Basic Games - R 9100 or TI4200?

[camswinton]

Would I notice the difference between a Radeon 9100 and a TI4200 in games such as SimCity 4 and Links 2003? I'm looking for a budget card for basic gaming as well as photoshop work (2D is important). I've heard that the ATI cards historically have better 2D performance but that the NVidia cards have improved recently. For a bit more I suppose I could look at some of the ATI 9500 (non-pro) cards, but would like to spend less if possible.
This will go in a P4 2.6c system w/1GB RAM.

 

[DeathByDuke]

for professional work, nothing can touch the Radeons above 9500. So a 9500 non Pro would be good plus if you get into games more in the future, its gonna be faster at newer games than the other cards you listed. The GeForce 4 Ti4200 is a decent 3D Card and good for professional work, but is generally more expensive than a Radeon 9500 (non Pro). The sweet spot is the 9500. Fantastic DVD quality and 2D quality, and brilliant 3D support as well as professional application support.

 

[Mingon]

Unless you get a 'proper' built by ATI card the 2d will not be any difference. Even the built by ATI cards are only marginally better at resolutions above 1600*1200. The Ti4200 should be just as cheap as a 9500 (and a better stock performer) and if you ever do cad work they will run about 200% better than the equivalent ATI card. I have used every nvdia card from TNT upwards and ati 9000, 9500 and soft modded 9700. The performance of the ATI cards in Autocad was poor to say the least.

 

[McArra]

4200Ti for gaming, maybe 9500 for more general use and future games.

 

[Schadenfroh]

the 4200 is faster than a radeon 9100. you would most likely notice a small differance. mind that a geforce3 was faster than a 9100 also. you will notice a larger differance if you o/c the 4200 to 4400 levels. as for 2d, ATI and Nvidia are the same, as long as you buy from a well known AIB maker, like Asus or someone similar, you should be safe with 2D image quality. I know that a 4600 can sometimes beat a 9500 pro, so in todays game, the 4200 and a 9500 np might be around the same level.

 

[Pete]

Firstly, later drivers made the 8500/9100 faster than a GF3, as it should be.

Secondly, GeForce cards are still not equal to Radeons. Maybe the FX series will change that with their integrated RAMDACs.

Thirdly, the 4200 will be faster than the 9100, but both cards should be about equal once you enable AF.

I think you should go with a Radeon if you value 2D. Otherwise, be prepared to do some reading to make sure the GF4 you buy is known to have good 2D.

 

[Mingon]

Secondly, GeForce cards are still not equal to Radeons. Maybe the FX series will change that with their integrated RAMDACs.

So you have tried all geforce cards then ? and all ati powered cards? and the difference between a geforce 3 and an 8500 is very little for every game 1 side is quicker the other can counter. If your doing 2d work get a lcd and a dvi adaptor then you will have no worries

 

[bluemax]

Originally posted by: Pete
Firstly, later drivers made the 8500/9100 faster than a GF3, as it should be.

Secondly, GeForce cards are still not equal to Radeons. Maybe the FX series will change that with their integrated RAMDACs.

Thirdly, the 4200 will be faster than the 9100, but both cards should be about equal once you enable AF.

I think you should go with a Radeon if you value 2D. Otherwise, be prepared to do some reading to make sure the GF4 you buy is known to have good 2D.

I bolded the statement that best answers the question. Yes, a TI4200 is faster on average, but if you turn on Ansiotropic Filtering (which looks real nice!) you'll see precious little difference between the two cards.
AND the Radeon 9100 has a few extra visual goodies when it comes to playing video files.

Both are excellent budget choices... Whichever card is noticably cheaper, go for it.
If the same price, the answer is not so clear... I'd probably lean towards the Radeon 9100 myself.

 

[camswinton]

Originally posted by: bluemax

Originally posted by: Pete

Both are excellent budget choices... Whichever card is noticably cheaper, go for it.
If the same price, the answer is not so clear... I'd probably lean towards the Radeon 9100 myself.

Everyone - Thanks for the input so far! There does seem to be a big price difference between the 9100 and the Ti4200 - I can get the 9100 from googlegear for less than $70 and the Ti4200 is almost twice that (as is the 9500). Not sure if the small speed increase is worth the extra ~$60 for the Ti4200. Is the fan noise much different between the two cards?

 

[Ilmater]

Originally posted by: camswinton

Originally posted by: Pete

Both are excellent budget choices... Whichever card is noticably cheaper, go for it.
If the same price, the answer is not so clear... I'd probably lean towards the Radeon 9100 myself.

Everyone - Thanks for the input so far! There does seem to be a big price difference between the 9100 and the Ti4200 - I can get the 9100 from googlegear for less than $70 and the Ti4200 is almost twice that (as is the 9500). Not sure if the small speed increase is worth the extra ~$60 for the Ti4200. Is the fan noise much different between the two cards?

All of these people are on crack. We clearly have a bunch of fanATIcs in here. The newer Ti4200's are DEFINITELY worth the price. Almost all of them are clocked well above stock settings. I just got a Ti4200 from Newegg last night, and it comes clocked 10MHz over the stock core, and ~35MHz over the stock RAM. Everyone's telling you that the two cards are "nearly equal with all the quality settings turned up." Now I don't want to start a flame, but you ATI fanATIcs are obviously either unable or unwilling to look through his eyes. He is clearly a budget consumer, and is looking for the card that will perform better now and keep performing well later.

Let's compare both cards on this basis. Remember, the 9100 is just a renamed 8500. There is absolutely zero difference besides the name. If you look at Tom's VGA charts, you'll see that the 8x 128MB Ti4200 performs between 20 and 40 fps better on every test except JK II where its lead shrinks to only 3 or 4 fps. Its 3DMark score is over 2,000 marks above the 128MB Radeon, and nearly 2,000 above the 64MB version (which is messed up to begin with).

What does this mean for you? Right now, if you got the Ti4200, it would run considerably faster than the Radeon 9100 without AA or AF enabled (which is probably how you play anyway), and the same or better than the 9100 with AA/AF on. In the future, when neither card would be able to handle games with AA/AF turned on, the Ti4200 will play games far better than the 9100.

Now, above and beyond all of those reasons, there is also overclocking. The core on the Ti4200 and the Ti4600 are identical. In fact, most Ti4200's are now being sold with the same 8-layer PCB that the Ti4600 has (instead of the old 6-layer PCB) and nearly the same RAM as the Ti4600 (3.3ns vs. 2.8ns). Even if you're squeemish about overclocking now, imagine when you're getting to where games are running a little too slow on your card. You can turn things up then. I just got this ASUS card from Newegg last night, and it overclocked easily (with stock cooling) to 320MHz core and 690MHz RAM. That's WELL over the speeds of a stock Ti4600. That's quite a bit of extra punch a year or more down the road. It raised my 3DMark score by more than 1,300.

I would never say that there aren't MANY times when an ATI cards would better fit someone's needs, but the Ti4200 is, IMHO, your best bet in thsi instance.

BTW, don't worry about image quality. As Schadenfroh said and I can now fully attest to, there is no problem with the 2D image quality of my ASUS Ti4200.

 

[gtd2000]

In the game Soldier of Fortune 2 my Radeon 128MB 8500LE (250/200) (US$74 shipped from Newegg) was a much better performer than my GF4 Ti 4200 (300/600) (US$70.99 - Circuit City PM dealio).

Don't ask me why - I have no idea.

There was another guy in another thread that had exactly the same experience - he rated the Radeon 8500 better than the GF4 Ti4200.

I thought I was dreaming

Perhaps we just got very good Radeons and lesser quality GF4's?

In summary - the Radeon 8500LE impressed me much more than the GF4 Ti4200 - as always YMMV

 

[gtd2000]

I forgot to mention I have always bought and used Nvidia graphics cards - so I'm not in the ATi fanboy club

My experience is totally objective.

 

[Genx87]

Thirdly, the 4200 will be faster than the 9100, but both cards should be about equal once you enable AF.

Um remember this is the R200 based 9100 we are talking about. ROTFLMAO! Beyond pathetic. 90 degrees is the only thing that gets AF applied to it on the R200 and well it looks like complete horse shat.

Sorry Ti4200 is much better.

 

[Ilmater]

Originally posted by: gtd 2000
I forgot to mention I have always bought and used Nvidia graphics cards - so I'm not in the ATi fanboy club

My experience is totally objective.

Considering that you said you owned both cards, I would have never said otherwise. I don't question your experiences, I only question people who give opinions based on little or no experience.

I think we can both agree, however, that SoF 2 is clearly a fluke. I don't know if ATI just tweaked its drivers for that game or what, but I'm quite sure that that is not typical for that card.

 

[Mem]

I think you should go with a Radeon if you value 2D. Otherwise, be prepared to do some reading to make sure the GF4 you buy is known to have good 2D.

Actually finding the best 2D quality card Geforce 4 wise is very easy,go with Leadtek or Gainward and you`ll have the top 2 .

Btw if you value driver stability and ease of install then Nvidia drivers are still no.1 .

 

[camswinton]

So you think the Leadtek and Gainword cards would have better 2D image quality than the Asus card mentioned in this thread?

 

[Mem]

So you think the Leadtek and Gainword cards would have better 2D image quality than the Asus card mentioned in this thread?

There was a review awhile back on quite a lot of GF4 brands,the Leadtek came top,I should point out that image quality on GF4 models has improved over the older GF2/3 models and even the other brands in the GF4 review did very well,there were quite a few that were very close on image quality.

 

[bluemax]

It's funny seeing the staunch defenders of both sides.
The fact of the matter is that they're both good cards.

WITH AF enabled (which looks good, try it if you haven't already...) the 9100 will perform very close to the TI4200, sometimes even pass it.

WITHOUT AF on, the TI4200 will be faster in games, by a fair-but-probably-visible margin.

nVidia drivers are just a little easier to get installed and going, but not by much.

The 9100 has certain features the TI4200 lacks, including full hardware DVD playback (better DVD playback quality too) and FullStream video deblocking which is beginning to creep in to other applications besides RealVideo. FullStream + DivX is a combo just on the verge of release which'll really improve DivX image quality for the owners of 9000's or better.

IF gaming is all you intend to do, the TI4200 is probably just a little bit better choice.
For doing MORE than just gaming, like playing movies, DVD, video clips, video off the web, etc... I'd still vote for the 9100.

 

[ZimZum]

Originally posted by: Ilmater

Originally posted by: camswinton

Originally posted by: Pete

Both are excellent budget choices... Whichever card is noticably cheaper, go for it.
If the same price, the answer is not so clear... I'd probably lean towards the Radeon 9100 myself.

Everyone - Thanks for the input so far! There does seem to be a big price difference between the 9100 and the Ti4200 - I can get the 9100 from googlegear for less than $70 and the Ti4200 is almost twice that (as is the 9500). Not sure if the small speed increase is worth the extra ~$60 for the Ti4200. Is the fan noise much different between the two cards?

All of these people are on crack. We clearly have a bunch of fanATIcs in here. The newer Ti4200's are DEFINITELY worth the price. Almost all of them are clocked well above stock settings. I just got a Ti4200 from Newegg last night, and it comes clocked 10MHz over the stock core, and ~35MHz over the stock RAM. Everyone's telling you that the two cards are "nearly equal with all the quality settings turned up." Now I don't want to start a flame, but you ATI fanATIcs are obviously either unable or unwilling to look through his eyes. He is clearly a budget consumer, and is looking for the card that will perform better now and keep performing well later.

Let's compare both cards on this basis. Remember, the 9100 is just a renamed 8500. There is absolutely zero difference besides the name. If you look at Tom's VGA charts, you'll see that the 8x 128MB Ti4200 performs between 20 and 40 fps better on every test except JK II where its lead shrinks to only 3 or 4 fps. Its 3DMark score is over 2,000 marks above the 128MB Radeon, and nearly 2,000 above the 64MB version (which is messed up to begin with).

What does this mean for you? Right now, if you got the Ti4200, it would run considerably faster than the Radeon 9100 without AA or AF enabled (which is probably how you play anyway), and the same or better than the 9100 with AA/AF on. In the future, when neither card would be able to handle games with AA/AF turned on, the Ti4200 will play games far better than the 9100.

Now, above and beyond all of those reasons, there is also overclocking. The core on the Ti4200 and the Ti4600 are identical. In fact, most Ti4200's are now being sold with the same 8-layer PCB that the Ti4600 has (instead of the old 6-layer PCB) and nearly the same RAM as the Ti4600 (3.3ns vs. 2.8ns). Even if you're squeemish about overclocking now, imagine when you're getting to where games are running a little too slow on your card. You can turn things up then. I just got this ASUS card from Newegg last night, and it overclocked easily (with stock cooling) to 320MHz core and 690MHz RAM. That's WELL over the speeds of a stock Ti4600. That's quite a bit of extra punch a year or more down the road. It raised my 3DMark score by more than 1,300.

I would never say that there aren't MANY times when an ATI cards would better fit someone's needs, but the Ti4200 is, IMHO, your best bet in thsi instance.

BTW, don't worry about image quality. As Schadenfroh said and I can now fully attest to, there is no problem with the 2D image quality of my ASUS Ti4200.

I dont think anyone is saying that the 4200 isnt faster in games because obviously it is. But I think the question is, is the performance increase worth the price difference. Not only that but for what a 4200 costs you can get a 9600 NP that will utterly destroy the 4200 and will overclock like a beast.