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ATI Radeon Released
Dwayne Mulford writes: "ATI has released their new RADEON with 64MB of DDR memory. It's clocked at 183MHz and really gives the NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS a run for its money. ATI has their product info here and Sharky Extreme did a review of it here."
Here's what Tom had to say...
J:)
Oh well, no point in steering now.
Hey, if they want to shoot themselves in the foot, they're allowed.
On the other hand, one wonders exactly how many of these cards they would actually sell simply due to a full suite of Linux drivers.
Just how big is the hardcore gamer/linuxgeek crossover? Obviously they're the most VOCAL ones on the internet, and so it seems like there's bunches of them. But I'd be willing to bet that a WAY disproportionate amount of them have web pages and are active on discussion boards etc.
The high end gaming card market is being driven by people running Windows. If ATI loses all of their potential Linux clients, how many would that add up to? Hundreds? Let's be honest here.
Writing and supporting a driver well is not all that cheap for them. Publishing the specs is.
I'd rather have a well written community based driver than a poorly written ATI one.
Greg
Something to remember about video cards...
640k should be enough for anybody!
oh, wait...
GRAPHICS CARDS WITH 64 MEGABYTES OF RAM AND COOLING FANS.
try to sell THAT to someone 10 years ago. -i- wouldn't have believed it.
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
My life is complete. It's the feature I've always wanted!
SGI's Reality Engine, Sony's Emotion Engine, throw in a printer personality cart and you have a really intelligent bot w/ feelings that's a pleasure to have around.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
This is the first time that ATI has been on par with performance leaders since...well...probably since before 3D performance was being stressed much at all. I myself have an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 which I'm fond of, but I have reservations about this new chip.
First of all, ATI's track record for supporting non-Intel chipsets is pretty sketchy at best, abysmal at worst. Currently the Athlon chipsets out now are well provided for in ATI's drivers, but when you consider that new Athlon chipsets are going to be coming out within the next six months which feature many new advancements and changes, from DDR SDRAM to SMP and more subtle changes, I can't say that I'd buy one with performance in mind unless I'd definitely be running an older Athlon mobo or an Intel setup. These ATI boards will definitely be great for their multimedia features, and the All-in-Wonder version especially promises to be interesting, but I doubt performance will be up to snuff on the VIA and ALi next-gen Athlon chipsets because they poorly supported the VIA MVP3 and similar Socket 7 chipsets and to this day their own webpages tout only Intel processors; last time I was there, not a single benchmark was done on an Athlon, and they "recommended" Intel processor boards. With the new Willamette chipsets coming out, it's likely that ATI will make compatability with those their first priority, and compatibility with next-gen Athlon mobos an afterthought. ATI has also had many odd driver issues, like the Fury MAXX not supporting Windows 2000. Just remember that this might not perform well if you upgrade your Athlon mobo...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Again, Gareth Hughes, from Precision Insight, has already begun work on the Radeon drivers. PI is under contract from ATI to write those drivers. It doesn't sound like they aren't getting any help and it *certainly* doesn't sound like we'll be stuck with a poorly written community driver.
Ranessin
I'll be interested to see how this one does.
Consumer 3D acceleration has advanced at a phenomenal rate in the past few years, for two main reasons.
Firstly, until now everyone has been chasing SGI's taillights. SGI and OpenGL pretty much defined how to do fast 3D, so hardware and API designs have evolved toward that goal in a fairly consistent manner. (Except for a few unsuccessful oddballs like the NV-1 and D3D-RM.)
Secondly, it started off as a wide-open market with no entrenched leader. Lots of competition, leading to low prices and very fast product cycles.
This picture is starting to change, which is why I wonder whether the rate of progress is going to slow down. Firstly, consumer hardware has now caught up with SGI. SGI's "high bandwidth throughout the box" systems still win for some workstation apps, but there's no gaping chasm in speed or features any more. We're in uncharted territory now, and there's much less agreement about what the next goals should be. If every vendor starts innovating along radically different paths, apps will have a harder time using them all, and without app support the upgrade cycle is broken.
At the same time, the competition is thinning out drastically. ATI is now just about the only significant competitor to NVidia; 3Dfx is just about hanging in there but is suffering from repeated slippages and is going to have a very hard time catching up. These days NVidia is very, VERY influential in defining the direction of Direct3D, and will become more so now that they've been selected for X-Box. Remember that D3D (unlike OpenGL) has no extension mechanism, so a D3D version written to favour one vendor is a huge competitive advantage - if other vendors can't get their features exposed then they've effectively wasted a generation.
I'm a big fan of NVidia. Their hardware is superb, their drivers are excellent, they have a serious commitment to OpenGL and cross-platform support, and they contribute a lot to the graphics community in terms of research. But I'm not sure I'd like to see a total NVidia monopoly on consumer graphics. For that reason, if no other, I hope Radeon does well.
For those of you who haven't been on the scene lately, I'll clue you in. With the arrival of the GeForce, consumer 3D hardware has gotten REALLY fast. Right now, the GeForce 2 GTS is nearly the fastest 3D card availabe on PCs for workstation tasks. If you head over to Intergraphs's website, you'll see their comparisons between the Elsa's NVIDIA Quadro-based card and Intergraphs Wildcat 4210, which is currently the fastest workstation card availabe (more than twice as fast as the SGI Visual Workstation series in awedvs tests.) However, the Quadro-based card is nearly 50-70% the speed of the intergraph machine. Considering that the Quadro is only 135MHz compared to the GeForce2 GTS's 200MHz, plus the fact that the GeForce2 has twice as many pipes, it means that a GeForce2 is probably close to the performance of a Wildcat 4210. Thus, you can get nearly all of the $2000+Wildcat's performance in Hercules's $400 64MB GeForce2 card (which can be run at 235MHz core and 200+ MHz RAM). That sound you just heard was a collective orgasm from all the 3D Studio users who just realized that a $5000 PC can take the place of their $10,000 intergraph.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Never mind the ethical dilema of supporting hardware manufacturers who "do the right thing" for us free software proponents, even if it means giving up a few features every now and then. Frankly, I'm not about to shell out that kind of cash to anyone unless I know I'll be able to support the hardware years from now when it becomes outdated. When's the last time you saw a modern driver under Windows for the GD5380, or S3/968? Telling me to buy new hardware is NOT why I run Linux/BSD.
Well, Precision Insight (Hi Gareth!), are already working on the drivers for the Radeon graphics chip, so drivers for Linux should be vailable soon..
Also, Intense 3D will release soon a driver for XFree 4.0.x RSN (the driver for their WildCat series is written by Intense 3D, so expect some kick-ass performance!)
Hetz (Heunique)