12-12-2003, 07:39 AM
The 9600XT is better, ATI has upped the clock speed for that card and is introducing automatic overclocking with their new Catalyst drivers. The only problem is you can't find it for under $200 right now because it's basically a new card.
I own the 9600 Pro and it's done it's job wonderfully. New games run fine on it, although I haven't run Halo on it yet, which is the most hardware intensive game out there right now. But Armed and Dangerous, Prince of Persia, and Max Payne 2 all run wonderfully on it.
All of the current problems I've heard with DX9 cards have been with Nvidia, and DX9 Radeon cards (9600, 9800) have constantly outperformed their Nvidia counterparts because of inefficient DX9 coding.
I own the 9600 Pro and it's done it's job wonderfully. New games run fine on it, although I haven't run Halo on it yet, which is the most hardware intensive game out there right now. But Armed and Dangerous, Prince of Persia, and Max Payne 2 all run wonderfully on it.
All of the current problems I've heard with DX9 cards have been with Nvidia, and DX9 Radeon cards (9600, 9800) have constantly outperformed their Nvidia counterparts because of inefficient DX9 coding.