Radeon X1300 $95 US dollars, Is this worth it?

[Trinitus]

Just as the name suggests, I want to know if this is worth it, with these specs for a recent card idont know if it, is....... worth buying, or do i buy higher end cards. I am still confused that it is a recently made card, and it sell cheaper than a 9800 pro, here is the link for it... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102001 now ppl tell me if this is worth buying...cause i aint sure...ok i went a read the difference between the 2 cards, on or 2 things give reaons to which card is better, but de price bracket still overweighing what yuh paying for....HELP!!

[Beomagi]

No it's not worth it. It's a very slow card. Ati REALLY cut the legs out. It has 4 pipes, a patheic memory bus that just kills the bandwidth making high res gaming impossible, and to sell for that much is an insult.

I dropped a link to the x800 in another post by you, ill put it in here as well
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814127176
assuming you were looking at the right interface (pci-e/agp) for you...

The x800 is a 12 pipe card. the x1300 has 4 pipes, and the 9800- 8 pipes.

While the x1300 supports shader model 3, i've not seen games where there's noticable differences with their older x800 cards. The x800 cards do handle HDR as in halflife 2, and HDR bloom effects as in need for speed most wanted - so developers are not going to abandon a large stock of gamers out there.

The one game where i did see heavy use of sm3.0 (chronicles of riddick), the shading is so heavy with that turned on, My 6800gt no longer keeps up a comfortable framerate.

Now here's a link to a chart of chipset specifications
http://users.erols.com/chare/video.htm

scroll down to ATI and note the radeons.
the x1300pro has a 450 clock, with 4 pipes. Bandwidth = (128bit/8bit/byte)*500MHz = 8GBps - so that how they got that number.
look at the 9800 pro - it has a slightly slower clock - but double the pipes. Even though it's older tech, it's still faster overall there. And (btw, the memory figure there is incorrect, it's 680, that figure is a base clock) the bandwidth is more than double.

Now the x800 - 400MHz, 12 piper, and fast enough memory. At $100, i thought it was a price misprint at newegg for months now, but other x800s have been falling too.

[Trinitus]

Ok thats cool, too bad i dont entirely understand what the pipes do and how effective 128mb of ram as opposed to 256mb. And i also realised that the x1300 doh have a fan....sad......but anyway do u know where i can read up on all these terminologies for graphic cards? Need to know what they mean, yeah ah dat bad....(n00b).....what the hell does anti aliasing really do for a game?

[Beomagi]

here's a decent article on architecture of a 7800
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=150&type=expert&pid=3

Not having a fan is not a bad thing. It's not good for overclocking, but it's better for noise, and reliability.

antialiasing smoothens out jagged edges of polygons. If you're playing a game and look at a slanted edge, you'll see stairstepping as it's just the way pixels light up to draw this line. With Antialiasing, the pixels around the edge are essentially slightly blurred. This makes a much smoother image, And it's done by the raster operator of a card. There's different algorrithms to do it - ATI and Nvidia to multisample AA - take say 4 samples at fractions of a pixel off the target, then use the average color. S3 has a implementation called supersample AA - in supersampling, the screen is rendered in a higher res on the card, then the card reduces the image size - speed is killed in this way, but you do get one of the smoothest images.