AGP Vidion Cards

[Kitsune]

Prehaps an idle question but will ask it anyway......
Beginning to consider getting better video cards for my two desktop machines. They both are 128 meg AGP cards at present
Curious how much of a jump in performance replacing them with 512 meg video cards would give?

[Uraniun235]

Video card performance isn't really measured by the amount of memory on the video card. It's entirely possible for a video card with 1024MB of video RAM to be outperformed by a video card with only 512MB of video RAM.

Post the model that you have and the models you're looking at, but be forewarned that AGP is a dead technology. What are you looking to play with your new card? It's entirely possible that a new AGP card won't be worth it, i.e. that the rest of your system will be too great a bottleneck for upgrading the video card to make that great a difference.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Yes, we'll really need a full picture of your system stats to make a suitable recommendation.

[Vertigo1]

Just FYI, the only possible advantage to having more memory on a card is the ability to store larger texture files in memory. This does not by nature make the video card faster no more than dropping in a new hard drive would.

[Stargate Nerd]

Well there's this article by The Inquirer from February last year about the Radeon HD 3850 APG and how supposedly it gave an old system a huge boost.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/rev ... nth-coming

Also according to Tom's Hardware that the best AGP card you can currently buy:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/bes ... 118-6.html

[Kitsune]

My current cards are the Radeon 9200 SE on my Athlon XP machine and a NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 on my Sempron machine

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

7600 GS or GT would be ideal if you could find one for a good price. Not on Newegg anymore, though, so you'd probably have to get one second hand. Radeon 3650 would be faster, but some people have complained about problems with drivers and such. 3850 is probably too much card, but the price is not unreasonable and it's the fastest AGP card that will ever come out.

[Stargate Nerd]

7600 GS or GT would be ideal if you could find one for a good price. Not on Newegg anymore, though, so you'd probably have to get one second hand. Radeon 3650 would be faster, but some people have complained about problems with drivers and such. 3850 is probably too much card, but the price is not unreasonable and it's the fastest AGP card that will ever come out.

I have a Radeon 3650. I've heard the same complaints, but luckily I didn't have any problems.

And it was a huge jump from the 9600XT I had before that too.