Wanna see GDDR3 vs. GDDR4?

[Babrbarossa]

I thought I'd getcha with the title: unfortunately this comparison was done with X1900 cards, instead of X2*** cards, which is fairly useless since these cards hit a GPU bottleneck before a memory bottleneck.

The performance difference between the GDDR3 and GDDR4 is irrelevant in the end, what is relevant is whether or not the X1950 Pro as a previous mid-range video card is still worth buying now, with other options available.

Pricing of the Jetway X1950 Pro GDDR3 512Mb is competitive at €149, besting the nearest NVIDIA offer by ~€30 (Sparkle 8600 GTS 256Mb), no price is public yet for the GDDR4 version, don’t expect it to be cheaper though. But wait… isn’t there a 256Mb version of the X1950 Pro? Jetway has one at an amazing price of €119, the NVIDIA equivalent at that price is the 8600GT which is nowhere near the X1950 Pro performance wise. Do you need the extra 256Mb? Is the 512Mb version that much better? Truth is that you’ll hit a GPU bottleneck before you will see a performance decrease due to lack of video memory.

We find it hard to recommend the Jetway Radeon X1950 Pro GDDR4 512Mb to anyone at a price most likely higher than €149. However we do think its smaller and slightly (oh so slightly ~5%) slower brother, the Jetway Radeon X1950 Pro GDDR3 256Mb is quite the steal and rightly deserves a recommendation from us for anybody looking to build a mid-range gaming system. The X1950 Pro proves it still capable of running the latest games, with high detail, as long as you stick to medium resolutions (1024x768 ~ 1280x1024).

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