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Please use a working link:

and the guy that said that has been known to bullshit on that forum, so people are doubting him.

Checking out his 3dMark and you notice, fillrate, poly count, shader, spride speeds are missing. Also only 4x AGP, be nice to also see 8x AGP enabled, his motherboard might not support it yet.

His ATI driver is also 6.13.10.6159, he should upgrade to 6193, major performance increase. You can get it over at rage3d.com

Impressive thou, Double my 3DMark on a plain AMD 1800 with a ATI 9700.

Some discussion in this thread concerning data corruption on NTFS useing the ATI R300 series.

May be a problem associated with large system cache but I've read something somewhere that had a much better explanation.

The other problem, straight from ATI:

"In certain cases, after installing the RADEON 9700 PRO 128MB in an AGP 8x capable motherboard, the system will not post, or boot up.

"Not all AGP 8x motherboards are affected. Some customer's have reported that lowering the AGP transfer speed in some instances, will allow the system to then post.

"ATI Engineering has been advised of this issue and is investigating. Any updates will appear on this page when they become available."

ATI Radeon 8500 is a better card, with a nicer fragment path, while NVidia still consistently runs faster due to better drivers.

Wrong!

What Carmack actually says is this:

In order from best to worst for Doom:

I still think that overall, the GeForce 4 Ti is the best card you can buy. It has high speed and excellent driver quality.

Based on the feature set, the Radeon 8500 should be a faster card for Doom than the GF4, because it can do the seven texture accesses that I need in a single pass, while it takes two or three passes (depending on details) on the GF4. However, in practice, the GF4 consistently runs faster due to a highly efficient implementation. For programmers, the 8500 has a much nicer fragment path than the GF4, with more general features and increased precision, but the driver quality is still quite a ways from Nvidia's, so I would be a little hesitant to use it as a primary research platform.

The GF4-MX is a very fast card for existing games, but it is less well suited to Doom, due to the lower texture unit count and the lack of vertex shaders.

On a slow CPU with all features enabled, the GF3 will be faster than the GF4-MX, because it offloads some work. On systems with CPU power to burn, the GF4 may still be faster.

The 128 bit DDR GF2 systems will be faster than the Radeon-7500 systems, again due to low level implementation details overshadowing the extra texture unit.

The slowest cards will be the 64 bit and SDR ram GF and Radeon cards, which will really not be fast enough to play the game properly unless you run at 320x240 or so.

With regards to 8500 vs. GF4, he meant that the 8500 has better hardware on paper, but GF4's efficient hardware implementation makes it faster. He mentioned driver quality as a separate issue from speed.

In talking about ATI's next generation hardware, the R300, he says the following in separate emails. From www.rage3d.com.

Doom III is very much hardware driven, and one of the controversies of this year's E3 was that the game was demonstrated on the latest ATI graphics card rather than a card from NVidia.

"NVidia has been stellar in terms of driver quality and support and doing all of the things right," says Carmack, who has been an outspoken evangelist for NVidia's GeForce technology. "For the past few years, they have been able to consistently outplay ATI on every front. The problem is that they are about one-half step out of synch with the hardware generation because they did Xbox instead of focusing everything on their next board. So they are a little bit behind ATI."

"I told everyone that I was going to demonstrate Doom III on the best hardware, and there has been no collusion or kickbacks or anything like that going on. Our objective is the technical merit." "The new ATI card was clearly superior. I don't want to ding NVidia for anything because NVidia has done everything they possibly could; but in every test we ran, ATI was faster."

However, he was comparing R300 to a GF4, not NV30. In this email to nvnews:

It [The ATI card used] was compared against a very high speed GF4. It shouldn't be surprising that a next-generation card is faster than a current generation card. What will be very interesting is comparing the next gen cards (and the supporting drivers) from both vendors head to head when they are both in production.

Everyone working on DOOM still uses GF4-Ti cards at the moment, and if someone needs to buy a new video card today, that is what I tell them to get.

John Carmack

Visit Rage 3D where they show many of the newer drivers can be used on older cards...

Me three (four?)

I've had my ATi Rage128 running on Win2k for the last year or so, and not one crash. The default drivers are crap, though, not even supporting OpenGL. Kudos to Rage3d.com for pointing us to the Real Drivers.

On the issue of ATI's driver development for the Radeon:

ATI Radeon Beta Driver Comparison

A recent review on some of the other features Radeon Cards offer:

gotapex reviews-Ati Radeon 64MB

A good site for ATI information, and user feedback:

Rage3D The Place for the Latest ATI News

Even with the GeForce getting higher benchmark scores, the Radeon is considered by many to have
better video quality, and multimedia friendly features.

For some of us, that is also an important consideration.