Originally posted by: Pete
The 9600's fewer pipelines and lesser bandwidth simply limits them to lower resolutions with AA+AF. 10x7 is the main res for those cards, and that's good enough for most people with 15-17" monitors.
But $200-250 should net you an eight-pipeline 9700, 9700Pro, or 9800, be it new or used. You can also find 5900s in that price range, but I'd probably still lean toward a new 9800 over a new 5900 for ~$250.
Actually there's a LOT more to it than raw speed, a lot of it is efficiency. Take a look at the GeForce 2 Ultra and the GeForce 3 that replaced it. Identical memory bandwidths and the GeForce 3 even had a slower core clock speed but yet it is a clearly superior card. Right now I'm running on an M10 (mobile 9600) and it's running all my games on my UXGA display at its native resolution (1600x1200) and frames are definatley not hard to come by, and this is with the memory running at 236.25MHz. Comparing it to my 8500's 275MHz memory, you'd think it couldn't touch higher resolutions but it can, this includes Unreal2/UT2k3, Tribes 2, and Vice City. Halo I run at 800x600 but I've yet to read about the game running perfect on anyone's system at the super high resolutions.
It is a lot about the efficiency. When you compare the GF4 Ti 4600's memory bandwidth to the 9500 Pro's you'll notice that the 4600's bandwidth is higher. Why then is it that the 9500 Pro kick the crap out of the 4600 in memory bandwidth intensive situations such as high resolutions and/or FSAA/AF cranked up? It's the efficiency of the core handling the bandwidth that matters a lot these days, that's why my mobile 9600 can seemingly do so much better than my 8500, even with memory that is much slower than my 8500.
Pipes have to do with fill rate. Basically the 9500 Pro was the budget card to have because even though it's relatively outdated core clock and ram speed seemed a little slow, it is still very efficient. (275MHz?) but with 8 pipes, now this means the 4 pipe 9600 (in theory) needs to run at a clock rate twice as high as the 9500 Pro in order to match its fill rate simply because it has half of the pipes (say 250MHz x 8 vs 500MHz x 4, both = 2000). I was blown away by what my 8500 could do back in the day, and now I'm blown away by my m9600 even though it sounds rather weak compared to some of the desktop beasts; all I knew was what my 8500 was giving me and now I'm overwhelmed by what my m9600 can tackle. You don't need the most expensive video to get by (I'm more than getting by with a 9600), so you don't need to limit yourself to an 8 pipe card at all (there are actually very few). But on the other hand I don't see how you can go wrong with a plain jane 9700/9800 (non pro) for $200-250 (not sure what their price points are, I quit looking after I got my laptop ). Either card should be able to flash to a Pro version and even if you don't flash it you'll still end up with enough raw power greater than that of anything else for a similar price point (including midrange cards such as 9600/9500 Pros/TXs or 5600/5700 Ultras), you've got to remember that a non pro 9700 and 9800 are still high end despite their price resembling that of a mid range board more and more these days.