Thoughts on the X1950PRO AGP

[RDFmx3]

There are two things to keep in mind when looking at the X1950PRO AGP card. My uncle just got one which was a upgrade from his Nvidia 6800GT,
which he's running on a Intel 3.4 gig processor. The result's after doing benchmarking on some old and new games "mostly new" are this.
On the newer games the minimum fps didn't really change much, the reason is being CPU limited, no card will help that. But on average the avg and max fps went up anywhere from 15 to 30+ fps, and mostly 20 to 30.
SO.....at places where your CPU limited this card will not help you, BUT, where your shader limited it will help a lot.
Point is, with new games their using both more CPU and GPU, you can't change the CPU part of it with this card, but you can get a lot more better game play because the GPU end of it is no longer there, or at least not as much anyway. So instead of the whole game playing bad maybe you can cut that down by half, or more? Does that make this card worth buying? On that one you'll have to make up your own mind, it's either buy it or upgrade to a PCIe system. (Note) If you have a 7800GS already I would say no.

[j0j081]

I upgraded from a 6800gt to a 7800gs (because I sold my old card for a lot making it basically free) and my results were similar. I do like that this card was fully working PureVideo though and it's runs extremely cool in comparison to my old card so I'm happy.

[Joe Public]

I went from a 6800GT (clocked to Ultra) to the X1950 Pro. On average I saw about a 50%+ increase in F.E.A.R, but Oblivion saw the biggest increase, as on the 6800 i was barely able to run in 1152x864 with textures set to high, view distance to max and other settings to medium or low levels, while on the X1950 Pro I could turn the resolution up to 1280x1024, crank most sliders to max and still have better framerates than I did on the 6800GT. Yeah, I know ATI cards like Oblivion better than nVIdia ones, but since I did come from an nVidia card, I feel that it was worth it. Oh yeah, in F.E.A.R I can turn on soft shadows and 4xAA, something that didn't work so well on the previous card.