While everyone is eagerly awaiting the arrival of the next generation, some are actually hunting for good deals as the price of the current high-end cards like the ATI Radeon 9800 and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 GPUs drops. But as the title of this article suggests, I'll be concentrating on ATI cards.
The first ATI Radeon 9800 Pro was released about a year ago. The R350 core was an evolution of the older R300 core with additional features and a much higher clock speed. At that time, the Radeon 9800 Pro was easily the fastest card in the market while NVIDIA was still struggling with the 'Dustbuster' FX 5800.
The 256MB variant of the Radeon 9800 Pro is virtually identical to the 128MB model. The only difference is the 256MB Radeon 9800 Pro uses DDR II memory which has a higher latency compared to the old DDR memory. Therefore, a slight memory clock speed bump was implemented to eliminate any loss of performance due to the increased DDR II latency.
rojakpot
Apr 13, 2004, 10:23 AM
