ATI Radeon 9800 Pro

INTRODUCTION I cannot review this videocard without situating it first. As you probably know there are only two main competitors left in the 3D accelerated videocard ratrace, namely Ati and Nvidia. The Ati Radeon 9800Pro is the direct successor of the Radeon 9700Pro which in August 2002 was considered the killer of the top of the range Nvidia cards of the time. With its successor the 9800Pro ATi managed to maintain the lead throughout the following years 2003 and first half of 2004. In this generation of videocrds, after the 9800Pro came only the 9800XT model that performs better than this 9800pro. Which should make it clear that when it came ...

I personally own the Readon 9800 Pro (Saphire) card and to put it mildly i'm very happy with it. Decided to buy this card after my Gefore 3 Ti 200 was starting to get a bit dated. Did the usually good things when buying a card looked round the net to see what people recommend. One thing immeditely jumps up at you - this card is highly recommended by the Hlaf-Life 2 creators Valve (and they weren't just bribed by ATI either). If you compare this card to the only other rival the Geforce 4 series you notice they apear pretty much matched with similar draw rates however quite noticably the Geforce 4 doesn't correctly support DirectX 9 so when you play games like Half-Life a ...