Still using an ATI 9800 Pro? Did a cpu upgrade push its performance?

[bupkus]

Still using an ATI 9800 Pro? Did a cpu upgrade push its performance?

I'm wondering if a cpu upgrade from an Athlon XP to an Athlon 64 did much to wring more frames out of the venerable 9800 Pro.

Which game was the beneficiary of this upgrade?

How much improvement can you testify to?

 

[Munky]

I'll tell you something else that pushed it's performance -- a $35 zalman vf700 cooler and some overclocking. AQ3 score went up from around 40000 to around 52000. 3dmark05 went from 2500-ish to somewhere around 3000. I'm still using my Athlon XP, so I can't tell you if it improves much from a A64.

 

[Kogan]

I don't have a 9800 pro, but try this out.

Run a benchmark with halflife2, doom3 or any other game you play regularly - run it with the lowest possible resolution (640x480?) and no AA/AF.

The score you get is basically what your cpu is capable of. So if you get 130fps in halflife2, if your computer is not video limited, you should also get 130fps in halflife2 at 1600x1200 with AA/AF turned on.

I haven't played battlefield2 yet, but lets say for example you only get 20fps in BF2 at low resolutions, and the game just seems to go slow no matter how low you turn the quality settings - then you really need to look at getting a cpu upgrade.

Overall, if you want to play high resolutions, but only low resolutions are playable, you need a new video card.

For a pure gaming system, a fast cpu is not necessary and an upgrade with a faster video card will do a lot better than a cpu/motherboard upgrade.

After looking at your sig, it looks like we've got about the same system I have an 8rda and an XP @ 2.2ghz, but with a geforce4 video card. I ordered a geforce 6800 and will have it delivered in about 5 hours from now. I'll let you know what sort of improvement I get if you're interested.

 

[JokerRulez]

Hmmm. The comments made by munky may be the best bet you have for improving your score.

Let me see if I can get my personal history correct here for you:

I had an AMD Athlon XP 1400+ with an older 3D card.
I upgrade my video card to the Radeon 9800 128MB card to play 'Call of Duty'. Big improvement.

Then came the CPU upgrade. I bought an AMD 64 3200+ with 2x512MB DDR3200 memory. Very nice performance boost again. When the next gen video games started coming out I initially thought I'd absolutely have to get a new video card. However, I played Doom 3 all the way through and was reasonably satisfied. Same with HL2. Farcry really punished me though. Indoor environments really killed me and I had to turn the quality down to a point I felt was too low.

I recently bought a BFG GeForce 6800 GT OC but just returned it before my 30 days expired from Best Buy. I just haven't been happy with the 6800 line (it was my third 6800 GT, including two from Leadtek). I didn't get great performance and never could figure out why. Who knows.

So right now I have my old Radeon 9800 in my HTPC and, get this, a GeForce 3 Ti400 in my main machine!!! Wow. No DX9 really sucks. I'll pick up something again soon as this 7000 series settles down.

I hope this bit of personal experience helps you.

If I were to chart a course forward for you it would be quite difficult. You may well have to get a PCI-E card to be happy, yet you can't do that without upgrading your system. Yet if you upgrade your system and include PCI-E you won't be able to use your old Radeon card... Catch 22. Either take the chance on AGP and upgrade your system now but keep it at AGP, or jump in wholesale - buy the CPU, motherboard, and video card at the same time. Tough choices man.

Joker

 

[selfbuilt]

Well, about 6 months ago I went from a similar setup as yours (XP @2.45GHz, DDR400 @2-3-2-6) to an A64 (@2.34GHz skt754, DDR~400 @2-3-2-6) with my 9800pro (o/c to 420 core, 375 mem). I saw:

Doom3 (@1280 med quality): 4% boost on timedemo (35.9 vs 34.5 fps)
UT2003 (@1280 no aa/af): 19% boost in botmatch (108 vs 90 fps)
3DMark01: 14% boost (21585 vs 18975)
3DMark03: 4% boost (6784 vs 6496)

So, not too impressive in the end. I suspect HL2 would have shown a greater difference, but I didn't test it on the XP system. Still, you might do a bit better with a higher o/c on the A64 (my newcastle won't do more than 2.34 stable). Frankly though, I think a graphics card upgrade on your current system would be a better idea, if gaming is your thing.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Unless you're running a Duron 800, upgrading the graphics card is usually the best route to improving gaming experience (also assuming you have enough RAM). I took a "downgrade" from a mobiCel 1.6 @ 3.2 w/9800 Pro to an eMachines m6805 (A64 3000+ w/~9600 Pro) and while everything seems zippier (esp. DiVX encoding, etc.), gaming performance definitely took a dive. I can still play 1024x768 no/AA and AF very satisfactorily though (Vampire Bloodlines, HL2, D3, etc.).