AGP question

[dæmon]

Having seen the Half Life 2 benchmarks, I'm hoping to upgrade to a Radeon 9800 Pro sometime in the near future, but my motherboard is only 4x AGP.

I appreciate that I obviously won't get full performance out of the card, but I'm curious as to how much performance I shall actually lose. I don't want to buy one and find that I only have a few more fps and slightly more details than I would with my current card.

I apologise that this a newbie question, but I'll be grateful for any help

 

[Tork]

no big performance difference from 4x agp and 8x agp. In 3dmark it will give you a very small increase like 50-100 points but thats about it.

 

[dæmon]

OK, thanks Tork.

 

[Quotidian---]

actually..

4x AGP allows 1.1 gig transfers
8x obviously allows 2.2 gig transfers..

if you don't run 8x AGP you are 'bottlenecking' your card to only HALF its power.

my 3dmark03 scores are very dif. with 4x.

but i don't think you would notice a difference in game


but a problem with a ton of 9800 users is they can't get fastwrite enabled.

which is an AGP smartgart feature, that seems to effect the aquamark scores by 25,000 some pts.

i am one that can't get this feature turned on.

But i can run Americas Army, with AA and AF turned on (2x and 8x) everything on ultra high, detailed everything cranked. res. 1024x748.. and i get 60+ fps always.

i mean, ^^ seriously, damn that is good.

 

[dæmon]

Would you still recommend that I get the 9800 Pro? Would it do a better job than my current GeForce 4 Ti4200 (128mb) on 4x AGP, or would the difference be negligible?

 

[Sgt.Igneri]

Originally posted by dæmon
Would you still recommend that I get the 9800 Pro? Would it do a better job than my current GeForce 4 Ti4200 (128mb) on 4x AGP, or would the difference be negligible?

It would definitely be worth it.