What Graphics Card

[trick>of>light]

Here's my spec to give some context:

Athlon XP 2000
Abit KX7 333
Radeon 7000
and the rest

I plan to get a new graphics card for arounf £130. I was consideringa Geforce 4 Ti4200

A friend reckons I should wait till the DX9 Cards come out.

Whats your advice? I'm not hot on video cards.

cheers guys

 

[trick>of>light]

sound advice.

out of interest why forget about 8x AGP?

 

[Arris]

x8 AGP has been proven to give little or no visible performance increase over x4. And the 9700 Pro is directx 9 completely compliant, but since games are only just taking advantage of directx 8 more fully it isn't really worth spending money now to get a card that supports directx 9's feature set.

 

[Th3M1ghtyD8]

8x AGP is irrelevant on Ti4200s and MXs because they are unable to max out the bandwidth of AGP 4x efficiently, unlike their big brothers the 4400 and 4600.

I would go for a cheap 4200, and then think about upgrading to a DX9 card when you need one. Right now there is only one choice Radeon 9700, which rocks, but at 300 quid is a bit expensive for most people. If you really want DX9 support wait until the 9500 is available, as it is a slighly slower clocked 9700 from what I've heard.

Soon we will have NV30 and a new ATi chip anyway, so that will make your decision even harder

 

[Arris]

9500 is quite significantly cut back in comparison to the 9700.

Anandtech's 9500 review :
The Radeon 9500 Pro has two 64-bit DDR memory controllers instead of the four in the Radeon 9700 Pro. This cuts the 9500 Pro's memory bandwidth to half of the 9700 Pro at identical clock speeds, and puts it in line with the GeForce4's 128-bit DDR memory subsystem.

Then there's the Radeon 9500 (non-Pro) which also has the reduction in memory bandwidth, but along with that it also loses half of its rendering pipelines. This makes the regular Radeon 9500 a significantly worse performer as it still only has one texture unit per pipeline, giving it a disadvantage when compared to the GeForce4.

.........

Quite possibly much more exciting than the Radeon 9500 Pro is the regular (non-Pro) Radeon 9700; a much cheaper version of the 9700 that still offers higher performance than the GeForce4 Ti 4600 isn't a bad deal at all and it's what we'd suggest you look out for.

In benchmarks that I have looked at from several sources the 9500 from ATI seems to sit between the GF4 Ti4200 and the Ti4400.