I got my new video card the other day. After installing the card I of course fired up Camelot to see how it ran. This is my first Radeon card and I was a little worried. But it ran fine. The next thing I did was benchmark my new pc with 3DMark 2001. I’ve always been very anal about benchmarking my computer whenever I got a new video card or piece of hardware that improved my pc. Here is the 3DMark results of my old pc that I made when I got my GeForce 3. This result is a look at my old pc and the new pc (using the GeForce FX 5200 in both). And finally here are the benchmarks of the new pc with the Radeon 9600 XT.

So far the new pc is doing better than I had hoped. I’ve installed and ran every 3d accelerated game I got that gave the old pc trouble. The list which includes Morrowind and Soldier of Fortune 2. And they both run like a dream now. I also downloaded and installed the Unreal Tournament 2004 and Painkiller demos. Both games performed great even with all the settings turned up. I’m looking forward to playing all the games that would never play on the old pc.

On a side note about the video card I got from Newegg.com. It did not include the coupon for a free copy of Half Life 2. The retail box I got was a lite version and it only came with the card, the driver disc, and a cable to hook my tv up to it. So if you followed my link to buy the vid card from a few posts ago consider yourself warned.