i also owned a 5200 myself (upgraded to a 6200 for pixel shader 3.0 support). most likely the reason you arent noticing a difference is the agp slot being the bottleneck. the 5200 in my experience was a pretty quick card, and i definitely noticed a speed difference between 4x and 8x agp speed when playing around with it. as for the graphics being crappy, im not really sure unless you managed to get a card with a dying gpu (due to previous overclocking). you may want to take a look at the support forums of the games that are experiencing problems, maybe more people are having problems with ati cards. same thing happens to nvidia cards as well, its not just an "ati thing".

edit: one of my friends also owns an ati radeon 9800, with the right agp speed its normally quite a bit faster than the 5200. i borrowed the card once to see if the performance problems i was having with a game (guild wars) was my video card being slow or something else.

 

i dont think its an overclocking problem like i said it works great with medieval and rome, the graphics are 1000 times better than my fx5200, but the graphics on links and tiger woods 2003 and older games look like they did with the stock 32 bit card this pc came with.

any other input would be appreciated

thanks

 

Part of the problem may be the drivers.I personally prefer ATI cards and have owened several. In all of them I have the same issue. ATI drivers tend to not be fully backward compatible with older devices. I have several old DOS and early windows games from the early to mid 90s that work fine on an old 2MB ATI RAGE card but become grainy on a Radeon 9000 and my radeon X800 dosent support SVGA at all on most of these games. NVIDIA does not seem to have this problem. All of these older games that were of poor quality or didn't work at all on newer ATI cards worked fine on an NVIDIA fx5700 and a 7900 GTX. Allthough a newgame like Battlefield 1942 haveing problems with the Radeon 9800 would sugest that your drivers may be incompatible (unlikely) or the much greater posiblity of the drivers or direct X not being up to date. Have you gotten the updated drivers from ATI's website? If not download them. Drviers are updated so oftain even if you had bought the card new the drivers on the disc the manufacture included would probably be outdated.You stated you downloaded Tray tools which is exelent tweeking software but not a driver. You also need the standard driver for tray tools to work properly. If you did download the ATI drivers they may have contained an error or installed improperly so try downloading the again. Also make sure any integrated graphics are dissabled. even if the were disabled they can become enabled if a new video card is installed and use up processer and memory resources.