nvidia geforce 7800gs AGP V's geforce fx 5500 AGP

[stackner]

hoping to get some information on how much of a difference i would expreience going from my current geforce fx 5500 AGP video card to a geforce 7800gs AGP video card playing games like tiberium wars, C&C generals, sims 2, running windows vista aero ect. my current card does it all but not too well. forinstance on tib wars i need to have all graphic details set to minimum. also wondering if anyone knows a site i can compare the two on? i know about to good site TOMS HARDWARE but it does not go back as far as the fx5500 model to compare it to the 7800gs.

[rallynavvie]

It would be a pretty remarkable difference. I just had to upgrade from a 6600GT to a 7600GT and found it to be a much bigger difference than when I went from a 5700 to the 6600GT. Skipping an entire series would be a rather large jump, and since those games ran just fine of the GeForce 6 series of cards I'd imagine you could nearly max them out with the 7800GS.

Just curious as to why you chose the 7800GS over the 7600GT? I know I had a reason but I keep forgetting why, or perhaps I missed something.

[Krispy Kritter]

Typically, each new generation doubles the speed of the previous card. In other words, the 6800 is over 2 times faster than a fx 5500 and the 7800 is about twice as fast as the 6800. So you are looking at 3 to 4 times the graphic capability. You most likely won't see all of that performance. Depending on the games you play, your cpu and MB chipset will become the bottleneck. This would be a good and fairly cheap investment to get more time from your current system. However, keep in mind it is also money lost, none of the new MB's use AGP any longer.

[TheFamilyMan]

For the price of that 7800gs AGP, you should also consider the ATI 1950pro AGP. It spanks the 7800gs performance wise, but then again you're stuck with ATI drivers and their crappy control panel.

[rallynavvie]

Still the old DX vs OGL debate with the nVidia and ATi cards: nVidia is still outperforming ATi with DX games and ATi is still outperforming nVidia in OGL games. Give and take either way. I'll stick with the one with better driver support.

AGP may be discontinued but it's not really money lost not to update a system to PCI-E. For instance my main workstation is 3 years old and the weakpoint is always (and seems forever will be) the video card in the system. And now that games are being written to take advantage of SMP I have lot more life left in that machine.

[stackner]

thanks for all the replys. the reason im going for the gs and not gt is becouse i belive only the gs offers an AGP version in the 7800. also i am looking at this following card that seems to be closers to a 7900
http://www.mvktech.net/content/view/3368/39/1/0/
i can see that its money lost to a degree but i will not be upgrading from agp to pci-e for a long time yet unfortunatly.
cheers.