Radeon 9550 256mb 8xAGP

[Tholor]

I am just wondering how well GW would run on a Powercolor radeon 9550 256mb 8xAGP video card. Also how much better is this card than the Geforce 5200FX 128mb that I have right now? Thanks :)

[5zigen]

It will run good on the Radeon, and decent on the Gforce

[Tholor]

how big will the difference be in performance if I change to the radeon 9550 from the geforce 5200FX? How much better is the radeon 9550 than the geforce 5200FX? thanks.

[Fallen_62]

how big will the difference be in performance if I change to the radeon 9550 from the geforce 5200FX? How much better is the radeon 9550 than the geforce 5200FX? thanks.

The extra 128 MB of RAM will help quite a bit, and without knowing the AGP speed of the card you have now, I would say that the 9550 would be a good step up. I have a 128 MB 9600SE and GW runs fine. I have the graphics turned down one notch just so that it doenst use up all the resources, but it still runs really good on my card.

So yea... the 9550 would be a good card to play this on, specially if it is 256 MB. It would show some improvement over the card you have now, in my opinion.

[5zigen]

hmm, I think the 5200fx is like the Nvidia baseline card, akin to the 9200 from radeon. AFAIK the 9550 is basically a 9600 card (BTW is this a laptop? Thats the only place ive actually seen the 9550... but I doubt it had 256mb dedicated vram). Maybe its just a newer card, but anyway the 9550 should be at least one step up, in general, and it should work better with GW as GW works better with ATI cards.

Oh yeah, i disagree with fallen, unless you have a really high resolution monitor the 256 ram wont make much of a difference. It will make a difference once you start trying to run the program in resolutions higher than 1024x786 though. But to justify 256 you would really need super high resolutions like 1600x1040 (i think thats right).

The more important performance boost comes from the different core speeds of the GPU's.

[Tholor]

I think the geforce is only 4xAGP. Also I can get the 9550 for about 140$ around where I live. So I guess by what you have told me, this card is worth the money for the performance it will supply? thanks again.

[Yezah]

I have a GeForce 4 MX440...my friend has a Radeon 9800, the difference is astounding. I couldn't figure out what people were on about when they kept going on about the GW's graphics until I saw his.

(I know this doesn't really relate to the thread but oh well :))

[bonesrool]

I use a pci slotted radeon 9200se w/128 mb ram, so it's slower than your agp slotted 9550. Plus w/256mb ram you can really enjoy the scenery.

Feb bwe, I played in a window, full screen just didn't cut the mustard <probably the extra graphics in pre searing ascalon>.
I have nearly everything on medium or less.
Full screen 800x600 too slow, but in a window, 1024x768, worked just fine.

[Zvixo]

If you plan to buy a 9550, might as well buy a 9600pro from sapphire, unless you want to overclock the card.
Practically all 9550s run rock stable at 400mhz core and 250mhz mem compared to the (for most cards, differs per brand) 250/200 default settings.

If you're not going to overclock, the difference with the 5200 won't be that great.
256mem won't have such a huge effect either.

Search a bit on google for reviews on the card, they're bound to be around.

[Thul Rasha]

The game runs smooth (highest settings) on a GeForce 4600 TI Gold, plugged into a P4 1700 Mhz.
Runs also smooth (also highest settings) on a Radeon Mobility 9600, in an AMD 2500 laptop.
Only noticable difference is how the water looks. The radeon gives a little more mirror effect to the water.

[Ewan_Dellary]

I am just wondering how well GW would run on a Powercolor radeon 9550 256mb 8xAGP video card. Also how much better is this card than the Geforce 5200FX 128mb that I have right now? Thanks :)

Your Powercolor Radeon should run GW great, but depending on your memory interface...it should be at least 256-bit to support that much memory which is 256MB. Your old card the 5200FX 128MB is also just as good....like I said before about the memory interface....they should at least match in 256-bit to 256MB or 128-bit to 128MB.
Because if your memory interface is a 128-bit it will take longer to read all that 256MB memory, which will cause slower performance.
My card is a GeForce 5500FX 256MB 256-bit @ 400Mhz. The water in GW is like crystals in the ocean, running only on medium settings, on highest settings it's so wow!!!