Good Card For The Casual Gamer (Sapphire Radeon 9000 Atlantis Pro)

Member Name: Grazymonk

Product:	Sapphire Radeon 9000 Atlantis Pro
Date:	25/12/04 (1578 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Performance, Price, 128mb

Disadvantages: None

This is just the card I needed. I was having trouble playing newer games with my aging geforce2, so I decided it was time for an upgrade. My goal was to find the best card I could get under 80 bucks.

After reading many reviews I decided on this one, and I’m clad I did! Here are the specs of the card:

- 275MHz for RADEON® 9000 PRO
- 128MB of DDR memory operating at 550 MHz
- CRT monitor: 15-pin VGA connector
- Composite connector
- DVI-I (flat panel display) connector
- Full support for DirectX ® 8.1
- Full support for OpenGL 1.3

I have an AMD athlon XP 2500, 384mb RAM and this card, and let me tell you that so far I have played anything from Quake 3 to Farcry. In Farcry I get around 32 FPS with 1024x786x32, with low detail. Quake 3 I play at the same resolution but set the detail to high, and I still get around 90 FPS.

In case you are not aware, the human eye can only distinguish the difference in frame rate up to 30 FPS, after that if you are getting 30 or 500 FPS you can't really tell the difference.

Other cards in this price range include the geforce MX 4 series, the newer but SLOWER radeon 9100, 9200 and the 9600LE. The geforce MX series is only supports DirectX 7.1, older technology, and the other radeon 9100, 9200 and 9600LE are slower than this one.

Picture quality if also outstanding, much better than the geforce MX series, you can tell the difference if you see them side by side. Installation was easy, just plug the card and load the drivers found in the CD, but if you really want the best performance go to www.ati.com/support/driver.html and download the newest drivers.

I recommend this card to all the casual gamers out there. For this price you can't find a better card.

Summary: