Ayah Wrote:The Pro is gimp. I believe it has either 4 or 8 shaders. The XT is an x1600 Pro with a different name, it had 12 shaders.
A "clocked and locked" system doesn't really make sense to me.
To my knowledge there are no "hercules" type cards. Radeons aren't more for movies...
nVidia and ATI both produce excellent GPU cores, it's the implementation that's usually flawed. Both excel at certain price points in the market.
Pixel shaders are disabled to be able to mass produce a single core type and have it work for multiple products on the market.
hercules is a subclass name for cards just as geforce has pny and others. pro is set at 4 or 8 shaders at default based on its version and software but it can be manually changed up to 32 if my memory serves me right.
radeon stated already in the past their cards were more to serve movie playing rather than gaming. some of their newer cards are still directed to movies rather than games itself but are beginning to change due to the overwhelming requests they have been giving over the years after their slight halt in mid 2004 when nvidia released 3 cards in a short period of time.
if you want to talk about gimp, you may want to talk to macintosh complaining about how microsoft was stealing from them when in fact macintosh stole ideas from microsoft during the production of the g4 series and their exposed OS system. as for nvidia they are already busted for copying parts and setups from the ati X series.
btw. the X series comes in standard, XT, Pro XT pro and XTX. just some of them are harder to find since they have been set as an onboard unit for some of the newer board such as the one foxconn released a month ago that is supposed to be vista supportive.
vv-had to add this-vv
choosing ati: make sure the subname is a good one. crucial lately sucks ass at making video and audio cards. you may want to choose from maybe diamond, HIS or even visiontek. only thing crucial makes good so far is their OC memory cards and their 120mm cooling fans