HD4650 AGP - I mean best buy (performance VS price). Best is HD3850 but it very much depends on the game.

ehh i have a xfx 4650 agp and well not impressed yet. has slow ddr2 unlike its pcie brother with ddr3. the biggest issue im having is getting it to game outside of just xp since its a dx 10.1 card as well. c2d or quad or bust for any of these cards if you want max potential. everytime i see people running these cards its always in unbalanced setups.

4650 if you need good video playback,
3850 if you want best performance,
X1950 Pro if budget is something of a problem (or your MB has problems with newer cards).

3850 > 4650, no game/settings will change that.

X1950 should be better for older systems, it has lower driver overhead -> less CPU limited.

Nice benchmarks, i have all these agp cards.

Is there a ''HIGH'' setting for the Crysis benchmarks with these cards done? Would love to see those...

meljor wrote:

Nice benchmarks, i have all these agp cards.
Is there a ''HIGH'' setting for the Crysis benchmarks with these cards done? Would love to see those...

Here you go 😀

@down I didn't used hot fix driver. I simply manually forced the right driver from device manager.
FYI : Catalyst 10.2 for DX10/DX11 Radeons, and 9.1 for X1950 Pro, all GeForce cards used v93.71

The PCIe->AGP bridge on the HD radeons tend to be really hit-or-miss though, needing special hotfix'd drivers and not having the same reputation for performance or stability as their PCIe cousins....

The hotfix drivers were needed so the install can pick up the card, as most AGP 3850's used a different ID to the PCI-E versions.
The non hotfix driver can usually be force installed in XP, not sure about later OS's

There is nothing dodgy about the Bridge chip other than that they Needed a heatsink and never got one.
Fit a small heatsink, mod the board for 1.4v and 950mhz+ is doable, but probably not a good idea unless it has the
Zalman cooler that the Powercolor and Club3D versions and maybe others got.
Some single slot versions ran on lower voltage so high overclocks are not likely without modding.

agent_x007 wrote:

Here you go :) http://i.imgur.com/2vprDXw.png @down I didn't used hot fix driver. I simply manually forced the right driver from […]
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meljor wrote:

Nice benchmarks, i have all these agp cards.
Is there a ''HIGH'' setting for the Crysis benchmarks with these cards done? Would love to see those...

Here you go 😀

@down I didn't used hot fix driver. I simply manually forced the right driver from device manager.
FYI : Catalyst 10.2 for DX10/DX11 Radeons, and 9.1 for X1950 Pro, all GeForce cards used v93.71

Thank you!

My vote does to the X1950 pro as it is affordable to many more people plus they are not sought after to the extent later cards are, when performance is that much of a problem there are better choices of systems for that use as more modern hardware can be dirt cheap mainly C2D/C2Q as well piles of i3/i5/i7 systems these days.

X1950 series has some lovely dithering for 16bit color depth in D3D and just has better support in general for older D3D7/8 games. Nice with DGVoodoo1 running 16bit color depth. It might have the best dithering I've seen...

One caveat that comes to mind with the R5xx cards is if you play FEAR you will see strangely pixelated "god rays" at some windows. This doesn't happen on newer Radeons. Some missing filtering feature.

If the only concern is gaming performance then the X1950 cards are probably a good choice.
If you care about video playback on that system then I'd go for something later. The X1950 doesn't have H.264 acceleration. An Athlon64 can generally, sort of, usually, kind of play H.264 1080p video but at least on the models I've tried, it's not a glitch-free experience. H.264 acceleration solves that.

Given that you already own the card, might as well just try it and see if you run into a problem.

From what I remember reading, I think the popular VLC Player doesn't support acceleration until the HD4xxx series cards. (Not totally sure about the situation with HD3xxx).
The lesser known "MPC-BE" player will use acceleration on the HD2xxx cards though (I use it with an AGP HD2600XT).
I don't know what is required to get acceleration directly in the web browser. Doesn't work on my HD2600XT, but I normally download videos before watching them anyway.

HD 2000/3000 cards just cant accelerate Flash. They have fairly complete DXVA2 VC1 and H.264 acceleration. It should work with any program that uses DXVA2. This excludes HD 2900 which has the X1900's featureset. Similar to how NV G80 has 7900's.