Geforce 4600 ti or ATI 9800 XT?

Hi all,

I have a P4 1.7 system with a Geforce 4600 TI w/ 128 mb ram.

A friend is letting me test out his spare ATI 9800 XT. I installed the
ATI and didnt notice much (if any) of an improvement, but it has twice
the amount of RAM on it so I am wondering...

Will that 256 mb/ram offer me anything in the way of performance?
Until I can afford a proper upgrade I am looking to squeeze as much as
I can out of my system, any ideas?

TIA

Which games were you playing? The ATI 9800 XT should be significantly
faster than the 4600TI. Unless you're playing Doom3 at ultra high
quality, a 128mb 9800XT should be pretty fast already.

Also keep in mind that the 4600 is a DirectX 8 generation card, whereas
the 9800XT is DX9.

You're CPU is probably the bottleneck performance-wise, and if you
aren't already, try playing the more hardware intensive games out there
i.e. HL2, Doom3, Far Cry at resolutions ranging from 1024x768 to
1600x1200, with varying degrees of AA and AF turned on.

If you still don't see a difference compared to your 4600TI (even
taking into account your relatively modest CPU), then there's something
wrong with your PC setup.