Originally posted by: Stumps
I must add that I really did have high hopes for this card...I was considering it for my other AGP rigs...the sad truth is and I suspect because of the AGP bus, the card just simply doesn't live up to it's name or price...either that or I have a super Sapphire X1950Pro...but I don't have the latter (Apoppin can confirm this, his rig performs almost identical to mine).
In the end I was just simply disappointed with it.
Not even a X1950XTX can saturate the AGP bus.
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/Sapphire%20X1950Pro%20AGP/index.php It says the following:
Conclusion: if the performance is bounded by the video system, migration to a more powerful platform does not bring any significant effect.
That is, in practice if you have a video card belonging to the mid-end (or lower) and you wish to improve the performance at 3D games, the CPU overclocking, its replacement with a more powerful model or migration to a more powerful platform without replacement of the video card won't help. Using our tests, you can determine the bottleneck of your system - the video card or the CPU.
As regards the video cards themselves which took part in today's tests, the results are evident. Despite the respectable age of AGP platforms, they can get the second wind through installation of the fastest AGP video cards currently available. Now regarding the prices. Video cards based on 7800GS are currently offered at prices within $295 to $325. (8800GTS 320 MB costs a bit more, but unfortunately it is not manufactured for the AGP.) Sapphire X1950Pro 512 AGP is currently available at about $270-280. No doubt, this is a good chance to give a new lease of life to the AGP-based system without loss of comfort at modern games. For now, there are still no DirectX 10 games, and it's going to pass a long time until they are released. Once they appear in mass quantities, a number of CPU and GPU generations will be replaced, and then there will come the time to think of "migration" to a new computer.
http://firingsquad.com/hardware/powerco...adeon_x1950_pro_agp_review/default.asp States the following:
The point is, there are plenty of reasons why many AGP users just don?t feel the urge to replace their entire system just yet, and would rather just upgrade the component that matters the most right now for gaming: the graphics card. Think of it as a midlife upgrade if you will.
The debate is, should you upgrade to a new card like the Radeon X1950 Pro AGP, or just junk the idea of a midlife upgrade and swap out your motherboard, graphics, and other components and make the move to PCI Express.
Hopefully this article shed a little light on what kind of performance you could expect from going down the midlife upgrade path (via the PowerColor X1950 Pro AGP), or for the all-out replacement with the PCI Express system.
As you just saw in our benchmarks, in many cases the AGP rig is quite a capable performer. In Quake 4 and Oblivion for instance, the difference in performance was nearly indistinguishable. Company of Heroes, and to a slightly lesser extent F.E.A.R. were the only applications where the PCI Express X1950 Pro card really pulled ahead of its AGP counterpart, with the PCIe board running up to 9% faster in CoH at 1600x1200 with 2xAA/8xAF.
"In comparison to the other AGP cards, the Radeon X1950 Pro is clearly in a class of its own right now. With the exception of Quake 4 (where the GeForce 7800 GS quite handily outperformed the X1950 Pro), the X1950 Pro swept all of our benchmarks, sometimes delivering over 1.5 times the performance of the GeForce 7800 GS AGP. Unless you?re a heavy Quake player, the Radeon X1950 Pro is definitely the fastest GPU out there on the AGP platform. It really isn?t all that close either."
So somebody going from a 7800GS to a X1950PRO really will appreciate the huge performance boost, but somebody going from a X1950PRO to XT hardly will notice a difference except in high resolutions and lots of anti aliasing, but the difference will be even less considering that the GeCube X1950XT has only 256MB of VRAM. I notice a huge performance boost from my X800XT PE in heavy games like Oblivion, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Prey, in other games like The Need for Speed Most Wanted, Half Life 2 etc, the benefits are not that great, considering that I don't have the greatest CPU gaming in the market, still able to see nice benefits and being able to increase image quality like High AF and FSAA. So even though a X1950XT having 25% more pixel shaders, 25% more pixel pipelines, 35% more pixel fillrate, 15% more vertex power and 33% more pixel shader power calculation, so a 30% increase in performance from a X1950PRO to XT can be seen when not CPU limited. Pretty much like comparing a X800PRO to a X800XT PE.
And the revision is 1.1, but something written with some kind of marker near the AGP port says 03, don't know what that means.
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