Thu Jun 19, 2003 5:54 pm by awdougherty
A lot sites with benchmarks have shown that the Geforce FX 5600 performs roughly the same (or slightly better) than a Geforce 4200. The advantages to the 5600 start coming in when you need Direct X 9 support (which no games currently do that I know of... maybe Eve Online or Unreal 2) or when you start using anti-aliasing and aniostropic filter. You start turning these on with a 4200 and your frame rates will plummet, not so with the 5600. The 256 MB of ram will also help with higher res textures in future games (I think Unreal 2 and Asheron's Call can utilize the highest level of textures).
I would get the 5600 if you're on a budget regardless of your needs (if the choice was a 4200 or a 5600) because the price difference is minimal and why not get full DX9 support? Aniostropic filtering can also improve the visuals pretty significantly, so it's nice not to have to worry about a performance hit. Now who's to say how this will work with Half Life 2 or Doom 3, so if you can't wait and have money to burn, go nuts with the 5900 or 5900 Ultras.
I currently own a Radeon 9500 Pro and it handles Freelancer pretty well but I have some annoyances with other games because (cue broken record) ATI still has some driver issues to work out. Honestly, I'm not blown away by my 9500 Pro's performance with Freelancer, but it looks good, plays smooth, and has slightly better image quality than my old Geforce 4 4200.