the other card was a 9600 gso, it had 384 and if he going for a little more expensive its a good deal.
DX10.1 is considered a "minor improvement" to DX10 by MS (Much like DX9 - DX9.0c. It will have some visual improvements and still be compatible with DX10.
I wouldn't consider it a small improvement. Remember Assassin's Creed pre-patched? The HD 3800 series was on a rampage because of the performance improvements 10.1 brought with AA enabled.the .1...? do you mean the direct x 10 vs 10.1...? I wouldn't even sweat that
Microsoft's Sam Glassenberg told Next-Gen in a phone interview, "DX10.1 fully supports DX10 hardware. No hardware support is being removed....It's strictly a superset. It's basically an update to DX10 that extends the hardware functionality slightly."
But Glassenberg stated, "It's a minor update, so we don't expect any developers to say, 'oh, this game is DX10.1 only.'
"All off the games that are coming out in the next few years will take better and better advantage of current DX10 hardware."
I wouldn't consider it a small improvement. Remember Assassin's Creed pre-patched? The HD 3800 series was on a rampage because of the performance improvements 10.1 brought with AA enabled.
Of course, Nvidia quicky had to slip Ubisoft something to get them to remove 10.1 support.
Here are the cards in order of performance: 9600GT/9600GSO/HD 3870 < 8800GT < 8800GTS < 9800GTX < HD 4850. The biggest jump in performance is going from the 9600/3870 to the 8800GT. After that, it's all fairly incremental. But there is definitely a noticable increase going from the 8800GT to the HD 4850. And you can get the 4850 for $165 after MIR, I would go for that.