Worth the difference?

[krueL]

Hi, first off, its my BIRTHDAY! HAPPY BIRTHDAY ME! YAY! .... now to my question. with my !BIRTHDAY! money, i planned on purchasing a new vid card. and i was wondering if you people thought it was worth spending the extra $100 to get the regular geforce 6800 over a ati radeon 9800pro.. if i ended up getting the ati, i could just go ahead and grab another stick of 512mb pc3200 ram to give a a total of 1024mb of ram.. or.. i could go with the geforce and stick with just the 512mb.. so, which do you guys think would be the wisest decision?

 

[tranCendenZ]

Go with the 6800. It's about 15-30% faster than the 9800XT on average, and the XT is faster than the PRO. Plus the 6800 has Shader Model 3.0 and FP16 Blending for HDR Lighting, features that are being used in numerous upcoming games. And the 6800's excellent OpenGL performance and Ultrashadow2 will be your biggest assets for Doom3.

You can always add more memory later

 

[krueL]

even just the base model of the 6800 is faster? here is a link to the one i am referring to..

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproductdesc.asp?description=14-130-202&DEPA=0

 

[tranCendenZ]

Yep, thats what I'm referring to in my above post, the GeForce 6800 Standard 128mb.

Here are some benchmarks
http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?cat=grfx&id=318
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2113&p=4

6800 wins most of the benchmarks, often by a wide 10fps+ margin...

 

[Poison]

9800 PRO is fast enough....but you need 1GB memory for smooth game playing. 6800 GT is nice card & also faster than 9800P, but you still need 1GB ram for smooth playing. Even with X800XT PE or 6800U, you can't play farcry smoothly if you don't have 1GB ram, so whatever VPU you go for, be sure to have 1GB ram.

 

[OrionNT]

Yes 1gb of ram is a must. If you have the money I would definitely get a 6800.