Better Graphics Card: Radeon 9550 or nVidia 5200

[Dorian Gray]

I know, they both suck compared to most of today's cards, but we're talking about cards going in computers that are at least 7 years old. Which one is better? I lost my Trapper Keeper with the ATI-nVidia conversion chart.

[-Axiom-]

The 9550 is the more powerful card.

[Dorian Gray]

thanks

[ThatSoundAgain]

I've owned and used both (9550 in a mobile version). I got the 5200 because it supposedly supported shaders (openGL 2.1, DX9) for games, in the real world I had to turn that off in my games.

One down for NVidia for touting features that only work in theory. The ATI card, which ran solidly to my experience, never made such promises. (Oh, and plenty of forehead slaps for me for not checking this out beforehand.)

[jnelso99]

http://www.overclock.net/graphics-cards-general/270292-graphics-card-ranking-3rd-time-s.html

[dudalb]

I would go for Radeon if you are building or refurbishing a computer to run older games, because Nividia has had issues with backward compatiblity in a number of games.

[Dorian Gray]

It's okay, I have both cards already for two old computers. My wife uses the one with the 9550, and I got the 5200 for the other, but if the 5200 was better I was going to switch them. From what I've read or assimilated, whatever the 9550 has it has, and the 5200 might have that and might not, depending on several factors. In other words, the 9550 min/max are the same, but the 5200 min/max are not the same, and its max is no higher than the 9550. In other words, the 5200 can be, at best, as good as the 9550, but at worst can be a lot less than the 9550. In other words, fargle oxxcvjj gun;a jdke gondwana.

[Wowbagger]

9550 is a higher number than 5200, therefore the 9550 is probably better.

:duck:

[Dorian Gray]

So Windows 2000 is better than Windows 7?

[Wowbagger]

So Windows 2000 is better than Windows 7? Depends. It is quite possible for history to decide that.

Win2K was the last great OS that Microsoft really had their act together, with.

[Beerina]

I have an NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS, which is pretty much the most powerful card I could buy for my computer last fall.

AGP is dead, and everything is PCI-Express now, or Hologram-Tesseract Rendering with Tachyon Transversal Transmission, or something. But this system can play most current games out there, including BioShock, WoW, City of Heroes, Eve Online (Premium Graphics Content), and a number of other games.


And at some point, your processor just can't keep up anyway. I had a 5200 in a P3 system several years ago, and it made almost no difference over the ancient card it replaced, since it turned out the processor was the bottleneck. YMMV.