I think a lot of people here think the same way, including myself.

But it is sad, as Ati made very good cards (and they still do). I have almost the complete range from Nvidia, riva128 all the way up to 7900gs agp but i only have a few Ati cards.
I stumbled upon a few old ones some time back and i tested them. I only use cards for 3d so i tested 3dmark99. I was amazed by the rage 128 pro, it is pretty descent for its time and i just didn't know....

Cards like radeon Radeon 8500, 9700/9800, x800/x850, x1900, hd2900, hd3870, hd4890,hd5870 etc. are ALL nice highend cards from their series and sometimes even faster than their Nvidia counterparts.

I do like the hd series and used a few of them in my main system trough the years. I don't care which brand i have, i just want a good deal. I now have the r9 290 and before that i had a gtx660.

But for my retro's i use 3dfx and nvidia (and maybe a matrox here and there). I do have the hd3850 agp btw, it is THE fastest agp card. No doubt. And i have one 9800pro (it came with a bunch of nvidia's 🤣 )

I always wanted a x850xt platinum edition agp because it is a beast too but i can buy one right now for 25 euro complete with original box etc. and i just can't make the decision...... in the meantime i bought a couple of Nvidia cards without even the smallest doubt.

I do like that zalman! I have the same and it is a really good cooler.

The top looks to be one of the following (based on the Floppy power connector and board layout) with a Zalman cooler.

Radeon 9700 Pro (My first bet as well after comparing it to mine). This is a rare card and the Zalman cooler is likely worth 6 euros by itself.
x800 Series AGP

The middle appears to be a passively cooled X800 PCIe which isn't very common (I only recognize this because Jade_Falcon posted a link to passive x800 not long ago on the eBay thread) and that appears to have a DFP connector? weird and rare

I cant see enough of the bottom to attempt to identify it.

Anywho, I'd go back and get that bag if i were you. Those are decent and fairly uncommon cards. The 9700 Pro is around 10 percent faster than a FX5800 i believe and the X800 is the fastest PS2.0 card around and also one of the first PCIe cards on the market from ATI

Ahem... 3870 AGP is faster...

every one of them is good.

The x800/x850 series are my favorite. A tiny bit faster then the nvidia 6800, and today easier to find and cheaper. They come in PCI-E and AGP flavors, and have very very good win98 drivers.

It was followed by the x1800 series witch was not spectacular, but they are worth having because they are quite rare in some parts of the world (east europe for example) with AGP versions being extremly rare as they were partner designed cards and not ATi designed cards.

The X1900 series cards were awesome (and still are). The AGP versions (like the X1950 PRO) are great for older AGP machines and windows XP. The x1900 were also the first cards from ATi to support multi-GPU configurations, using an external connector reminiscent of a voodoo card setup. Crossfire required a "Crossfire Edition" master card witch could be mated with a regular card for multi-gpu. The latter X1950 PRO PCI-E used an internal modern CF cable and did not require a special master card for multi-gpu.

The 3850 / 3870 series are great cards. Back in the day they were very good value for money and offered excellent performance. Most notable are the GDDR4 equipped HD 3870 - as one of the few cards to be equipped with GDDR4 - performance is somewhere in between the 8800GTX and 9800GTX (although back in the day it was only on par with the 8800 really, slightly slower in some games, a tiny bit faster in others) - and there's the AGP HD 3850 - the fastest agp video card ever made. I've never actually owned one, since I'd personally have no use for it (I don't like using fast video cards on slow machines). It delivers solid winXP performance but performs slightly slower then a PCI-E version, especially when running a game with large textures, high resolutions or with AA enabled. I've had the opportunity to play with a friends card for a couple of weeks - and could only recommend the 3850 AGP for those wierd Core 2 Duo + Asorck LGA775 AGP configurations.

The HD 2900 gets an honorable mention. Performance wise (today with most recent drivers) it places in between the 8800GTS 640MB and the 8800GTX, and it was usually sold for less then the GTS. It was notably faster then the later when AA and AF were enabled, actually catching up to the GTX. They are also quite rare, witch makes them interesting for collectors.

lazibayer wrote:

Ahem... 3870 AGP is faster...

If they had made one........ahem,

meljor wrote:

If they had made one........ahem,

Are you saying 3870 never made into AGP? Oh my all those years of searching!

lazibayer wrote:

meljor wrote:

If they had made one........ahem,

Are you saying 3870 never made into AGP? Oh my all those years of searching!

That is correct.... they only made the hd3850 agp and later a hd4670 agp came that can be faster in some settings but ''overall'' the 3850 is the fastest agp card ever made.

Nvidia didn't even come close.

The fastest nvidia agp card i have is the 7900gs 512mb agp and its cores 17000 points in 3dmark '03. This is on a core2dua@3ghz on an asrock board.
On the same system the 3850 agp scores 30000 points (overclocked 32000) and nearly doubles the Nvidia.

My 7900gs is a 20/7 shader/vertex card and there is also a version with 24/8 (pretty darn rare) but that will still not come close to the radeon.

ATI cards are indeed easily overlooked. I'm guilty of this also. Though I do not see good prices in my area, the markets are flooded with Nvidia stuff, ATI is rarer for me, and all the good stuff isn't cheap.

meljor wrote:

This is on a core2dua@3ghz on an asrock board.

I think this is key when discussing these high end AGP cards.

My tests only went up to a 3.4 GHz P4 EE, beyond that I just found continuing with AGP too "odd" and it's PCIe all the way for me. So I looked at it from another way and rather than buying high end AGP cards, I got PCIe boards for older sockets (754, 939 and 478) which then lets me use cheap and fast PCIe cards to do some unleashed benchmarks 😀

Reading this I realize that maybe I should throw some benchmarks at my cards just for some comparison. I do have 9700, 9800, 3850, 4650, 4670, 6600GT, 6800GT, 7900GS AGP cards...

sprcorreia wrote:

Reading this I realize that maybe I should throw some benchmarks at my cards just for some comparison. I do have 9700, 9800, 3850, 4650, 4670, 6600GT, 6800GT, 7900GS AGP cards...

I already did most important part, but I don't have all cards you listed in there.
Here are my results (4GHz E5700) :

Here's my test of fastest AGP machine you can build (based on Intel platform) : LINK
And this is 3DMark 03 chart for it, with different GPU's :

^ Well, no need to repeat that.

meljor wrote:

Nvidia didn't even come close.

The fastest nvidia agp card i have is the 7900gs 512mb agp and its cores 17000 points in 3dmark '03. This is on a core2dua@3ghz on an asrock board.
On the same system the 3850 agp scores 30000 points (overclocked 32000) and nearly doubles the Nvidia.

There was some Chinese company that rigged up a prototype 8800 agp via a bridge chip, unfortunately I could never find info on it for a long time, it never came to market anyway. Ether way I never understood why the 8400 and other low end cards never made it to agp.

meljor wrote:

That is correct.... they only made the hd3850 agp and later a hd4670 agp came that can be faster in some settings but ''overall' […]
Show full quote

lazibayer wrote:

meljor wrote:

If they had made one........ahem,

Are you saying 3870 never made into AGP? Oh my all those years of searching!

That is correct.... they only made the hd3850 agp and later a hd4670 agp came that can be faster in some settings but ''overall'' the 3850 is the fastest agp card ever made.

Nvidia didn't even come close.

The fastest nvidia agp card i have is the 7900gs 512mb agp and its cores 17000 points in 3dmark '03. This is on a core2dua@3ghz on an asrock board.
On the same system the 3850 agp scores 30000 points (overclocked 32000) and nearly doubles the Nvidia.

My 7900gs is a 20/7 shader/vertex card and there is also a version with 24/8 (pretty darn rare) but that will still not come close to the radeon.

There was the 7950GT AGP and the 7800GS+ Limited Golden Sample, faster than a 7900GS

GeForce 6 and 7 have rather poor / speed-optimized texture filtering and ugly anti-aliasing. I always wonder why people tend to obsess over them instead of ATI counterparts. I suppose ATI's driver reputation could be part of it though. 😀 And they repeatedly released embarrassing midrange cards. The segment that most people probably buy into.

And of course ATI's D3D10.x cards weren't exactly amazingly competitive. Which is why they sold em fairly cheap. People liked that.

Jade Falcon wrote:

meljor wrote:

Nvidia didn't even come close.

The fastest nvidia agp card i have is the 7900gs 512mb agp and its cores 17000 points in 3dmark '03. This is on a core2dua@3ghz on an asrock board.
On the same system the 3850 agp scores 30000 points (overclocked 32000) and nearly doubles the Nvidia.

There was some Chinese company that rigged up a prototype 8800 agp via a bridge chip, unfortunately I could never find info on it for a long time, it never came to market anyway. Ether way I never understood why the 8400 and other low end cards never made it to agp.

I remember reading that G80 and newer GPUs just didn't work well (or at all) with the AGP bridge chips.

swaaye wrote:

GeForce 6 and 7 have rather poor / speed-optimized texture filtering and ugly anti-aliasing. I always wonder why people tend to obsess over them instead of ATI counterparts.

True that. I am still to explore all this eye candy stuff, but what I find mind-boggling is that in the threads it's usually about performance, rarely do I see discussions about "best image quality, AA modes, AF quality, Eye candy performance impact and all that juicy stuff that the high powered and Windows 98 compatible cards are capable of 🤣

meljor wrote:

Cards like radeon Radeon 8500, 9700/9800, x800/x850, x1900, hd2900, hd3870, hd4890,hd5870 etc. are ALL nice highend cards from their series and sometimes even faster than their Nvidia counterparts.

The HD2900 doens't belong in that list.
It was a disaster of a card, comparable to the GeForce FX series from nVidia. It was overpriced, ran very hot, and didn't perform very well. Especially its AA implementation was very slow.
All the more reason to collect one now, I suppose 😀
There was actually a joke on Beyond3D at the time. Some people not he forum had something in their signature like: "I pre-ordered the HD2900, and stuck by it!" 😀

kanecvr wrote:

The HD 2900 gets an honorable mention. Performance wise (today with most recent drivers) it places in between the 8800GTS 640MB and the 8800GTX, and it was usually sold for less then the GTS. It was notably faster then the later when AA and AF were enabled, actually catching up to the GTX. They are also quite rare, witch makes them interesting for collectors.

I think you remembered it exactly the wrong way around: AA/AF was the HD2900's weak point: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ATI/HD_2900_XT/6.html
In some cases it even falls behind the X19xx series with AA/AF.
The reason for this is that ATi didn't put dedicated hardware on there, but performed AA with the shader hardware. The advantage should have been that it was programmable/very flexible, but they couldn't get it to perform well enough for the common use cases (people were used to running 4xAA/16xAF as standard for some time now).
In the HD3xxx series, they moved back to dedicated hardware for AA resolution.

Thanks for the input, I do remember I had a 5770 for a year or so. Other than that, Nvidia only. I have some ATI cards from 02-06, but I haven't checked them out for some reason. I always thought people prefered Geforce over ATI as more games seemed to have that Nvidia intro that made people think it was optimized for those cards. I'm sure some of them were, but what kind of difference are we talking about here? Still, this kind of marketing does make you think about you card choices. I know if I was an ATI enthusiast I would think how much faster would this game actually run on an Nvidia card? 🤣

Oh, I also forgot to mention there was an Audigy 2 in that bag of ATI cards. I already have one so that was also one of the reasons to skip it. 😀