Back when I upgraded the graphics card of my Barton 3200+ from GF7600GS to a HD4670 (somewhat comparable to your 2 cards), I basically didn't notice any significant speed increase.
I'm guessing your CPU being dual core won't matter with many games and the IPC shouldn't be too far off (your 2GHz for one core to the 2.2GHz of my barton, even though your CPU is likely faster per core).

Personally I'd probably try the GF 6800GT first. This way, by using that card, you can retrogame and actually test the card's functionality at the same time 🙂
I don't remember what drivers I used for my 7600GS, but it was probably the one that came with the disk. I'd need to dig it out to check what exact driver version I used but I'd say it's likely one of the earlier ones (I don't tend to upgrade something that's already working fine, including drivers).

If you don't like the GF 6800GT for some reason, you can always upgrade to your HD4650. Would actually be interesting to see if you would see any benefit to such an upgrade. I think my AXP 3200+ was just too slow to benefit from a HD46X0.

Ftr I was using XP SP2 for most of the time, but probably upgraded to SP3 when it came out.

Tetrium wrote on 2022-04-07, 12:03:

Back when I upgraded the graphics card of my Barton 3200+ from GF7600GS to a HD4670 (somewhat comparable to your 2 cards), I basically didn't notice any significant speed increase.
I'm guessing your CPU being dual core won't matter with many games and the IPC shouldn't be too far off (your 2GHz for one core to the 2.2GHz of my barton, even though your CPU is likely faster per core).

Not very likely.

The similarity ends with the clock speed. An Athlon64 has integrated memory controller and much higher IPC. I can't find any direct comparison between the X2 3800+ and the XP 3200+ because of the big age difference, but reviews of the Athlon64 3200+ (basically single-core equivalent of the x2 3800+) are clear enough:

Even ignoring the second core, that X2 3800+ is likely to do 50% better in CPU-limited applications. OP is running XP, so the second core will be used - even if a game is single-threaded, background OS stuff will go onto the other core, improving performance a bit there too.

dionb wrote on 2022-04-07, 13:25:

Not very likely. […]
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Tetrium wrote on 2022-04-07, 12:03:

Back when I upgraded the graphics card of my Barton 3200+ from GF7600GS to a HD4670 (somewhat comparable to your 2 cards), I basically didn't notice any significant speed increase.
I'm guessing your CPU being dual core won't matter with many games and the IPC shouldn't be too far off (your 2GHz for one core to the 2.2GHz of my barton, even though your CPU is likely faster per core).

Not very likely.

The similarity ends with the clock speed. An Athlon64 has integrated memory controller and much higher IPC. I can't find any direct comparison between the X2 3800+ and the XP 3200+ because of the big age difference, but reviews of the Athlon64 3200+ (basically single-core equivalent of the x2 3800+) are clear enough:

Even ignoring the second core, that X2 3800+ is likely to do 50% better in CPU-limited applications. OP is running XP, so the second core will be used - even if a game is single-threaded, background OS stuff will go onto the other core, improving performance a bit there too.

I used both Barton @2.2GHz and Athlon64 @2.2GHz and I found the A64 to be roughly 25% faster.
Exact differences will depend on the software used.
When gaming on rigs of this era I find it kinda prudent to minimize the use of software running in the background anyway.

Overall I don't think A64 was 50% faster than a Barton clock for clock. Unless a certain program needed SSE2 or something.