Slashdot Mirror

http://clusty.com/search?query=nvidia+batman+arkham+asylum&tb=opensearch&

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33960034

http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=nvidia+amd+physx

http://clusty.com/search?input-form=clusty-simple&v%3Asources=webplus&query=nvidia+cheat

And the list goes on and on.

Nvidia = Intel = Microsoft. Anti-competitive and anti-consumer to the end.

For people that actually need to load unsigned 64-bit drivers (myself, for instance, to patch tcpip.sys so I can have lots of half-open connections at once), the procedure is actually pretty simple. You generate a cert, sign the driver yourself and then put the computer into "testing mode", which allows for self-signed drivers. The whole process can be automated (for instance, the tcpip.sys patch is now one click plus reboot) so that it's transparent to the end user.

IMO, this is the correct way to do it -- you can sign the driver yourself but you have to explicitly tell Windows to accept that signature. Seems like a perfectly reasonable balance between protecting newbies and not aggravating power-users too much.

References
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/c/5/9c5b2167-8017-4bae-9fde-d599bac8184a/kmsigning.doc (DOC WARNING)>
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33920573

"Softmodding only works up to the Geforce 6x00 series."

Wrong. Here are instructions for softmodding a Geforce 8800 GTS:

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33898714

Also, the main thing you are paying for with a quadro card is support. You are given access to the driver development team. If you find a bug they will fix it in short time.

Here is a story from April 29th.. Which actually tells you WHAT the microcode fixes http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?threadi d=33889730

I suspect the real problem is because high end cards are starting to push Shader unification.

From a chipset standpoint, Intel actually makes decent (not spectacular, but better than many) graphics hardware already, they just don't have hardware transformation and lighting (T&L), which gets offloaded to the CPU. That means you can't be throttling your CPU(s)/cores and need a decent pipe between the hardware and memory. Intel said a couple of years back that it's a myth that the bottleneck is usually in T&L and the problem is actually pixel throughput.

As far as I can tell, that means
a) the bottleneck is between geometry (T&L) and shading (pixel hardware), meaning it's because of the software driver.
or
b) the bottleneck is between shading and the display, meaning Intel's hardware is too crappy to push that many pixels.

The first is a meh (no surprise - it's caused by having geometry in software) the second would be a hardware issue Intel needs to resolve to work with larger displays.

Now back to Shader Unification - basically, if companies like nVidia and ATI move to unified shaders they can assign the types they need as needed and not leave many of them idle. Both of those companies have experience in unified shader architectures already (i.e. the Xbox, and GeForce 8 series), so it wouldn't surprise me if this were the trend of the future. Intel needs to move their software T&L into hardware to create a unified architecture - assuming that is the way of the future.

Another issue is that unified architectures are basically high speed generalized floating point units - these have practical uses in other areas besides graphics (physics, supercomputing, even databases - there are even web pages like this one dedicated to it). Intel has to see this as a threat and know that they need a response should their main competitor, AMD (ATI), go in that direction.

ATI 3D Linux drivers? * LOL * Take a look what Linux users think of ATI drivers: http://www.rage3d.com/board/forumdisplay.php?f=61

My correspondance with the fglrx packager: Dear Sir/Sirs, > > I don't know if this is the proper channel to report bugs or > deficiencies of the fglrx drivers to, but I don't know where else to > turn to. > > My system is RADEON 9600 XT 256MB (AGP) on Intel 845PE motherboard , > Pentium4 2.4 GHz, 1GB RAM. While on Windows XP everything runs fine, > on every flavor of Linux I've tried I get the same bugs: > > 1. glxgears freezes linux, and also every type of openGL application > after approx. 1 min. > > 2. Xv video overlay on TV-out produces only the upper half of the > piped video. If I disable Xv overlay, video is correctly displayed but > the performance deteriorates to a point where it is unwatchable. > > I have tried ubuntu 5.10 and 6.06, kubuntu 5.10 and 6.06, SuSe 10.1, > drivers 2.25.18 and 2.26.18 with every possible configuration and I > get the same bugs. > > I have switched back to "ati" driver on kubuntu 6.06 albeit with no > TV-out. > > Luckily windows can read linux filesystems and I watch my videos this way > > I would greatly appreciate if the drivers for linux can pipe video to > my tv while I work on my monitor, just like extended desktop on xp. > > Thanks for reading. Responce: Unfortunately I don't for for ATI, so can't really help you much with the drivers. I just submit the packaging scripts to ATI for their installer. But maybe the following is helpful to you: > 1. glxgears freezes linux, and also every type of openGL application > after approx. 1 min. I have never heard of this problem before. I have a Mobility 9600 and 9800XT myself, and have no such problems with the driver. Have you tried changing "fast writes" in your BIOS to "off", or trying different Linux kernels? > 2. Xv video overlay on TV-out produces only the upper half of the > piped video. If I disable Xv overlay, video is correctly displayed but > the performance deteriorates to a point where it is unwatchable. I guess you are using PAL TV? I believe this is a know issue, and there is no way around it other than reverting to much older drivers (8.20 might work, 8.16 should for sure if you can get it to compile on your kernel). From what I hear, ATI should be working on TV stuff for future releases, but I have no idea when they will be released. For now I'd recommend you disable Xv, and use the OpenGL display target of your video player (for example in mplayer use: "-vo gl2"). That should give you good performance, provided you can fix issue #1. I suggest you check out the Rage3D community site at http://rage3d.com/board/forumdisplay.php?f=88 and the unofficial ATI wiki at http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Main_Page for more info.

There may very well be, however it won't last long.
ATI have a new policy of pulling support for their products even while they're still selling new in the stores. They recently dropped support of the R200 ( see http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33856 854 ).

This may be marked as a troll, and maybe this wouldn't be out of line, but I still warn you:

Do not buy ATI products if you use or intend to use Linux . Otherwise you will be sorry.

Something isn't right, from the screenshot.

..Using an award bios last copyrighted in 2003 for AMD's latest FX-60 chip (2006)..
..Notice how the AMD Processor isn't correctly id'd in the Bios post.
..Even though.. DFI has distributed a new bios version to suport FX60..

.. This thread indicates that there is some video defect in RD480 chipset..

These red flags indicate that something is very fishy and Intel's results should not be trusted... (rigged test)

glxgears is a benchmark for graphics acceleration.

glx gears is NOT a benchmark, the numbers it produces are meaningless for anything other than 'how fast does glxgears' run. If you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe this ATi-er saying glxgears is not a benchmark?.

No, Microsoft has been the #1 supporter of anti-virus companies. Shipping operating systems with security holes has made Norton and McAffee what they are today. If Microsoft shipped a solid OS that wasn't easily compromised, the anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-trojan, anti-worm industry woudldn't be where it is today.

My question is, with Microsoft now looking to profit from the holes that let trojans and worms run riot on your PC, what's their incentive to patch these issues? It seems they patch at a glacial pace as it is, but now they make money selling the OS, and more money protecting the OS.

It's now standard practice in the PC-gaming industry to ship essentially buggy (broken) games, because you can patch later.

I think it's getting to the point where people aren't shocked that there are huge security holes in their OS, and they expect to spend money on anti-virus software, routers/firewalls, and anti-spyware, not to mention all the time it takes to update the operating system, the anti-virus software, the anti-spyware software, etc.

We've all been brainwashed by companies that ship shoddy products. I'm not sure how it happened, but I buy games expecting that there will be a few issues that will later be resolved by a patch.

The COD2 online community is so fed up with the poor support that Infinity Ward has given (cheats and problems abound), that they are trying to co-ordinate a shutdown of all the servers they run on December 17th to protest.

Could you imagine if Infinity Ward started selling a second product that would fix the bugs in Call of Duty 2?

That's what Microsoft is doing.

Try

        Option "VideoOverlay"
        Option "OverlayOnCRTC2"

in the Device section for the _primary_ screen.

The linux driver forum on rage3d.com at http://rage3d.com/board/forumdisplay.php?f=88 and the unofficial bugzilla at http://ati.cchtml.com/ are both worth a look.

For me, an ATI customer, they do. I'm not comfortable at all with the support I get from ATI. I'm able to install the drivers, but I DO have a problem with the driver's 2D performance. For 2D, you are better off open source drivers then to use Fglrx. Games aren't everything. Hell, to me games are what I play on my Gamecube. I want to have decent performance in a 2D desktop environment considering that 2D acceleration is old hat by now. Now everyone measures a card by its 3D performance (where the flgrx drivers still lag greatly in compared to the windows drivers....)

The only setbacks seen with the fglrx drivers would be that of the mentioned lack of XRandR support as well as a lack of XCompMgr support (for drop shadows/transparency). However, such minor setbacks on 'beauty' shouldn't be a big decision when choosing which drivers to use.

It might not matter to you, because you (like me) have an ATI card and you've never actually seen this stuff at work. The other day I tried it out on my girlfriend's laptop (with a Geforce 420 Go, a card theoretically not half as good as my 9600 pro), and that fading trick when it was properly accelerated was the coolest desktop effect I've ever seen. Makes desktop use a lot easier on the eyes. Also, when xcompmagr is running on hers, the entire desktop feels faster and more responsive then my much faster desktop with the ATI card in it. Since I (like many people) use my computer more for work than games, my ATI card is not acceptable. Thats why I bought a 5200 Nvidia card a few days ago, because I'm sick of fighting with crappy drivers only to have my 2D performance SUFFER!!!! I'll keep the old card around, to remind me not to buy ATI again...

Those that are going to try using this should read the Rage3D Linux Drivers Forum.

Some of the material there is pretty much required reading to get this stuff working, and includes posts with patches from ATI developers to make the driver work with the latest kernels (2.6.10, etc).

Cedega is a non-free version of wine with directx capabilities. You can browse their supported games here.

Of course not all games now-a-days require wine or cedega in order to run on linux. Games like unreal tournament and doom III include fully functional linux versions.

There are several open source games developed for but not limited to linux. torcs, flightgear, tuxracer are some examples.

Projects like libsdl are making cross-platform game development easier.

Probably the biggest problem you'll encounter is building drivers for your video card. I've heard it argued both ways but as I understand it, both nvidia and ati drivers are ass-pains in linux. Nvidia's drivers are free as in beer, not speech. If you don't really care about free-software principles and philosophy then this is not a problem for you. ATI's drivers I understand to perform less than ideally. If you haven't already purchased your video card, I would encourage you to do extensive research beforehand.

In reality, linux distributions have few differences. Any recent, major distribution should be able to accomodate gameplay. I myself use debian unstable for amd64.

As far as performance, it really boils down to hardware. My advice is to install the linux distribution of your choice. Once you get glxgears to run, give ut2004demo a try, and if you like the way it works, then stick with linux.

The best forum to read/ask this topic is at Rage3D.

They have howto's, patches, and some ATI dev's even post there.

from the you're-all-beta-testers dept.

Yawn. Every Linux distro gets released bug-free, right? ...Usually, a game bug isn't news-worthy, but the sporadic nature of this bug makes me wonder - who else has problems with HL2 pausing/skipping?

Well, you sure linked a ton of forums, how about you just read those threads? Or perhaps other gamer boards?

Listen, I know HL2 is the biggest thing to happen to the gaming community in quite some time. I know the controversy surrounding it, Gabe Newell, Vivendi, Valve and a piece of caerphilly cheese. I just don't see why a bug that is sporadic and what seems like a very minute number of people are having makes the frontpage.

Yes, I expected to get modded down.
No, I don't care.
Yes, I have "been around here for a while, and I know how the place works!"
No, these aren't the droids you're looking for.

Hello, We noticed that you just registered a Half-Life 2 key. Where did you come across a copy of the game? You're not in trouble or anything, but you're registered pretty early, and the game isn't activated just yet. Thanks, Erik Johnson Valve

In an E-Mail sent to all EBGames associates, the president of EBGames has stated that the persons who broke the street date at their stores have been terminated. As well, should anyone else break the street date the employee, manager, and district manager will all be held responsible. The e-mail was sent yesterday at aprox 5:30 PM EST.

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33739 457

8500DV I bought off ebay to make a freevo box from. Apparently the fglrx driver has a breakpoint so any opengl app fails. On top of that neither the tv in or tv out work. This card is useless to me.

... that ATI's drivers won't even install on a modern and widely used distro, such as Fedora Core 2 - no matter if you follow ATI's instructions.

You'll have to find a community support forum or two, download patches, and apply them. Then, if you have an SMP machine, you'll also have to create a symlink in your kernel source directory. If you've got an x86-64 machine, you're apparently SOL.
(And if you've got another CPU or OS, you're also SOL, due to the closed source, but that's another topic. OK, one recent ATI release actually wouldn't load on Athlons, but that's not what I'm talking about.)

If it only were a matter of RTFM, no big deal.

Then there's the horrid performance (far worse than ATI's Win Catalyst's already "less than ideal" OpenGL performance), the apps/games that are unusable due to artifacting, the unsupported features (no FSAA on DX9-class hardware in 2004??), the misidentified gfx boards, ...

ATI has been steadily releasing newer versions of their linux drivers over the past year (and I commend them for doing that). What has been frustrating is that the general experience has been that performance has degraded with many of the recent 3.xx releases, at least in comparison to the old 2.8 release which was already pretty fast and stable for my ATI card. I think part of the problem has been the push to support the most recent chipsets which has definitely complicated the driver releases.

btw, this http://www.rage3d.com/content/articles/atilinuxhow to/how-to hosted by Rage3D has been a god-send to those of us linux users suffering with ATI cards....

Seriously, I've been on the ATI beta testing team (although not anymore) and submitted feedback for every driver release to date.

I cannot get 3D working (2D works fine) with my 9800 pro - although exactly the same setup works fine on my old 8500 for 3D.

ATI have not responded to my emails, to my feedback, to any forum posts (although that isn't unexpected) - and this just plain sucks.

Please, if you want a 3D card in Linux, check people have the same hardware and it works if you're after an ATI card. Although only a small group of people have this issue, it is real and does exist.

Gentoo discussion
Rage 3D discussion

Quick Summary Enabling DRI causes X eat all my CPU and not start unless I have a working framebuffer.
With a working framebuffer I get screen corruption, menus and windows are not drawn properly and running any OpenGL application causes X to hang and eat all my CPU.

In both cases I can ssh into my box and kill X or the OpenGL app and I can use the box again.

The only common demoninator seems to be Asus motherboards with certain ATI cards - but the same hardware works fine for Windows XP!

Are you kidding? They could get some numbers from Rage3D's Linux Forum and justify the expense easily. ATI isn't a small company. It takes very little to justify hiring one or two more people. It's a terrible corporate image to be perceived as writing shoddy software even by a niche market, because it's a niche market in their prime market share. When you go to an ATI based forum and people suggest that you buy an Nvidia if you get frustrated and return their $300 card, that's a bad thing(tm).

And how does it feel with OpenGL performance less than a third of the already sucky OGL performance with ATI's Windows drivers? And don't all those artifacts look nice? And hey, it only took a couple of months for ATI to publish a fix to the slight oversight of NOT FUCKING LOADING on Athlon machines! Wow, isn't the ATI commitment to Linux fantastic - every second month or so we see a new chip ID added and the version number yanked up 3 or 4 notches (along with 5 - 10 new critical bugs and 5 - 10% slowdowns). Cool, clicking anywhere (like e.g. on the "Cancel" button) in the "ATI Control" tool makes my screen turn yellow, and I need to power-down the computer to get it back to normal. Gotta love the inability to watch video files while having a web browser or something open, because xv overlay is FUBARed with X.org that most distros use today. Wow, not only don't ATI supply pre-compiled kernel modules for the latest most common distributions, but it won't even FUCKING COMPILE without a bunch of patches from various 3rd party community sources found on web forums (rage3d.com - thanks for saving our bacon!). Mmmmmm, with a Radeon 9600XT on a dual Athlon 2400+, 2D operations and redraws are about as snappy as Workbench running in 256 colours on a 14MHz Amiga 1200.

"Completely and utterly perfect."

The hardware rocks. But there are no words to describe how much the drivers and ATI's "dedication to Linux" suck.

Section "Module"
Load "dbe"
#Load "extmod" #rh
SubSection "extmod" #ati
Option "omit xfree86-dga" # ati: don't initialise the DGA extension
EndSubSection #ati
Load "fbdevhw"
Load "glx"
Load "record"
Load "freetype"
Load "type1"
Load "dri"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "r9600pro"
Driver "fglrx" #ati
VendorName "ATI Technologies Inc"
BoardName "RV350 AP [ATI Radeon 9600 Pro]"
BusID "PCI:2:0:0"
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "no" #ati
EndSection

...so it's even sillier that the submitter would say that. But, hey, it's healthy fanboyism I guess.

Here's what the Register says:

ATI will ship its much-anticipated R420 chip later this month as the Radeon X800 Pro. The part's 26 April debut will be followed a month later by the Radeon X800 XT on 31 May.

So claims Anandtech, citing unnamed vendor sources and a glance at ATI's roadmap.

If the date is accurate, it puts ATI just 13 days behind Nvidia's NV40 launch on 13 April. NV40 will surface as the GeForce 6800 and is likely to form the basis for other series 6000 GeForce parts. Note the lack of the 'FX' branding - Nvidia has dropped it, Anandtech claims.

The X800 Pro will ship with 256MB of GDDR 3 graphics RAM across a 256-bit memory bus, but a revised version with 512MB of memory is expected later this year. The report also forecasts the arrival of an X800 SE, which supports 128MB of vanilla DDR SDRAM.

The R420 is an AGP 8x part - the native PCI Express version, the R423, will launch on 14 June, the report claims. It too will be offered as the Radeon X800. Both versions are expected to clock at around 500MHz with 1GHz memory clock frequencies. They feature eight-stage pipelines with six vertex shaders.

Expect to see Radeon X600 and X300 products in due course, we're told, as the RV380 and RV370 parts come on stream. These represent ATI's first 110nm parts.

Meanwhile, ATI's Radeon 9100 IGP is due for an update, apparently, in a few months' time. The revision, codenamed 'RS350', will support Intel's LGA775 CPU interface.

Further down the line, late in Q3, ATI will offer three new Pentium 4 chipsets, currently dubbed the RS400, RC400 and RU400. The first provides PCI Express graphics and non-graphics add-in card buses, along with a dual-channel memory controller. The other two will offer single-channel memory support, while the latter will not support external graphics cards.

AMD isn't being left out, courtesy of RS480 and RX480 chipsets, the first with integrated graphics the second without it. ®

Here's a little more info from Rage3d:

Only weeks before the release, ATI Technologies decided to boost performance of its next-generation code-named R420 processor by increasing the number of pixel pipelines inside the chip. Industry source told X-bit labs that the story is not about redesign, but about enabling "big guns" that were "hidden" inside the chip from the very beginning.

ATI Technologies' chip known as R420 will be called RADEON X800 PRO and is likely to be launched on the 26th of April, 2004. Higher-speed flavour of the R420 - the RADEON X800 XT - is expected to debut on the 31st of May, 2004, if the assumptions posted earlier this week are correct. PCI Express x16 solution powered by the R423 architecture will see the light of the day on the 14th of June. ATI on Tuesday began marketing campaign on its web-site to support the launch of the new graphics architecture.

Try also the Rage 3D site.

It's usually a site with boards for ATI users, but this morning I got there and was like "WTF? Did they sell out to some bogus company?".

then please be sure to read this existing thread for a discussion. For me, I haven't found the best one yet. Even Beyond TV didn't fit my needs. It's getting there, but no payment from me. You can read the posts by me, antdude.

I am currently using ATI's buggy MMC v8.9 for now for my Radeon 9800 All-In-Wonder card. Please post a reply if you know any other PVR software that you know will work with these requirements:

1. Can I install this program with ATI MultiMedia Center (MMC) v8.9 installed? Or do I have to uninstall MMC due to conflicts?

2. Can I watch scheduled TV shows in Timeshifting mode? Basically, I have the recorder program record an hour TV show from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM. I come home, and I already missed the first 15 minutes. I want to be able to jump into the TV show from the beginning (recorded already) and catch up to the live TV feed (include skipping commercials). This is like TiVo. I don't have to wait until the program finishes recording. MMC is annoying without this method.

3. Can I record with captions? ATI's MMC VCR video format can, but not DivX, MPEG-2, etc.

4. Can I watch my recorded shows and Timeshift recordings (in progress) on my TV (TV out fullscreen overlay) and still use my computer on primary screen (monitor)? If so, then can it show captions if available?

5. Is the low volume a problem since I have a SB Live! card? MMC's recording result very low audio volume.

I hope this helps for other ATI Radeon AIW users who are looking for a MMC replacement.

...users who have ATI Radeon cards can now benefit from an official release.

If you read the README these are all "officially unsuopported"

v3.7.1 driver was PULLED a few days ago due to many complaints. See this ATI Linux driver forum for the complaints. I had issues with both v3.7.0 (Xscreensaver's OpenGL didn't work) and v3.7.1 (X server didn't start at all) drivers on my old Red Hat Linux 7.2 box.

FYI the next big thing (tm) that ATI fanatics are looking forward too is the R420, not the R400. Rage 3d reports that the Xbox2 VPU will be based off the R500.

There's now way that ATI will cannibalize their PC graphics card market by making the xbox VPU on par with their top PC VPU for a fraction of the price (IMHO).

ATI is commited to a bimonthly release of it's Linux drivers, which is more than can be said for nvidia... Try reading rage3d.com's Linux forum if you are having problems with your ATI card. I've yet to see a single post from a user complaining about a 9800 XT flat out not working. Besides, the 9800 XT didn't come out until two months ago. October. The last driver they (ATI) released was also in October. It's now Decebmer. The new driver should be out any day now, providing they hold true to their bimonthly release promise. According to the info posted to rage3d.com concerning the recent windows driver release (last week), it should be out THIS week.

Yeah, I think your right. Anyways, why not go to Rage 3D? They are an ATI dedicated site. They have very active forums there for user-to-user support.

With All-In-Wonder cards and v3.9 drivers, OpenGL games no long work (crashes). See this thread.

I have to agree with your post. ATI has some work ahead of them on their drivers. They don't seem to have what it takes in that area.
Rage3D Forum For Driver Incompatabilities

An excerpt from ATI's Response to recent allegations of benchmark cheating

AquaMark3: We are currently investigating our rendering in AquaMark3. We have identified that we are rendering an image that is slightly different than the reference rasterizer, but at this point in time we are unable to identify why that is. We believe that this does not have any impact on our performance. Our investigation will continue to identify the cause and resolve it as soon as possible. One point to note is that we render the same image using our latest driver (CATALYST 3.8) as we do with a driver that pre-dates the release of Aquamark3 by almost six months (CATALYST 3.2). Also, in all of our dealings with the developer of Aquamark3, at no point have they advised us that they are unsatisfied with the images that we are rendering. We do not have any application specific optimizations in our driver and we are not cheating in this application.

As many are aware of, Tomshardware is the "Weekly World News" of the computer world. The only consistent factor in their reporting is the misleading nature of their articles. Furthermore, describing any Geforce FX as an "image quality king" is an outright lie, as image quality is noticeably worse than a Radeon even on the games that ATI supposedly "cheats" at. Go look at some screenshots for yourself if you doubt this. nVidia has still not stopped cheating, as their cards still will not enable Trilinear filtering, even when requested by the game and enabled in the drivers. nVidia's recent driver upgrades that purported to increase Pixel Shader 2.0 performance merely drastically reduced image quality, still failing to achieve performance parity with ATI products.

Nice try, though.

It doesn't bother me that much who has the fastest card. All I know is that this sort of competition is great in the Linux arena. With the recent trends in 3d animation studios transition to Linux, they can't ignore the need for high quality drivers.

Nvidia has really polished up their Linux drivers recently, and in response ATI has done the same.

This means Linux is one step closer to gaining a foothold on the desktop. Hopefully this will will spur interest 3D gaming on the linux platform.

One can dream of the day of playing Battlefield 1942 on Linux. I'm using the Liux FireGL drivers on my Radeon 9700 Pro, and so far, they work great for playing RTCW ET.

So much for seeing Dawn on Xbox2.

Oh, wait... Nevermind.

On the contrary, ATI recently started canvasing the various community forums to get beta testers for their new Catalyst Linux drivers, which they recently started serious development on. I've got the betas running here now, and I must say they are very very good - I'd put them on par with nVidias Linux drivers at the very least. There's a link here to a forum post from one of ATIs driver guys discussin the matter.

Yet it's not to hard to find bad stories about them elsewhere.

Oh well.

Driver Download and Installation
Before you start, please read these installation tips.

Download this driver bundle if you are having issues with your ATI product, including those mentioned in the "Fixed in this driver"
ATI Linux Driver Version 2.5.1:
Install the Driver Package for XFree 4.1.0 OR Install the Driver Package for XFree 4.2.0.
Xfree86 Version Driver Version
4.1.0 X4.1.0-2.5.1
4.2.0 X4.2.0-2.5.1

Posted: November 29, 2002
Released/Not Supported

Driver Release Notes (HTML)

This version supports only Linux/x86 versions based on libc 6.2.
To find out which library you have, download the script 'Check.sh' and run it.
This bundle contains the necessary files for any X86 version of Linux based on libc 6.2 (glibc 2.2)
Submit feedback on this driver to our ATI Linux Driver Feedback

Further Linux and XFree86 information on ATI products is available from the ATI website.

Check out the hair on this NVIDIA shot

and compare with the hair in this shot off the ATI.

The zoom on the NV example isn't quite as close-up, but you can still see how the hair feathers away at the tips, while the hair on the ATI is all jaggy and uniform thickness right out to the tips. Like some kind of Raggedy Anne yarn hair.

So does the ATI not support alpha-to-coverage? Or did these guys making the wrapper just not translate it properly? The hair looks pretty bad without it.

I seem to remember when I saw the NV guys give the demo that they made a point of how expensive the hair was to render. Each hair is a separate GL_LINE_STRIP, there are thousands of them, and if you turn off the complicated blending and smoothing on each one of those little hairs, that could maybe add up to a large savings. I don't know, but I wonder if that would account for most of the speed-up they see running it on ATI.

Still a neat hack. It would really rock to have complete NV<->ATI compatibility dlls that would work for all apps and not just this demo.

While they may have made some slight improvement to one aspect of image quality by improving normalization, which I guess makes the lighting a little more accurate, I really doubt the improvement is all that noticeable. Maybe I could tell given a side-by-side comparison, but I doubt I would notice if only shown a version normalized one way or the other. On the other hand, that ugly hair is pretty obvious. To me that makes the NVIDIA sreen shots look better.

You mean you "didn't install the drivers properly" ?
'Cause this guy doesn't seem to be stuck at 20fps

Yes, I have observed this with my 9700 AIW. Check Rage3D and search through their forums. I didn't have any problems with mine until I got a new hard drive, reinstalled XP and decided to use Service Pack 1. All the common problems, waves, some games crashing, TV stuttering...

A small proggie from Rage3D fixed some problems but I think I am going to have to reinstall.

Card works fine in Redhat 9 btw, and is otherwise stable.

For a high end GPU that is passively cooled you can look to the passively cooled Radeon 9700 Pro by Sapphire.
Sapphire Radeon 9700 Pro Ultimate Review
Basically you get a leading edge card that generated NO NOISE. A dream come true!

I think it's interesting how little CPU and RAM influence 3DMark 03 score. By way of example, my Radeon 9500 Pro system with Athlon XP 2100+ and RAM at 266mhz gets a score of about 3560. If I overclock the Althon to 2250 mhz (an effective 2800+) and the RAM to 400mhz, my score increases *10 points*. :) The old 3DMark gives gain of a couple of thousand at least. The argument for this new way of scoring is that this is how DX9 works, and (presumably) CPU and RAM won't have the same influence in the new games coming out over the next couple of years. As a layperson I have trouble believing that. A fairly good back-and-forth discussion of these merits can be found in the Rage3D forums here.

This mod and its possible failure modes have been discussed on the rage3d forums.

It seems the best theory as to why some checkerboard and some do not, is that the 9500 uses binned chips, where not all eight texture pipelines necessarily operate correctly at normal speeds, voltages, or possibly at all.

The mod apparently works by unlocking or changing a hard-wired ID field, which then allows the 9700 bios to be used on the 9500 board.

We've managed to get an ENMIC 8500 Pro to work with that as well. (see mutombo's posts in this thread)

Its funny, over at Been reading about features that they disable on the 9700, that are enabled on the 8500, like 16bit Anti-Aliasing. Alot of flight sim people are bitching, the 8500 supports it, the 9700 doesnt, and the card cost 400 bux when it came out.

I like the idea of a standard driver installation, as long as its not 500 megs and comes on a CD. (Like SoundBlaster drivers)

So there you have it; the elusive NV30 has surfaced in the form of GeForce FX. ATI has won the first round with the Radeon 9700 Pro, what will be most interesting will be what ATI has up their sleeves when the GeForce FX hits the shelves in February.

Myself, I had a GF3 Ti500, I upgraded to a GF4 4600, but it wasnt much faster, returned it. Then a couple games came out (Battlefield 1942, Unreal2003) that really needed some gfx horsepower. So I bought the Ati 9700, Amazing. I can run older games with 6x AA perfectly, and Newer games run at 60FPS with 2x AA enabled. The GFX card works fine with the CVS version of Xfree also. (Or vesa mode for older 4.2.1) Also, I can output to TV at 1024x768, and have it mirror my monitor, great when playing some multiplayer games, or playing some divx/svcds. The Ati 9700 is a very nice product, and found some great forums at Rage3d for questions and updated beta drivers. (Like the new DX 9.0 drivers and DX 9.0 demos)