radeon 8500/9100 equivalent ?

[Renton]

Which card from Nvidia is the equivalent of a Radeon 8500/9100 as far as the performance is concerned ?

 

[rogue1979]

That a wide range there, the Radeon 8500/9100 could be 64MB or 128MB. The 8500 Retail comes clocked at 275/275, while some 8500 LE variants and some of the 9100's come clocked at 250/200 or lower. Assuming you take the top of the line 8500 128MB retail which usually overclocks to 300/300, it falls just below the GF4 Ti4200, but above the GF3 Ti500.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: rogue1979
That a wide range there, the Radeon 8500/9100 could be 64MB or 128MB. The 8500 Retail comes clocked at 275/275, while some 8500 LE variants and some of the 9100's come clocked at 250/200 or lower. Assuming you take the top of the line 8500 128MB retail which usually overclocks to 300/300, it falls just below the GF4 Ti4200, but above the GF3 Ti500.

Is that comparison taking into account the Ti4200's ability to OC to at least 300 core clocks? Memory speed on the Ti4200's varies, but the newer ones are shipping with 3.3ns BGA and approach 600 MHz similar to what the 64MB versions were doing at launch. The GF3's OC'd quite nicely as well; I have my VT Ti200 at 235/510 and my PNY did 230/495. The Ti500's were decent OC'ers, but didn't see the % gains like the Ti200.

I'd place the R200s on par with the GF3s (only after numerous driver updates), with the Ti4200 considerably ahead.

Chiz

 

[rogue1979]

Originally posted by: chizow

Originally posted by: rogue1979
That a wide range there, the Radeon 8500/9100 could be 64MB or 128MB. The 8500 Retail comes clocked at 275/275, while some 8500 LE variants and some of the 9100's come clocked at 250/200 or lower. Assuming you take the top of the line 8500 128MB retail which usually overclocks to 300/300, it falls just below the GF4 Ti4200, but above the GF3 Ti500.

Is that comparison taking into account the Ti4200's ability to OC to at least 300 core clocks? Memory speed on the Ti4200's varies, but the newer ones are shipping with 3.3ns BGA and approach 600 MHz similar to what the 64MB versions were doing at launch. The GF3's OC'd quite nicely as well; I have my VT Ti200 at 235/510 and my PNY did 230/495. The Ti500's were decent OC'ers, but didn't see the % gains like the Ti200.

I'd place the R200s on par with the GF3s (only after numerous driver updates), with the Ti4200 considerably ahead.

Chiz

Got bad news for you. I have a GF3 Ti200 @ 250/520, Radeon 8500 128MB @310/303, and several GF4 Ti4200 @ 280-300/540-662. The Radeon 8500 128MB retail which I referred to is almost always faster than the GF3 in almost every situation. At 1600 x 1200 with Anisotropic on and no FSAA, the 8500 128MB even manages to pull ahead of my fastest GF4 Ti4200 128MB. Im most cases the GF4 Ti4200 is ahead of the 8500, in a few by a large margin. Hence my opinion stands, GF3, then a decent 8500 128MB, then a GF4 ti4200. Overall the 8500 always beats the GF3, but in some cases pulls ahead of the GF4, so I can't say that the Ti4200 is considerably ahead. By the way you won't find any of this real life gaming performance info in a bunch of wimpy benchmarks.

 

[chizow]

Interesting, so by your tests, one could assume a Radeon 8500 is faster than a Ti4600 at 1600x32 w/ AF? That's something you don't hear every day. Did you run these "real-world" tests on the same platform? CPU might have been the bottleneck as well. Granted, I only owned a Radeon 8500 for a few weeks before I sent it packing back to Dell, but my Ti200 beat it considerably in every game I played or benched at the time (RTCW, BG2, MPBT3025, Q3A, etc.). Really couldn't justify keeping the 8500 based on potential, so I sent it back and bought another Ti200 for 1/2 the price ($220 from Dell, $115 for a second GF3). In total, I got 2 GF3's for less than the R8500 a month from release.

Chiz

 

[rogue1979]

Yes, the 8500 retail 128MB outperforms the Ti4600 at 1600 x 1200 32-bit color with anisotropic set at maximum. Interesting to note, without AF with or without FSAA, the 8500 falls well behind. The Geforce3 is a great card, I still think it is able to play today's games fine. I had it for quite some time as well as a Radeon 8500. The Geforce3 was faster with superior drivers, but after the Cat 2.5 release that completely changed. The 8500 received another performance boost through the Cat 3.0 and 3.1 release.

I just put the 8500 back in the same machine as the GF4 to test the new Cat 3.1 on the same platform, 1700+ running 183 x 11.5, so that shouldn't be a bottleneck.

 

[Renton]

Thanks guys for the advices