The biggest difference is that you'll be able to run games with higher quality grahpics options with little impact on performance. You won't notice the impact at low resolutions, but at high resolutions (1024x768 and above) you should notice that performance will be the same. That means the games will be more CPU limited than anything. The video cards is basically starving for information. The retail Radeon 9800 Pro even has some features to allow you to increase visual quality even more. It has a control panel to allow you to use full scene antialiasing and anisotropic filtering in most OpenGL apps, even ones which don't have FSAA and AF support built in. And all that comes at almost no performance hit (depends on the game and the screen resolution usually. 1600x1200 and 6xFSAA might slow down some games which use a lot of VRAM).
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