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I'm looking at selling a desktop system to a fellow FFXI player whose system is dying. Unfortunately, this will involve shipping, so I can't do a lot of comparative testing between hardware I have to send and hardware he already has on hand. I'm trying to get a sense of the performance comparison between his existing video and mine, particularly as regards FFXI.
The cards in question:
ATI Radeon 8500 LE (R200)
nVidia GeForce FX 5500
This is essentially a question of comparison of a value (but not quite bottom-of-the-line) card to a high-end (but not quite top-of-the-line) card of a prior generation. It has been noted that the 8500 is roughly equivalent in power to the GeForce 4 Ti 4200.
There seem to be two key issues that look like they'd impact performance based on what I do know from comparisons of different video chipsets: Fill rate and AGP bus speed (Memory bandwidth may also matter but is harder to judge since one of the chipsets I've looked at uses the system memory bus). The 8500 has about twice the fill rate as the FX 5500 (2000 vs 1080), and has a higher memory bandwidth (8.0GB/s vs. 6.4 or 3.2 depending on bus width -- Is this just a difference between the AGP 8x and PCI versions of the card?), but it only supports AGP 4x, which has been shown to make a difference in games making heavy use of textures.
I'd like to know if other people who have experience using FFXI with AGP 4x cards can shed some light on the nature and extent of the performance difference between AGP 4x and 8x, and how much that might offset the extra power of the older card.
For reference, I can post some Vana'diel Bench 3 results I've gotten for various systems, but I can't avoid extra factors leaking in since I don't have a single system that can use each chipset.
Emily - Pentium D 805, Radeon 8500 LE: 2908-H
Emie - T2400 @ 1.83GHz, Mobility Radeon X1400: 3249-H
Meredith - AMD Athlon X2 6000+ w/ PCI-E:
w/ Onboard ATI RS690 (X1250): 3125-H
w/ GeForce 7600 GT KO: 8336-H
Note the similar fill rates between the first 3 setups (The Mobility X1400 has a fill rate of 1728 and the RS690 has a fill rate of 1600). Despite differing CPU speeds, each squeezes out nearly the same performance in FFXI (with Emily suffering from some notable sluggishness in some situations, admittedly). The specs for the 7600 GT KO are several times higher than most of the chipsets shown here, but does demonstrate the fact that a system which squeezes out comparable performance with a value Radeon chipset scales up dramatically with high-end hardware, despite the usual claims that CPU will matter more than video hardware.
Also, note that aside from the 8500, all of those scores come from hardware on a PCI-E bus. This may be more significant than the CPU in terms of Emily scoring lower on these benchmarks, but it's difficult to say exactly how much of an impact there is without being able to compare to, say, the AGP 8x rerelease of the GeForce 4 Ti 4200.
Unfortunately, the system with the FX 5500 is apparently incapable of running Vana'diel Bench 3, even though it can handle FFXI itself.
Wikipedia on ATI GPUs
Wikipedia on nVidia GPUs
The cards in question:
ATI Radeon 8500 LE (R200)
nVidia GeForce FX 5500
This is essentially a question of comparison of a value (but not quite bottom-of-the-line) card to a high-end (but not quite top-of-the-line) card of a prior generation. It has been noted that the 8500 is roughly equivalent in power to the GeForce 4 Ti 4200.
There seem to be two key issues that look like they'd impact performance based on what I do know from comparisons of different video chipsets: Fill rate and AGP bus speed (Memory bandwidth may also matter but is harder to judge since one of the chipsets I've looked at uses the system memory bus). The 8500 has about twice the fill rate as the FX 5500 (2000 vs 1080), and has a higher memory bandwidth (8.0GB/s vs. 6.4 or 3.2 depending on bus width -- Is this just a difference between the AGP 8x and PCI versions of the card?), but it only supports AGP 4x, which has been shown to make a difference in games making heavy use of textures.
I'd like to know if other people who have experience using FFXI with AGP 4x cards can shed some light on the nature and extent of the performance difference between AGP 4x and 8x, and how much that might offset the extra power of the older card.
For reference, I can post some Vana'diel Bench 3 results I've gotten for various systems, but I can't avoid extra factors leaking in since I don't have a single system that can use each chipset.
Emily - Pentium D 805, Radeon 8500 LE: 2908-H
Emie - T2400 @ 1.83GHz, Mobility Radeon X1400: 3249-H
Meredith - AMD Athlon X2 6000+ w/ PCI-E:
w/ Onboard ATI RS690 (X1250): 3125-H
w/ GeForce 7600 GT KO: 8336-H
Note the similar fill rates between the first 3 setups (The Mobility X1400 has a fill rate of 1728 and the RS690 has a fill rate of 1600). Despite differing CPU speeds, each squeezes out nearly the same performance in FFXI (with Emily suffering from some notable sluggishness in some situations, admittedly). The specs for the 7600 GT KO are several times higher than most of the chipsets shown here, but does demonstrate the fact that a system which squeezes out comparable performance with a value Radeon chipset scales up dramatically with high-end hardware, despite the usual claims that CPU will matter more than video hardware.
Also, note that aside from the 8500, all of those scores come from hardware on a PCI-E bus. This may be more significant than the CPU in terms of Emily scoring lower on these benchmarks, but it's difficult to say exactly how much of an impact there is without being able to compare to, say, the AGP 8x rerelease of the GeForce 4 Ti 4200.
Unfortunately, the system with the FX 5500 is apparently incapable of running Vana'diel Bench 3, even though it can handle FFXI itself.
Wikipedia on ATI GPUs
Wikipedia on nVidia GPUs
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