HANDS ON GUIDE

Upgrade your AGP graphics card

Price:

Sapphire Radeon HD 3850 AGP - £120.54;

Total price: £120.54

Supplier: www.lambda-tek.com

We feel a little sorry for AGP - at least, as far is it's possible to empathise with a graphics interface. Recent high-end AGP graphics cards have either lagged way behind their PCI-E counterparts (such as the pitiful AGP GeForce 7800 GS), as they've taken years to materialise. This might have encouraged some PC gamers to switch to PCI-E motherboards, but it also inspired a lot of cynicism regarding the PC graphics business.

It appears that ATI and its partners have learned their lesson, though, as both Sapphire and PowerColor have launched AGP Radeon HD 3850 cards. However, is it too late? Let's face it; your old AGP rig isn't going to support a Core 2 processor. We decided to try our 'retro' games test machine, which we used in our game reviews for several years, to find out if a new AGP graphics card upgrade would enable it to play current games.

Before the upgrade, the machine had a GeForce 6800 card and an Athlon XP CPU. Running Call of Duty 4 at 1,024 x 768 with 0x AA and 0x AF, our long-lived orange-cased gaming machine could only muster an average frame rate of 5fps. Following the graphics upgrade, the game was much smoother, although not quite fluid enough to be considered playable. The average of 25fps was a huge improvement, but the minimum of 14fps meant that there was occasional stuttering, especially when multiple NPCs were on-screen.

Unfortunately, the results in Crysis were much worse. We'll be fair here; we didn't expect an Athlon XP rig to be able to play Crysis at High settings. Heck, a PCI-E Radeon HD 3850 can't even play Crysis at High settings on our high-spec graphics test rig. As such, we decided to test both cards at 1,024 x 768 with 0x AA and all the settings on Medium. However, the 3850 failed to produce anything remotely resembling a smooth frame rate even at these settings.

Of course, our old Athlon XP test system is something of a relic, and you may well obtain better results from an Athlon 64 or Pentium 4 system. However, you're likely to be playing your games at 1,024 x 768, if these results are anything to go by, and you'll have to make sacrifices. You have to ask yourself whether it's worth spending the money on what is basically a redundant upgrade.

A year ago, we might have recommended buying an AGP card based on a current high-end GPU. However, it's now clear that these old systems lack the power to cope with modern games at even half-decent settings. Now that games such as Crysis are showing a performance improvement from multiple CPU cores, it's time to think about upgrading your motherboard, CPU and memory, as well as your graphics card. This doesn't have to be expensive though.

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