ATI Radeon 9600Pro vs Geforce FX 5500 , Any help ?

[curiousergeorge]

Im trying to get a new card and have these 2 cards as my options .

GexCube ATI Radeon 9600 Pro , 128 mb
MSI GeForce FX 5500 , 256 mb


The price are quite the same , Can anyone tell me which card is better ? Perfomance wise and all . I was told that the 9600 Pro is a better card , but i dont see how a 128mb card can beat a 256mb card . Thanks for any help .

[SH64]

9600Pro of course ! . the 5500 is weak AFAIK .

9600 Pro has 1600MT/s fillrate & 9.60GB/s memory bandwidth .
5500 has 1080MT/s fillrate & a memory bandwidth of 6.40GB/s for the 128-bit bus & 3.20GB/s for the 64-bit bus .

yes the 256MB is cool , but the 5500 wont benefit much from it because its a value card & wont able to handle neither high res or the HQ extra effects in games that takes advatange of the 256MB RAM .
add to that the poor SM2.0 performance for the FX5500 & you get the whole picture .

[zer0]

9600pro!

all geforce FX generation of cards are generally weaker than the ATI 9000 series counterpart...