hey ppl! I wanted to ask, which would be better for LFS, an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ processor or an ATI Radeon 9250 SE. they are both the same price. here is how my specs will be like if I got the processor or if I got the gfx chip.
Processor GFX card
AMD Athlon XP 2400+ AMD Athlon XP 1800+
Nv GF4 MX440 ATI Radeon 9250 SE
one more thing, I wanted to ask if any1 have any of these specs, could you tell me how LFS is full grid. Good or bad?, thanks for the help.
The best way to test is as follows. If you can drop the resolution and not gain fps you are cpu bound otherwise you are GFX card bound. This should let you know what needs to be updated.
Is the Radeon 9250 DX9. If not you might not gain much anyway. Also the SE cards are normally crippled versions of the big cards so check fill rate etc compared to you MX. Their might not be much in it.
I would have thought for the price of a 2400+ you could get better than a 9250se. Maybe not though, better check that. Also LFS doesn't use dx9, so that doesn't matter.
but I wanted to know if some1 had a machine which is either an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ with a ATI Radeon 9250, OR, an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ with a Nv GF4 MX440. I appreciate the help for those who said they had the processor, or had the gfx card, but they don't really help . thanks for all the replies, and I hope some1 out there has either the specs of one machine or the other.
My 'newest' PC has 1Gddr 2700 athlon xp2600+ and came with a radeon 9200 256M
(don't know how comparable this is with a 9250 but I guess they're close)
anyway... I was really dismayed to find that my old graphics card (geforce 3 64M)
worked better on this system than the radeon.
Think it's down to the hardware vertex shader support.
Get the gfx card first. Cause your actual card doesnt support Hardware T&L, which is used by LFS and will give you a lot of performance with the new card. The next step should be the CPU then.
So: First the gfx-card, then the CPU.
i would choose the AMD Athlon XP 2400+ with a Nv GF4 MX440.
on my old PC, a P4 2.0 512mb and a 64mb GF4 MX440, i bought a ATI 9200SE 128mb card foolishly thinking it would be faster.
how wrong i was. it's true the 9200SE DID have HVS - but in the end it was actually substantially SLOWER than my GF4 MX440!
running 640x480 with no Anti Aliasing and no Anisotropic filtering, the card was still slower than my GFMX440 when it was in 1024x768.
Turning the 9200SE up to 1024x768 makes matters a whole lot worse, and turning on even the lowest Antialiasing turned lfs into a 5fps slide show. before you asked, all the latest drivers were installed properly, and i even tried other versions of the ATI driver. pure and simple the card was a P.O.S.
the reason the "SE" cards are so horrid is because the ram only has half the bandwidth. while an "SE" 9250 may have 128mb of ram, when the standard 9250 has 64mb - since the SE's ram is slower it ends up being slower overall. what does that translate to? any resolution above 640x480 will kill the card massively (higher you go, slower it is), and adding AA and AF to the equation simply makes it laughable.
so once again, go the faster XP 2400+ with the GF4. CPU is more important,in my example i had the exact same CPU, the GF4 came out ontop by a huge margin, so running a 2400+ (as opposed to the 1800+) just tips the margins even more in its favour. the GF4 MX will easily beat the 9250SE.
i would imagine an 1800+ with a 9250SE would be pure crap! excuse the french.
in conclusion, running a p4 2.0, in 1024x768 racing online with half a dozen other cars onscreen:
GF4 MX440 ~around 40FPS with 2xAA (HVS disabled [card doesnt have it)
9200SE ~around 10FPS with 2xAA (HVS enabled)
turning the AA off made things slightly better, but you can see what im getting at here.
I have the ATI Radeon 9250 SE 256MB and i find the card alright. Live for speed i have everything turned up, and only face problems when servers run Auto X with around 500 objects all close together, apart from that i find it a good card, and it can easily run LFS on 1280 X 1024,
( Processer = Athlon 64 3000)
Also, what is the full settings for LFS, could any one post a screen shot, as i think i have all the settings up full, but unsure about a couple of options, cheers,
Never buy an ultra-low end GFX card - they suck... Im not sure but 9250 must be a VERY low-end chip, and thus 256MB is really nonsense.
Low-end cards use chips which dont run at their intened clocks (this is why they arent used in the "normal" cards, and to avoid throwing them away, they use them in low-end cards) and mostly slow noname-ram.
I would recommend to get both the CPU and 9800. You need the CPU to be fast enough to send information to the graphics card. If you can't get both, overclock your CPU and just get the card.
This might be the right choice for most games, but certainly not for LFS. Firstly, it stresses the cpu more than the gpu. Secondly, LSF seems to be very strange concerning overclocking. As many have reported, overclocking can lead to major slow downs performancewise.
So, upgrade the cpu. For the rest of your money, yo could always check eBay for a cheap graphics board (9800 Pro is very recommendable: low price, good performance)
i agree. or go with a 2500+ unlocked they can run stabily at 2ghz. 768mb of ram total would be goo dalso.
My 9600XT 256mb runs lfs very well. but the frame rate stutters a tiny bit if i am last at the starting grid of a race with over 20 people. As i pass them i get rewarded with higher framerate
. thanks for all the replies, and I hope some1 out there has either the specs of one machine or the other.