DirectX 10 card on DirectX 9?

I'm putting together a new system, nothing very high-powered but suitable
for games such as Morrowind, FS 2004, maybe Oblivion and FS X a little
later. Thinking about WoW also.

I see Newegg has some 8600GT cards at attractive prices. Of course these are
DirectX 10, and since I won't be going to Vista in the forseeable future I
won't be using that. What I'm wondering is, will an 8600GT have a useful
advantage over comparable 7xxx cards with DirectX 9, or will it be wasted?
I'm assuming of course that an 8600GT will run all right with DX 9.

Any comments appreciated.

Neil

 

Neil Harrington wrote:

Make up your mind, either you are going to run FSX and Oblivion, which
demand a "very high-powered" rig, or you are going to run FS9 and
Morrowind, which do not.

Either way, you aren't going to purchase old hardware, so what
difference does it make? Your budget is your first obstacle.

 

I'm not going to run Oblivion or FS X *now*. I may later on, but then I'll
undoubtedly be building another system later on too, if the system I'm about
to build won't handle them well. That's all in the "if and when" category.

My question is really just about a DirectX 10 card running WinXP and (of
course) DirectX 9. Will an 8600GT card on DirectX 9 be significantly faster
than, say, a 7600GT card, or will it be crippled by not having DX 10 to play
with?

CPU by the way will be a 3600+ Brisbane, with 2 GB of DDR2 800 on a Biostar
TF7025-M2. (Had this stuff sitting around for quite a while, just haven't
had time to set up a system.)

 

Thanks. Can you say whether an 8600GT under DirectX 9 would be significantly
better than a 7600GT, or not?

By the time I'm ready to "swallow the Vista pill" as you say, there will be
better cards and the current high-end cards will be cheaper too. I'm not
that interested in playing the latest and greatest games, frankly. My
eperience with games is that they tend to be buggy *and* expensive *and*
with stiff hardware demands when they first come out. After a couple of
years they've gotten most of the bugs out via patches, the price has way
come down and the hardware to handle them is commonplace and inexpensive.

Most of the games with a lot of razzle-dazzle graphics just aren't my kind
of games anyway.

Neil

 

you get what you pay for.
to answer your questing it will work just fine with direct x 9.

and you will be going vista its only a mater of time, so why not get a
little better video card lets say a 9600 gt for around $150 and have a card
that will play games for the next year or so and be direct x 10 ready when
you finally do swallow the vista pill

 

An 8600GT's DX9 performance is roughly comparable to a 7600GT. If you have
a 7600GT buying an 8600GT would be a waste of money if you intend focusing
on DX9 games. An 8600GTS's DX9 performance is comparable to a 7900GT,
although its architecture means it suffers more than the 7900GT at higher
resolutions and with things like AA and AF turned up.

 

Right now there are 2 absolute, definitive, best bang-for-the-buck
cards; the 8800GT and the 9600GT. The 9600GT is a slightly crippled
8800GT core, but costs 50 bucks less or more (150). The 8800GT is the
undisputed king of performance to dollar. For around 200 you get
performance nearly as good as a 8800GTX!

Newer revisions of if are quiet, have good coolers (unlike on release),
draws less power than the previous 8800GTS (320mb and 640mb), and is a
single slot solution.

If you don't have the budget for it, the 9600GT is a small step down
that handles games in almost the same fashion until you start pushing
higher resolutions and antialiasing.

For the money, it's plain stupid to debate whether or not you'll need
DX10, etc. These are the fastest DX9 cards now and very fast DX10
cards. It's going to be a while before something else can best them in
their price category.

 

I don't know from personal experience, but see:

http://users.erols.com/chare/video.htm

It appears that a 7600GT and an 8600GT would have essentially identical
performance under DX9, based on their raw specs. I have not read of any
significant loss of performance of a DX10-capable cards under DX9.

If you are buying the card new, be sure to check pricing on the 9600GT as
well. It may well be bottlenecked by the processor you will use, but it's a
much more capable card than the 8600GT, for surprisingly little more money
(at least at www.newegg.com). I know that you don't want to be bullied into
spending a lot more money on your system, but you don't want to take a
significant performance loss to save a few dollars. (IMHO)

Return address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.

(snip)

 

Thanks very much! You and a couple of others here have answered all my
questions and then some. I will indeed check out the 9600GT and 8800GT.

Neil

 

Thanks! That's just what I wanted to know.

Neil

 

Bob, thanks a lot! I appreciate the info and sure will check out the 9600GT.

Neil

 

8800GT core, but costs 50 bucks less or more (150). The 8800GT is the

9800GT should be out soon...

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