> >>>The FX5200 may just not be up for it. Afaik, FX5200 is basically a >>>GF4MX440 upgraded to support DX9 features. A good GF3 card could quite >>>possibly outperform your FX5200. >>> >>No it is truly a GeForce FX chip, but a very minimal one. Same basic >>design as the 5600/5700 supposedly (4 pipelines) but much slower core >>and memory clocks, The 5800 had 8 pipelines and the 5900 doubles the >>memory bus to 256bit (helping the meomry starved pipeines). The 6800 >>(GT and better) have 16 pipelines while the base 6800 has 12. Memory >>bandwitdh matters a lot to these high end cards. The 5200 with 250MHZ >>core and memory (128bit) just won't match a 5900 at 400Mhz Core 425MHZ
Unfortunately, most recent FX5200 have a 64-bit wide memoryband limiting them even more. > I'm getting 30-60 fps at 640x480 medium with my fx5600, opteron240s, and > 1G ram. Is fx5200 that much worse than fx5600? In short, yes. See http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040809/doom3-06.html for a comparison under Windows (performance should be about the same for Linux for the nVidia models). Do note that the FX5200 mentioned there is an ultra model which is reportedly 50% faster than the non-ultra FX5200s. Unless the TS has one of those ultras I think he got about the performance he could expect. Maybe it could be upped to about 17-18 fps, but at 640x480, 32-bit colour and med-quality I would not expect more from a non-ultra FX5200, especially if it has a 64-bit wide memoryband. regards, Thomas
