaning towards the GeForce as it's a little cheaper than the Radeon and has more mature drivers. Any comments?

 

[Actaeon]

In terms of performance at stock speeds... Radeon 9000 is a bit slower than the 8500, so it would be pretty close... but Between the R9000 and the Ti200, I would have to go with the R9000. Xabre performs a bit faster than an MX460/440, and thats rather slow, so It would be best to dismiss that option.

In overclocking, the Ti200 overclocks easily to near Ti500 speeds, and most go past it (my Ti200 can hit 244/558 stable, compared to the stock Ti500 speed of 240/500). Which would put the Ti200 ahead of the R9000.

In terms of performance...

Non-Overclocked:
R9000 > Ti200 > Xabre (Extremely close between the Ti200 and R9000)

Overclocked:
Ti200 > R9000 > Xabre (Ti200 should pass the R9000 without a problem when both are overclocked.)

I'm sure you can find a Ti200 for very cheap (I picked mine up for $69 shipped), just look at the FS/T, and you should find some under $75. R9000 was released a week or two ago, I don't think you'll find very many over there, and they are priced at $100+ new. Another alternative would be finding a Radeon8500 for about $100, which happens to be a bit faster than all of the cards mentioned here. As far as drivers go, Nvidia's drivers are very mature, while ATi's also have improved heavily over the past couple years or so, I'm sure we'd all agree that they aren't on par with Nvidia's.

Personally, I would choose between the Ti200 and the Radeon8500. Both perform very well, but the Radeon8500 comes out ahead. Though you can find the Ti200 for a bit cheaper. If you would like to spend around $75, Ti200 is your best bet. If you're willing to spend a bit more, perhaps, around $100, you should get an Radeon8500.

What is your system rig specs? Your CPU could be bottlenecking your system, and it might not even be worth it getting a card that fast.

 

[Woodchuck2000]

Thanks for the reply. I'm looking at UK prices and the cheapest I can find are:
GF3: £74
9000: £83
Xabre:£65

I can't find a cheap radeon 8500 anywhere - I'd have gone with that definitely if I did.

It will be running on a duron 850/192 for about a month until I upgrade to a cheap Athlon XP. I'm expecting a degree of bottlenecking, but as it's replacing a GF2MX (32Mb) I ought to see a large performance gain with whatever I go for.

The thing I notice about the Radeon 9000 is that performance is very erratic when multitexturing is used (because it only has one texture unit per rendering pipe.) I'd like the card to be as future proof as possible for games like UT2003 which make extensive use of multitexturing. That said, the pixel shader is version 1.4 as opposed to the GeForce's 1.3

I'm not entirely sure how the benchmarks stack up and indeed how much the architectural differences affect real world performance. Too many factors. Ug.

 

[jiffylube1024]

I'd definately go for the GF3. A Radeon 9000 is like a Radeon MX.

 

[AnAndAustin]

Totally agree jiffylube1024, GF3TI200 is much faster than Rad9000 or Xabre and has MUCH better AA and Aniso too. But then the Rad cards do have better image quality, TVout and daul display, if these are important you may want to give some of the speed up and go Rad9000PRO or better still Rad8500LE. 128MB is a VERY wise purchase.

As said the Rad9000 and Rad9000pro (about 20% faster) are there to compete with the GF4MX cards which are inferior to GF3 cards which is where the Rad8500 cards are targetted at. Anyway, see for yourself:

Tech Report Rad9000pro review (inc GF4TI, Rad8500/LE, GF3, GF4MX440/460 & Rad7500)
AnAndTech Rad9000pro review (inc GF4TI, Rad8500/LE, Parhelia, GF4MX440/460 & Rad7500)

And for an idea of how these gfx cards cope with diff CPUs take a look at this:

AnAndTech CPU Scaling with many gfx card and games