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ATi Radeon 8500
punkmac writes: "The new ATi Radeon 2 8500 is finally here, with previews at Anandtech and Tom's Hardware. Could ATi finally have the killer card that we've all been hoping for? With promises of a 33% speed increase from the GeForce 3, they might." Gamespot has a piece too, all published simultaneously. I love it when a hardware company decides to lift their embargo and all the "independent" reviewers dutifully follow the herd. Compare the three articles and see if you can determine which images/text came directly from the press kit.
What else would you have the review sites do? Break their NDAs and publish early, thus both violating their agreement and guarenteeing getting snubbed on all future hardware releases? Or sit on their hands and ignore reporting on the latest hardware (sort of the raison d'etre of hardware sites)?
(Say what you will about me wanting actual vendor support, but I went through the DRI hell of owning -- and eventually dumping at a considerable loss -- a Voodoo5 5500. I now have a GeForce2 Ultra and the Nvidia driver was easy to install and works reasonably well. And I could care less that it isn't open source. Their hardware, their driver, my choice to use it. Same as my choice to use Opera. It's the best tool for the job.)
Anyway, I'd really like to see some of the "independant" review sites (especially Tom's and/or AnandTech) start including a bit about Linux compatibility (including whether or not OSS drivers exist), performance, availability, etc. But I guess since the press kit didn't have any mention of Linux, the reviews won't either, like Michael says. Plenty of ad views on those reviews, though...
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Cool reviews = sucking up or an honest review?
I remember a computer mag I read a long time ago that had an award for awful games called "Ejnar". I always looked for those those reviews first because they where usually the funniest.
Ofcourse that's a magazine and not a site. But I still wouldn't buy anything based only on a good review.
When will it hit the stores?
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Cpq has Rage Mobility drivers for 2000 on their site at
s p1 7791.exe
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp17501-18000/
Gravis did the same thing with their Ultrasound drivers just before announcing that they were exiting the soundcard market completely.
Actually, ATI and Microsoft collaborated closely on several areas of DirectX 8.1 and even more closely on the as yet unannounced DirectX 9. Some people say MS is a bit PO'ed at nVidia for some reason or another...
Ha! It's funny to see a ranting, self-proclaimed idiot come back from the -1 posting threshold. You must have been modded up lately. Does this make you feel good, knowing that their are now even more lame @55ed 'slashbots' that agree with your typical trolling and swearing? You're not making it better for slashdot, you're making it worse by wasting bandwidth bashing everyone.
From the article at tomshardware.com:
Let me not forget that the multi-sampling support of Radeon 8500 also allows so extremely important stuff as depth-of-field or motion blur.
Yeah sure, but does anyone remember the t-buffer? The voodoo5 had those, and I don't think any major developer used it.
Developers will always keep per-card-programming to a minimum and simple *ignore* those special FX features. It's not 'this effect, and that effect' that is important, but stuff that leads generally improved image quality (think Doom3, which does the lighting identical for every element in the scene)
- Andreas
Sure, the new Radeon took a couple of benchmarks by a little, and got absolutly spanked in others. And this is against a card that has been around for months now. If ATI can get their driver issues under control (which they haven't done in the past, read all the other posts if you think I'm lying) they might be able to beat out the GeForce3 when the GeForce3 Pro or Ultra or whatever the refresh will be named is out. Remember nVidia's 6 month product cycle?
And about your bolded point of the GeForce3 not running at full speed when released, well that's dumb. The damn thing ran faster than anything else months ago and now nVidia is pushing the limits further. Plus if you think you're ever going to reach the theoretical max fill rate you've got another thing coming to you. We should all be rejoicing that nVidia doesn't give their drivers only one shot, but is constantly updating them to make better use of their hardware. The fact of the matter is that its a gift to those with the GeForce3, even though the thing already kicked some serious ass.
The price is high...
Yes it is, considering I can get a GeForce3 for less than this new Radeon right now. With the refresh the current generation GeForce3 will drop in price even more, and ATI will be in a world of hurt. Sorry, but ATI probably doesn't have the market leader in a card here. And its a 64MB card? Woo-hoo! So is anything else you would buy today, even the stupid GeForce2 MX's. Not that it matters that much currently, can you name a single game that loads up more than 32 MB of texture?
If not now, when?
Agreed.
I've put together more than 50 machines in my lifetime, and I have used all of the brands of video cards repeatedly. When the Radeon came out, I used it in place of the Geforce2 MX card (it doesn't compare to the GTS in most cases) several times. I've found that while it has adequate stability most of the time, the performance is downright dismal. My Athlon 800 with a Geforce (first gen) outperforms my Athlon 900 with a Radeon 32MB DDR in several games, and that's pretty sad.
I don't like it when there is only one brand available, and so I seriously hope that ATI has hit it with this one. One of the reviews mentioned tearing textures though in DirectX applications, and this was one of the worst problems with the old ATI Rage Pro series as well as several other ATI cards....if it happens with this new card, I am seriously done with ATI for good, the NVIDIA products are rock-solid these days.
that's why you can only believe reviewers from magazines that have the politic of always buying their hardware... althought I can only think of a few in general and none in the computer industry. regards
I'm not buying ATI until I start hearing good word-of-mouth stories about their drivers. I've been burnt a few times by their products and absolutely refuse to try them anymore.
For me, its Matrox... my G400 has gotten more mileage than any card I've ever had before.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
That is not a catch-22. There's no inherent paradox because there's no incentive to give a bad review (unless journalistic integrity counts, but these game web sites aren't run by journalists anyway.)
Well first you'd have to find a m/board with 2 AGP slots - which is not the easiest thing in the world.
After that though, sure you can put two cards in at the same time for Windows (>=98).
As for Linux - I believe Xinerama lets you do the same kind of thing, though I've never experimented with it (not had two cards around since XFree 4 came around).
It can't be that hard to copy a rendered image from the main VRAM to the TV-out frame buffer.
Was that his main home, or his secondary home? At least you understand the English possessive. You could teach CmdrTaco at thing or two.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
You're playing Black and White at work? You're fired! :)
I don't know about Win2K, but the Win9X/Me drivers for my Radeon DDR card were fairly mature when the card was released, and I've only updated them once. They had an issue with one Athlon chipset for a while (can't remember which one), but otherwise they seem to be much better than the average ATI product.
The real reason why I got a Radeon card (aside from the good price/performance of the 32MB DDR version) was the knowledge that there was a guy at PI working full time on a fully accelerated XFree/DRI driver. I'm still regretting the purchase of a nVidia TNT card because I'm at the mercy of nVidia to release binary drivers that keep up with kernel and XFree releases.
Sorry, dudes..
when i got my ati rage 128 card, X, at that time didnt support it - because ati wouldnt release any specs. they still dont. i really wonder how long it will take before X supports this new card?
but of course you wouldnt be playing hardware acclerated games on linux other than quake...
(does anybody reverse engineer the window drivers to get the specs for X i wonder...)
my blog
Tribes 2 was written soly with the GF3 in mind. it runs slower/crashes on all other hardware. It crashes on GF3 systems, but thats another issue.
But what about the drivers? They are the real issue. I bought an ATI Radeon when they came out. And even on Windows, the drivers were quite buggy. Not just unoptimized, which I think they were too. But also buggy. Many games had clear visual bugs, and you had to be switching options on and off to find something that works. Maybe it's also because the card was new and game makers hadn't been able to test with it to get around the bugs, but I dont think so. I think the drivers were just immature.
I really hope the drivers have matured. We need something besides NVidia in good consumer level 3D cards. And as ATI has been quite good with releasing the specs for their cards, I wouldn't be sad at all to see ATI gaining some market share from NVidia.
The World's Best Music!
When it is something that is mostly related to hardware, MS acts fairly. MS mouse, keyboard, SideWinders et al are quite nice products. I applause MS for being hardware vendor independent.
¦ ©® ±
I can't help but wonder how ATI can expect to compete with nVidia on the Windows platform with Microsoft and nVidia working so closely together.
It wasn't so long ago that ATI and Microsoft were pretty buddy buddy. That died down quickly enough when ATI lost thier stronghold on the OEM market.
But don't think Microsoft and ATI don't still talk. NVidia may be the market leader right now -- but ATI still has some fat stacks of cash to drop whenever and wherever they like. NVidia is just one product release from 2nd place again. They know it and they show it; it's all over the face of their agressive marketing.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Just have a look at: :)
http://www.doomworld.com/files/doom3faq.shtml
It says the new Doom game will utilize GeForce3 completely. I only home ATI manages to get out something that will run the new game, too
As long as ATI gets their drivers working properly, they should have no trouble stealing market share from Nvidia. ATI traditionally has trouble developing stable drivers for their video cards.
I'm really sick of these meta comments about how much /. sucks, misses the point, or somesuch other ridiculous complaint. You don't like /., go read something else. You didn't post a single sentence about the features of the card, the content of the review, or the viability of drivers under Windows/Linux. There's NOTHING here but a meta statement about Slashdot. This is "Insightful"????
/. reader with a four digit user ID, I long for the days when /. was a content driven forum instead of a place where one can't hide from crap flood off topic posts, links to offensive material, and offensive ascii "art." That junk like this post could get modded up is proof that the moderation system is broken and needs radical repair.
Moderation has been taken over by an organized group determined to destroy this online forum. I encourage Rob Malda to shut down the moderation system and hire employees to both moderate and censor the forum. As a long time
Please Rob. I can't even post this complaint with my real userID for fear of getting modded down and having my IP suspended from posting. This is just wrong!
I agree... if the driver is indeed tweaked to artificially tweak benchmarks, we have a VERY large problem on our hands, and I'd be rather pissed off at whoever it was that participated in such deception. And yes, the drop in performance for Giants is rather interesting, but a single deteriorating benchmark is hardly evidence that NVIDIA is doing anything dishonest.
Tom's perspective on an issue is indeed imporant to me. I've been reading his site since not long after it first opened, and have come to trust the opinions of Tom and his staff. Their reviews are more than thorough, usually competently written (some of the translations from German don't quite come off perfectly,) and very informative. Recently, however, I've noticed a great deal of editorializing on the part of their editors.
Take, for example, Tom's crusade against Rambus. Several of his early articles made broad statements about the ethics and tactics of the not-so-well-loved company. His comments later turned out to be accurate, and I believe that the public's rejection of Rambus is due in no small part to Tom's influence, but at the time of his initial comments, he had little to back up his claims.
Tom is in a position to influence a lot of people with his opinion, but I believe he needs to exercise a bit of journalistic integrity when posting unsubstntiated comments that will be read by such a large audience. Based on the article that was posted today, and the lack of evidence to back up Tom's claims that something is amiss, it wouldn't surprise me if NVIDIA filed a libel suit against Tom.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
I own Radeon 64 and I am yet to see single ATI related crash ( running on Widows 2000)
To be fair, ATI has released drivers (beta ones anyway, but the same thing can be said for NVIDIA) much more frequently than once every 3 months for their Radeon line.
Granted, there hasn't been one for nearly a month now, but there were 4 released in June, 5 in May and 2 in April.
Three words: Dual Monitor Output
+++ATH0
Since Loki is going chapter 11, intuitively I'd say no, but when you consider that the ONLY choice people have currently for good 3D under Linux is an NVidia card (don't get me started on Linux+Radeon) then clearly many many people are simply excluded from even CONSIDERING buying 3d games in the first place. Until I bought a Geforce2mx card for my older system, I never would have considered buying Linux games, but now I do. And eventually when I look to upgrade, I will go with whatever company has the best Linux support.
Not too early. ATI dropped this at just the right time. That's because these supposedly early, unoptomized, buggy drivers perform at the same benchmark speeds that the final, less buggy but still un-optimized drivers will. Anyone who expects ATI to come out with better drivers later is just setting himself up for disappointment again.
Tribes 2! :)
... :) )
I've got a Geforce2 Pro 64MB card with a P3-933 processor & 384MB RAM and Tribes 2 does not run smoothly at 1024x768x32 with all the details turned up in all instances. Sure, indoors with five or six people around or outdoors with 3 or 4 it runs pretty well (40-100 fps depending). But you get 10-12 people mixing it up in a base assault and weapons exploding everywhere and it definitely starts dipping down below 20.
I've taken to running with a few features turned down here and there in 800x600 and all is well. A faster processor would help a bit too but so would a faster vid card. I'd love to be able to play in 1280x1024 or higher on a 21" monitor and stay above 80fps. I don't know of any current hardware that'll do that. (Let me know if there is
ATI has a long history of releasing drivers that are trash. I've never liked ATI, but I thought I would give them ONE more chance when the released the Radeon with DDR, since it had decent reviews. I had it for one week before I unloaded it on eBay for a steep loss. I have never used a card so terrible in my life. No games worked, drivers were worthless, and Windows 2000 would freeze constantly. Before you complain about Win2k being meant for business apps - nVidia can handle it. I've owned a couple other ATI cards and have had similar results. I don't know how it fares on Linux. I play all my games on my Windows box.
"Not too early. ATI dropped this at just the right time. That's because these supposedly early, unoptomized, buggy drivers perform at the same benchmark speeds that the final, less buggy but still un-optimized drivers will."
Nice blanket statement and where is your proof to back it up?
"Anyone who expects ATI to come out with better drivers later is just setting himself up for disappointment again."
Well considering that three big features aren't fully there yet (eg. HydraVision, SmoothVision) how can you have preformance equal to drivers that are refined? Given ATI's track record from the old ATI 32's till now I'd say they improved in what final drivers they release. Sure they have a lot of work to do in the areas of preformance and stability but these are beta or more likely alpha drivers.
Many Linux geeks have Windows machines (Or dual boot) for games. However, when they are in the market for a new system, they would like to buy hardware that supports Linux. Nvidia has decent drivers but with no source. The ATI DRI drivers under XF4 is great but with no T&L. Personally, I am looking for a linux workstation and would probably settle for a AMD Athlon 1.2 + ATI Radeon LE (Overcloackable). The reason I chose that over a MX is because ATI supports DRI by releasing the specs.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Locks up hard for me with kernel 2.4.6 and XFree86 4.1.... haven't tried it with a newer kernel.... if you have more info on this, I'd really appreciate it.
What a great concept, I bet the internet would be perfect for that ... oh wait.
Cheers,
- RLJ
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/00q4/001208/g4 50-09.html
Daniel J. Kelly
Yeah, its a parasitic relationship...like all the anti capitalist protesters: smash the state.. oh, but i want your money, and i dont want to have to work for it.
Does Slashdot not agree with embargoes now? How cute. So, go ahead, print stuff then. go on, from that big list of companies who trust you...
I just had a quick price look, and a G450 Dual Head is only $100 in most places.
Dual head would be nice....
What's the 3D performance on this card like? Got any benchmarks? Is Quake3 playable, in a decent resolution with all the goodies turned on? (I don't need bazillions of fps, 30 is good enough for me)
Thanks for the tip,
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
"The Radeon 8500 will retail for $399, although we believe that by the time it does hit the streets ATI may drop the price a bit in order to be more competitive with the 8500's counterpart at NVIDIA.
The Radeon 7500 will retail for $199 but again, in order for it to be competitive it will have to be a bit cheaper.
The Radeon 8500 and 7500 won't be going up against the GeForce3 and GeForce2 Pro when they launch, instead NVIDIA will have a new set of cards to compete with so ATI had better work on that pricing a bit."
Sadly, it only depresses me when someone mods me up. It proves that slashdot really is filled with the fucking morons I accuse them of being. Sometimes it sucks to be right.
Stupidity never felt so good.
I don't know about Nvidia's or ATI's driver support and performance under Linux so this may be a moot point to some, but... Nvidia on Win32 has generally had VERY good drivers. ATI's have been mediocre and rarely updated, at least in comparison. So that 33% faster than Geforce3 thing may won't make much differnce if that stays the same... Having fast hardware is one thing, but if you don't wring all the performance you can out of the drivers then you will be stuck with good specs and bad benchmarks. I would love for ATI to have the great driver performance and updates that Nvidia does even though I am using my 2nd straight Nvidia Card right now. Compatition is always good, and it would be nice if we could get to a point where the price and performance wars were as competitive as they are in the CPU market :).
"I wonder exactly what market ATI are aiming at - will the hardcore gamer market really offer them high enough sales to make a comeback? Or will they target the OEM market, where they used to be king?"
Bothand the embedded system market (gamecube and a few appliances) actually. The question is, will they be able to pull it off across the board.
Driver 'department'? What driver department? Do you mean that one poor ATI employee that produces some crappy driver update every 3 months, until they announce new hardware, at which time all driver updates stop entirely?
I have an attitude problem because I notice the complete and utter hypocracy of the average slashbot? Right. OK. Fucking moron.
Stupidity never felt so good.
Luca? Nah.. too coherent.
I've been using NVidia's "nvidia" v 1.0 driver with various 2.4.x kernels (currently 2.4.7) and XFree86 4.0.3 very successfully on a number of different distributions (Mandrake 7.2, Suse, and now debian-3.0-testing). Hardware which I have used ranges from Guillemot Cougar TNT2 PCI analog cards to Inno3d PCI GeForce2 400MX DVI cards to AGP GeForce2 DVI AGP cards, both standalone and using xinerama with other, non-nvidia cards, and with both standard 18" 4x3 LCD screens as well as SGI 1600SW 1600x1024 LCD screens via their multi-link adapter. I haven't tried a GeForce3 card as it remains a little pricey, but would be very surprised if it didn't work just as well.
Configuration of X was fairly trivial (the nvidia driver README describes what needs to be done and is absolutely accurate, modula removing the GLX support when using xinerama), and substituting one Nvidia card in a configured machine for another works flawlessly (even with radically different NVidia chipsets) and requires no additional configuration tweaks whatsoever (compare this to changing Matrox models, which often do require changes to the XF86Config file).
In fact, where I work we have standardized on nvidia completely (we used to use Matrox) mainly because of the ease of use with respect to GNU/Linux and the excellent support Nvidia provides (we have 50+ Linux workstations and servers and are rolling out new boxes all the time), whether using the stock "nv" drivers or the accelerated "nvidia" drivers provided by NVidia. As another noted, while releasing the driver as Free Software would be nice, we are more than happy to reward NVidia's excellent GNU/Linux support with our business even if they choose, as is their right, to keep their driver proprietary. Their product works extremely well, very painlessly, and eases my workload in supporting diverse video hardware under GNU/Linux and the X Windowing System immensly.
For what it is worth it should be noted that you have to recompile both the kernel driver and the GLX driver each time you recompile/upgrade your kernel. Failure to recompile both will make the X session unstable. Not recompiling the GLX driver will work (most of the time) and thus it is easy to forget, but failure to do so will lead to the kind of instability you describe.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Of course, we'll see if they get to review ATI's next new card, but it's clear that the so-called catch-22 isn't universal.
Erik
"You," Bite me.
"Each and every one of you." Bite me.
I'm finally going to upgrade my trusty old P233MMX w/Matrox Mill II to something a little more modern - hell, I got a good 5 years out of this system, running Linux.
Current plans are for an Athlon 1.2 GHz (266)
So what's a good 3D card to go with this system, given that it is exclusively for Linux?
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
When will it hit the stores?
Whenever ATI manages to get the beta drivers cut to CD.
Does a faster video card mean that their terrible Windows drivers will bring a faster BSoD?
After buying 180 All-In-Wonder Pros for a client (TV network), upgrading the systems a couple of years later and then not being able to get Windows 2000 support for them that actually works (their "MultiMedia Center" hangs the machine or causes BSoDs, and is in perputal beta), I've sworn off ATI.
Anyone else who is tired of ATI's always broken Windows software want to join me at ATI's lovely Markham, Ontario headquarters? I'll bring the barbecue, and we'll have a video card roast in their parking lot. I know at least one reputable TV network who will cover the protest.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Unfortunately, for 2D, the free linux drivers are terrible. I get around 13M pixels/sec glDrawPixels performance; while the closed source Xi drivers get ~80M pixels/sec; some 6 times as fast. The problem is that ATi didn't care to fund development of free high-performance 2D; so it didn't get done.
Perhaps it is surprising to some, but for many if not most visual effects applications, 2D performance is more important than 3D performance.
At this point, I would not recommend the ATi Radeon for visual effects applications for just this reason; and would recommend the nVidia cards which do have reasonably good free-driver 2D performance. I make this recommendation quite painfully, because I tremendously admire the work that the DRI team has done, it's just spectacular. They started from a clean sheet of paper, and addressed all of the subtle issues involved in doing accelerated graphics in multiple windows, from context switching to security. Unfortunately, it's unclear whether that effort will lead to drivers that take full advantage of the cards. It is really quite sad.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
#include
Hardly. The 1.0 version of GLX extracts into the /usr subdirectories (no need for Makefile). I've been recompiling the kernel driver for a good number of kernel versions without problems. The only time to reinstall GLX is when you get a newer X version (and even that might not matter if you are simply upgrading) or when you get a newer kernel driver.
Other than the believe in superstition, there is no _technical_ reason to keep reinstalling the GLX driver. The GLX and kernel driver are completely seperate from each other.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
This hurts. I'm still waiting on my DOA koolance case repair/return to use my brand new Radeon64DDR :( That think handily pounds my card.
I'm really not sure about TV out support. I've heard rumors that if you use something like 640x480 @ 60Hz. that the TV-out will be enabled, but I can't confirm that. Then I've heard other stuff about using FBDev and somehow getting it to work that way (without using the XF86 Radeon driver.) Along those lines, you also might be interested in this: http://fbdri.sourceforge.net/ Basically, it's Radeon DRI functionality without X. If the framebuffer trick works anyhow, you might be able to get 3D on TV-out this way. (Assuming that the Xf86 people haven't indeed implemented Tv-out for Radeon already. Some other ATI cards are supported. I don't see why not.)
No cool reviews = no traffic. You can't afford to purchase hardware / games for each review because you're not making any money. If you DON'T toe the party line from ATI or nVidia or whomever ... no more free demo cards / games / widgets.
Sure, mod me offtopic, but this is the reason online 'scoop' reviews are so ... homogenous. I'm not sure I have the solution. Does anyone?
Cheers,
- RLJ
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.
Having just been through an attempt at getting my Rage 128GL based All-in-Wonder working correctly with OpenBSD/Xfree86 on a VIA Apollo based board, I beg to differ. Between that and Win98/VIA DMA drivers/DirectCrash 8, I've been through driver hell. All because I want to drop out of OBSD once in a while and play M$ Train Simulator. (I know...I know... But I just can't kick the habit...)
I bought an cheesy no-name GeForce2 MX board, and it just worked. Bye bye ATI... Never again.
Temkin
Way back when, I was attempting to install Red Hat Linux on my PC. (I think it was v5.) ;P)
:)
After spending hours trying to get the damn install program to start copying (It had a strange habit of not working if i cancelled any of the steps in the install process) It installed and I was greeted by the Linux prompt. (Whatever the hell you linux users call it
After a friend told me how to start the GUI, i typed StartX and was greeted by... 640x480@256. whaHAY. I was never able to change the resolution because the shit xfree86 video drivers for my... *Gasp* ATI All-In-Wonder Pro 8MB PCI *Gasp* had NO SUPPORTED VIDEO MODES. The install process for the video driver had listed about 30 modes, noting that all of them were discarded due to unacceptable refresh rates.
Pure shit.
I uninstalled Linux a few days later.
If I can get guaranteed a somewhat better experience with my shiny new 3D Prophet 4500 (Kyro2), I want to install Linux
BTW, can I install linux on a dynamic disk?
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
ATI doesn't release these drivers to the public, so the only way to get them is through Dell. Whether they have them or not doesn't mean Dell lists them for the laptops. For instance, I have an Inspiron 7000, one of the last before the shift to the 7500. That means mine has the new video chip, a change over luckily made while it was being constructed.
So, when I want drivers for Windows Me, I only see a beta on Dell's support site. Its awful, and only for w98. Then I look at the 7500 and above, and there they are, my card exactly with new and updated drivers. These work, these actually don't crash my system, and some of these after installed actually boot up the GUI, instead of leaving me with a running system but showing the splash screen.
Dell had these drivers, just never listed them for my laptop. ATI wont release them to the public, so its a hunt. For 2000 or XP, that will likely be a hard find verses windows 9x, but still exist. Its not entirely ATI's fault, but Dell could do better by keeping driver support alive.
(Dell has other problems too. My laptop doesn't support Me or 2000 according to them, which is ridiculous since they came out right after. Dell should have been fine with it. To get DVD to work properly, I had to go to the 7500 support page, so I had sound. Dell needs to continue support for their products, not just retire the driver pages the week they rename them. The 7500 is exactly the same as my late edition 7000 from what I can tell.)
"Open Source?" - Press any key to continue
I do monitor the DRI mailing list... In fact, I've been subscribed to it for over a year now. And, quite frankly, the most problematic cards are the Voodoo cards (simply because they require an extra set of libraries to even get running in 3D).
The problem you ran into is, unfortunately, common across all sets of cards and drivers. There's always been a problem syncing the kernel drm driver with the XFree86 driver. Luckily, however, this has been getting better and steps have been taken quite recently to fix this problem.
Dinivin
I'm not buying ATI until I start hearing good word-of-mouth stories about their drivers. I've been burnt a few times by their products and absolutely refuse to try them anymore.
Imagine having several hundred flight information displays around a major international airport. These are just the computers that drive the monitors all over the place.
Bone-head decision number one: All the machines are running Windows 95. They won't run under NT or 2000. And the programmer won't port it to Linux or BSD - I tried to convince him, but he didn't have the time, and he thought the airports would balk at it.
Bone-headed decision number two: My fault. ATI Xpert@Play 98 video cards because they have an NTSC video output which can be fed to each of the old displays in the building. Boss really liked the choice - they're a hometown company, and the scan conversion is in hardware; the drivers don't need to load to enable the NTSC video output.
Problem:
All the machines are identical. All the drives were mirror images of each other - same software and ATI drivers, same hardware, same BIOS settings. Windows 95.
Approximately 25% of the machines, upon rebooting, stop at the "New Hardware Found! PCI Display Adapter" message, even though the Xpert@Play 98 drivers are properly installed.
Imagine the fun one can have with a ladder, a keyboard, and suspended ceiling panels after engineering does any electrical work in the building...
Now, do I make a voodoo doll of the guys who designed M$'s crappy Plug and Pray, or do I make a voodoo doll of ATI's incredibly bad programmers?
Whichever, the voodoo doll will take a ride through Bobo.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
I really wish reviewers would at least include a blurb about 2d performance. I imagine most people spend most of their computer time dealing with text and 2d images. When I'm gaming I certainly want high framerates and all, but not at the expense of crisp text and graphics at 1600x1200. I didn't see a blip about 2d quality in the Anandtech review.
The first nvidia cards (tnt/tnt2) I used had sucky 2d compared to the matrox cards I had been using. It seems like Matrox card reviews always mention something about 2d, if only because their 3d isn't anything to write home about.
I'm thinking it's not your drivers. What type of power supply do you have? I used to think it was software problem back when I had a TNT that constantly locked, but it seems to have been a hardware problem. Right now I'm using a geforce2 and have very few problems (I do still get a lockup once in awhile that is exactly like the TNT lockup.. but it is considerably rarer--TNT locked every single time on q3, but only a few times on half-life).
If your nvidia card is crapping out in 2D then it has to be something wrong with the hardware (or maybe a very misconfigured driver).
Dijkstra Considered Dead
They'd sell more cards, whether it's 1, 500, or 50,000 isn't really an issue. But ATI can't even get good Windows drivers yet, so Linux is SOL. Try gatos.org(?) instead.
I sent in an inquiry to ATI mentioning that I'd be buying 100 or 500. They never replied with anything other than press release type marketing quotes and never addressed my question.
My understanding is that they've released all the necessary specs to the XFree86 development team (which is very easy to join) for the Radeon... I don't know this for a fact, but I imagine they'll be doing the same thing for the Radeon2.
Dinivin
Wow, I wish my duties included minor plagarism... after all, why write reviews when you can have them handed down from above?
Every freakin' tech article here dealing with the ps2 or a video card or a new processor or a new toaster has somebody posting the exact same thing. Can you imaging a Beowulf cluster of these.
Man, can you imagine if half of you thought about your posts before you made them. I'd make a beowulf cluster of all of these unmade posts and take down the internet.
Certainly every man at his best state is but vapor
Damn! That must be an unusually tall camera.
Daniel J. Kelly
I've got a 32mb DDR Radeon Wonder AGP if you want it. $150. Retail version (paid 290+sh), I still have the box, manuals, etc, mint condition. Hundred fifty sound good? I have an old ATI 4mb pci tv wonder too :)
Under windows, I use VirtuDub for tv capture though - I have to admit the ATI software isn't the stablest in the world. email me at ssolfan at yahoo dot com if interested
Only l4m3 @553d g4me d\/\/33bz buy cards that fry themselves.
I have Radeon 64 running on VIA KT - something board with Athlon 1.1 Gz ..
No problems with Windows ( running beta "optimized" drivers")
and no problems with Linux ( running AcceleratedX 6.0 - extrememly fast )
Maybe I am just lucky.
Its not just 35mm cameras that have depth of field--the human eye also displays this effect.
If you hold a finger up in front of your face and focus on it, then anything further away will be blurry.
Yes, the effect is minimized in digicams due to the tiny distances involved, and you'll find that there are a great many photographers using digital cameras who are sadly disappointed by the lack of depth of field.
However, in a computer game I don't think it has any point, because the game doesn't know where you are looking and hence doesn't know what should be in focus. If you were using VR goggles, maybe, but on a normal monitor its useless.
If you'll take a look at the benchmarks you'll notice the GeForce 3 still beating the living crap out of every competitor including the '33% faster' ATI Radeon.
Or will the cards conflict with one another? Does the video driver for windows support two or three cards in the same machine? s/windows/linux/g, same question.
Not if those new drivers hurt exsisting games by large margins. I mean a decrease of 30 percent how can you justify that? Sure it's only Giants but come on how many other nvidia drivers have had such a shortfall? Also there is the supposition that maybe those Detonator 4 drivers were tweaked to give aritificial benefits to benchmark apps. If that is so, this brings us back to the bad times when we couldn't believe benchmarks. Sure it's a pure business decision but as a consumer I want to know if a company is doing this.
As for your beef with Tom presenting his perspective on an issue that could well affect this entire market segment, I say go elsewhere or maybe start your own site. Also the "this ones better and here's why" portion of your request is funny because there is a degree of subjectivity in it especially in the graphic card arena. You want them to say which is best instead of weighing everything you are presented with and comming to your own conclusion.
I've never had a problem with matrox.. I purchased a Matrox Millenium rev1 when it was brand new without any problems.. I also got a mystique, which also was very nice. I plan to get a quad-head G200 and a dual-head G450 soon.
/w DRI.
/w extmod enabled... something in the latest debian .deb, recompiling my cvs copy now :)
Yes, the HAL driver is closed.. and it is is needed for the G200-G400 cards, but the G450 does NOT need the HAL driver for full functionality. I assume (although do not know for sure) that this is because they are planning to have open drivers for all of their new products. The old products already have the binary driver, maybe they will release the source when the g550 comes out?
My ATI card is pretty cool, but Gatos development just seems to go too slow.. and I still haven't heard of any sucess getting my card (All in Wonder pro 8meg, 3d rage.. mach64 based) working
Actually, right now I'm having problems with using my All in Wonder in my Xinerama configuration
So use two PCI cards oe one PCI, one AGP? WTF is the problem?
why dont they just bring down the price on work station open gl cards , and if it's because they have to sell those because a. the r and d has to be covered or the parts are expensive , if they made them cheaper they wuld sell more thus making more profit, i oxygen wild cat card is fast it's just expensive , not that the geforce 3 is cheap mind you
When is there going to be something that takes advantage of all that power and gives us a reason to plunk down $400-$500 of our hard-earned bucks?
That will happen when all the companies that have licensed or will license id's DOOM engine release their games. That engine currently brings the GeForce3 to its knees. *drool*
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
I've now had a TNT and a GeForce2 GTS. Never once had a driver problem, in windows or linux. No lockups caused by the card, even when playing Quake3 at 1200x1024 on my lil old TNT. You've got some other issue going on man, or really bad luck.
Derek
Yes, at all of 2.4 fps. Maybe the Radeon2 8500 could do it faster?
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Quake 3, Max Payne, Black & White detailed? Puh-leeze. Nice textures maybe, but lets get rid of the blocky models.
I applaud. Not applause. blah blah blah. (lameness filter)
More advanced ATI drivers are available from the GATOS project. www.linuxvideo.org/gatos
Well, since I have 2.5 year-old Rage Pro, I don't believe it even does 3D accelleration. However with GATOS drivers I am able to get smooth-motion full-screen mpeg play, something I can't do with stock XFree 4.1 drivers or in Win98. So with all the ragging on ATI for its bad drivers, I wanted to point out something better was available.
They have the worst drivers I've ever dealt with. Want to know why Windows is unstable? NVIDIA, all the time. Want to know why Linux is juas as unstable? NVIDIA, all the time. Their lousy crap-drivers crash constantly. I'm not going to claim ATI is better; I haven't had one of their products for a few years (I replaced my old one with an NVIDIA card because I heard that their drivers are better--big mistake). I just wish that these companies would focus on stability more than on performance. I don't mind taking a 20 fps hit on Quake 3, but I certainly do mind when I'm working on something and my computer crashes because of their incompetent driver team.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
A working TV-out _with_ 3D hardware support
If I'm wrong, please let me know. Right now, I am this '' close to buying 2 Nvidia cards instead of the current Radeon I. Yes, I _really_want_ to support a company that supports free software / open source.
If I'm wrong, what screen sizes can the Radeon I scale to fit NTSC? 800x600? 1024x768? (GeForce2 cards typically support 800x600, with 1024x768 on most GeForce3's.)
Is full 3D support enabled on the TV-out?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Uhh.. it's called a "Non-Disclosure Agreement". They can't release the reviews until Tuesday. Obviously they are all going to release them as soon as possible unless they are complete morons. "Let's release it a day later, that way everyone will have already have read the reviews and we wont get any traffic". Funny how that works, isnt it.
ATI don't even debug their drivers before release.
The drivers on the GATOS web site are only more advanced in terms of 2D support (namely, the Xv extension)... I don't believe (please correct me if I'm wrong) that they support any of the TCL features of the card.
Note: I'm not trying to degrade the work of the Gatos developers... They have done an absolutely incredible job with the drivers.
Dinivin
It allows a low polygon model to look much more detailed without sacrificing frames per second. See this and this for an illustration of what truform *could* do.
It will be very interesting to see what this truform thing can do. Read more about truform here.
I have a bit of an issue with your comments, and with very similar comments from many other people.
On the one hand one there is the myth that the GF2 trounced the Radeon. This is simply not true. The GF2 was better in many respects, but the Radeon also beat the GF2 in certain benchmarks, particularily those that were bandwidth-intensive. However, the review sites decided that people did not want to play their games in nice resolution and colour depth, instead prefering to go with bad quality and frame rates far above what they are actually capable of processing and therefore the GF2 kicked butt.
Now the preview release of the 8500 beats the GF3 by a bit and we hear that a marginal increase in performace is not enough to beat nVidia. Funny since an apparent marginal performance advantage was apparently enough for nVidia to eat ATI's lunch...
Does the video card require a fan (which makes it suck) and cover two slots for the heat sink sticking up (which make it suck more)? Is it available in a PCI version? (or does it suxor even harder)? Finally, does it need a direct connection to the power supply (what's that sucking sound)?
Thus decreasing Tom's credibility and the validity of his conspiracy theory even further. Of course, you provide as much evidence as Tom, so... ;)
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
Every time I see another manufacturer's video card that's better than my aging TNT2, I say "ooh", but I haven't gotten one so far out of fear of going back to the sheer driver hell that is other manufacturer's Linux drivers. I'll be getting a GF2MX when I feel like I have money.
Funny, if you monitor the DRI mailing lists for any amount of time you'll see that the ATI Rage128 cards are the MOST problematic. When I upgraded my own system to an Xpert2000 it took me over a month to find the right combination of X version (4.1.x), drivers (raw DRI source downloaded from xfree86.org) and kernel (now using 2.4.8 finally successfully).
Probably the only cards I've run across that consistently would not run reliably in anything were 3Dfx Voodoo Banshees (hell, I think you couldn't even get past the install without the damn thing locking up), and those (and the company that made them) are long gone.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
I'm running RH7.0 on the slimtop LX900 which has an SiS chipset. This may not be relevant because of the different video chipsets, btu I thought I would mention it anyway...
/etc/lilo.conf file. This puts the console into 1024x768x16 at boot, and tehn I used the FBDev driver for X. OpenGL even works reasonably well on the machine (not enough for games, but well enough for some of the GL xscreensaver hacks to run smoothly).
To get X working, I had to use the framebuffer for the virtual consoles. I made sure the kernel had FB support for the SiS chipset (had to upgrade to a 2.4.x kernel for the driver), and then added the line "vga=0x305" above the image entries in my
Like I said, since the machines use different chipsets, it may not be relevant, but that's how I got my slimtop running X. Overall, the machine runs beautifully under Linux.
Adding special features sometimes does get used in patches and then other companys jump on with the feature. Think Bump Mapping, if I remember correctly the first card to do this was a Matrox card. Now it is seen on several flavors of chipsets. So special features are like inventions. Few get accepted most get pushed aside.
Will I still be able to drill opps through walls in Half-life with the bug gun? If not then, it is a step backward.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
Heh, you're too kind. Don't even expect your ATI card that's been on the market for awhile to work with an operating system that was released a year and a half ago. They *still* don't have acceptable drivers for my Rage Fury Pro for Windows 2000. It works flawlessly in Windows ME, however. I also have a TV Wonder VE installed in the same machine, and there are some compatibility issues. And it would work fine if I took it out and put my old WinTV card back in. Makes great sense, doesn't it? It's an excellent card for the money hardware-wise, but their software engineers are taking forever to come out with driver updates, because they've got their hands full with the Radeon bullshit. I wrote a letter to ATI outlining exactly why I will not buy their products in the future unless they seriously change their ways, and why they're going to lose money and see their stock price fall because of how they've screwed their customers. I hope, albeit unrealistic, that they get the message and improve their software division, because they do make good hardware. In the future, however, I will be doing business with Matrox, not because their hardware is the top performer, but because their hardware is proven, rock-solid-stable, and because they stand behind and support their products. They obviously listen to their customers, and they support open source. They are a good corporate citizen, and for this, they get rewarded with the cash I put out for their products. Pretty effective system, eh?
Daniel J. Kelly
Did anyone else notice the little blurb on the sidebar at Anandtech? It mentions how nVidia Quadro workstation(s?) were able to render FF:TSW in real-time.
Does anyone else think that that's more of the bee's knees than a new card from Radeon?
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
Take a look at your frame rate in half life. No, you're not imagining that. It really is that bad, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Daniel J. Kelly
Actually, NVIDIA is releasing the Detonator 4 EARLY. They were going to release it in the Fall of this year, but decided to drop the ball into play a bit before that...
Derek
I have the same and worse experiences.
:-) ) and the mainboard which burned was an older 440BX.
;-) ). And I now don't have them in W2K. Certainly, the mainboard didn't burn under Windows.
The old drivers locked up the machine hard during 3D all the time. Actually, they burned my motherboard (yes, it doesn't boot anymore - all I did was running 3D apps in Linux using the nvidia driver)!
The newest drivers still sometimes lock up the machine hard.
Of course, no problem whatsoever with the open-source "nv" driver (probably because it doesn't use 3D).
> upgrading the power supply did
That might be a reason. I use a 4-years old 250W power supply, IIRC, (beautiful case
Nevertheless, I didn't have the same problems in Windows 95 (at least, I don't remember them
So, if it is the power supply, the Linux drivers must push the card much harder than the Windows ones do.
I haven't followed ATI for the past couple of years (I've used Nvidia cards). How good are the Linux drivers for current cards, and how much problems have there been with implementing them (specs from ATI, maturity, performance, that sort of thing)?
What I'm wondering, really, is if we are going to see comprehensive support under Linux in the near future, or if these new cards will be glorified framebuffers for the foreseeable future?
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Something that seems to be concensus opinion across the sites is that the card was previewed too early.
Like most pre-releases, it's nowhere near it's potential, and, if all it as in the past, ATI will have problems getting the most out of the hardware due to this.
Is it just me, or does it seem like they could get a boost by releasing all the specs and driver details to the open source world?
For starters, this would make for great driver porting and supporting, and as a side, could help ATI come up with better performance as patches and improvements are fed back to them.
Malk
Uhm. GLX is binary only. The Makefile simply installs it.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
Releasing 1 driver per month, across ALL product lines total, is not 1 per month each. Besides... June, July, August and still no drivers. Thats's 3 months from June, not one.
What? Do you remember how much the GF3 cost when it debuted? Hint: it was a lot more expensive than the Radeon 8500 will be.
Ahhh... Yeah, the Rage Pro cards don't currently do 3D acceleration (very well) under XFree86 4.1.0 (they do with the utah-glx project under XFree86 3.3.6)... Luckily, though, there are individuals who are working on the current unstable drivers... The utah-glx drivers where initially rewritten for the Direct Rendering Infrastructure by Gareth Hughes (contracted, at the time, with VA Linux). However, he never had the time to continue their development. However, based on recent activity on the dri-devel mailing list, it looks like the drivers are actually getting to a usuable state.
Dinivin
GeForce3 speed at the price of...more than a Geforce3. Maybe if the halved the price, and finished the implimentation of the features that are supposed to make this card a killah, then I would think about it. ATi, however, can't expect to compete with nVidia with a more expensive card when nVidia is known for their great driver support (yay det 4!).
Then again, more work on the 8500 may produce a true Geforce3 killer....
It is a *very* good thing that NVidia have got some competition. While NVidia are a great company, from my perspective as a developer, the fact that they are coming close to ruling every market unsettles me slightly.
Radeon I was a bit of a disappointment as far as I could make out, not quite cheap enough to be a budget card but not quite good enough to take on GF2. The 8500 looks to be quite a nice piece of kit, and although I wasn't sure at first, the extended Pixel Shader caps should be very good fun to play with.
However, the current benchmarks don't put the 8500 far enough ahead of the GF3 for it to be a clear win, especially since the 8500 will be about GBP350 when it arrives, and I can get hold of a GF3 for under GBP250. What matters to ATI is the driver support - they need to get good enough drivers out of the door to put a clear gap between them and the GF3 in terms of performance, and plenty of decent developer relations to emphasise the feature set (although TruForm doesn't excite me at all - look ma! Hardware tesselation *all the time*!). Otherwise, NVidia will release their next part which will trounce the 8500 (don't imagine it's far away), before ATI have had a chance to reclaim their market share.
I wonder exactly what market ATI are aiming at - will the hardcore gamer market really offer them high enough sales to make a comeback? Or will they target the OEM market, where they used to be king?
Interesting times.
Henry
i don't do sigs. oops.
I can't help but wonder how ATI can expect to compete with nVidia on the Windows platform with Microsoft and nVidia working so closely together. But I guess it's good that they give it a shot. Competition is a good thing.
Besides, what effing difference does it make? Seeing as how even the most detailed games (Quake III, Max Payne, Black & White) are running at 80 FPS, it's obvious that the cards are way ahead of the games. When is there going to be something that takes advantage of all that power and gives us a reason to plunk down $400-$500 of our hard-earned bucks?
My sigs always suck.
Empirical evidence != superstition.
You may be right and I may be wrong (I haven't dug into the makefiles to see, and I'm too busy to do so at the moment), but emperically I have had crashes when not running a make install on GLX after performing kernel upgrades and recompiling the nvidia kernel drivers, and those crashes have gone away each time I have done so.
This isn't superstition, this is emperical evidence and reasoned thinking. The conclusion may be eroneous (drawing a false corallation), but your talk of superstition is nonesense.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I agree with your ATI driver problems. That's why I ditched my TV Wonder and went to a Matrox TV Tuner with on-board hardware MJPEG compression. Unfortunately, a week later, Matrox announced that they couldn't figure out how to write a driver for it under Win2k, and that they were abandoning driver development for it under all platforms.
This was after months of promising that bug fixes would be addressed in the new version. The bug fix that I needed was for the tuner to bring in any channel other than Channel 6.
Needless to say, there is a strongly miffed group of Matrox owners who shelled out 2 or 3 hundred bucks for a sophisticated video capture and compression card, and ended up (due to driver hell) with a TV tuner card equivalent to one that sells for about $30.
Stay away from Matrox.
Submitter: "It can do 33% better than NVidia -- they promised!"
;-)
Anandtech: "This PoS isn't even ready for a preview -- I really suspect that ATI lost some customers by having us preview this product with benchmarks trailing the GF3 by as much as 33%."
Let's face it -- this Rade-Offspring is being pushed to market by marketing because ATI is afraid of letting NVidia get too far ahead in the number wars. Now, what did the original 1133 Mhz Pentium III tell us about letting marketing push on numbers to get products out? "It's a sure-fire way to release crap."
ATI doesn't seem to have learned from Intel's mistake and will be releasing this card toward the end of September at a price point of ~$400 USD. For those couting, that's on par with many GeForce3 implementations, just several months later and many many fps slower (on the previews).
Of course, if you're lucky, you can get a retail GF3 on auction these days for ~40% less than that -- and not even have to wait a month to get it. And not even have to wait two months to get it "supported."
Speaking of which, anybody want my ATI Rage Fury Annoyed and Pissed 128 Pro? It has a bad habit of destabilizing Windows systems using ATI drivers and it can't render Unreal Tournament worth crap and was outmoded shortly after its release by the Radeon chipset... suffice to say, I'm not using it anymore.
nVidia make closed-source Linux drivers.
ATI make no Linux drivers.
Somehow that makes ATI more Linux-friendly than nVidia? You OSS freaks are fucking crazy. I'm convinced that beard growth must stop the flow of blood to the brain.
You've got some seriously fucked up attitide problems. SIMPLIFY MAN!
Switched to the 2D XFree86 driver for now..
I did that for months on end - Windows would crash repeatedly, and XFree86 (not the kernel, at least) would lock up often with the nvidia drivers, whereas everything would be perfectly stable with the open source nv driver.
Upgrading the Nvidia drivers didn't help; upgrading the power supply did. Nvidia makes hungry cards; a lot of motherboard vendors make dodgy AGP implementations. My 250 watt power supply was apparantly just at the edge of stability with my system, whereas with 400 watts to draw from everything runs just fine. You might also try plugging the video card fan directly into your power supply or motherboard, so it doesn't have to take it's juice through the AGP slot. Hackish, I know, but every little bit can help.
From toms:
.o)
"The catch of "Truform" however is that it has the ability to make 3D-objects look much more realistic while carrying the risk of creating artifacts (not every flat surface wants to be curved)."
I really think that ATI should dig into this problem, since it shouldnt be too hard to solve. Seriusly, NEWTEK have implemented this feature in Lightwave 3D since v. 4.0 or something (4.0, think AMIGA software, thats how old). And it works like a charm, as long as the polygons are flat(imagine a poly with points at 1.0.0 , 0.1.0 and -1.0.0 , this is flat. If you modified it to: 1.0.-1, 0.1.0 and -1.0.1 , it would be VERY bend out of shape, and wouldnt meta-truform very well
If TOM have found artifacts, its likely that some vertex shader is to blaime. Which, easily could screw up the flatness of the polygon.
SLAP THAT VERTEX SHADER, Truform is a great idea for gaming (think facial animatiom, morphing and more lifelike models in general)
I have a SONY PCV L640, the slimtop design that comes with a proprietary LCD screen. Anyway, I've installed RH7.1 and now want to run X but can't get the right settings. The integrated video adapter is an ATi Rage 128 Pro 4XL. I've searched the net for this. Anybody has any idea how to get XFree86 running? (The problem is not with the screen, im sure).
SIGSIG -- signature too long (core dumped)
Uhm. GLX is binary only. The Makefile simply installs it.
There is more to it than that. I haven't ferreted out the details, but failure to run make on the GLX driver following a recompile of the kernel and the driver does lead to instability that is eliminated by a "make install" on the GLX driver. Running a make install on the GLX driver after installing the kernel drivers following a kernel upgrade eliminates this problem, so clearly something more is going on in addition to copying glx*.o to the X tree.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
First, I should say that I'm biased. I can't bear nVIDIA 'cause they make fuckin' closed-source drivers, and thus deserve to burn in the eternal flames of Hell (well, maybe this is still not enough ;-)
Still, the Radeon is a great card, with plenty of nice features to keep the games developers happy (couldn't they just stick to open, interoperable APIs?), very good performances, and if ATI follows its policy of releasing their specs, it will surely have good Linux support. So, I'll probably buy it as soon as the drivers are out (or the 7500 if I've not enough money).
But, unless ATI releases optimized (Windows) drivers, this card is going to fail its sales goals. The cause are the so-called hardcore gamers , you know, these guys that are addicted to speed in a purely nonsensical way. They overclock their machine, they spend so much time and money doing all these tweaks that they could buy a new, faster, CPU for the same price, and with less efforts... These guys will read the benchmarks, find that ATI's card compute 0.00003 FPS less than a GeForce 3 on Operation Flashpoint, and they'll discard it as being completely outperformed by nVIDIA. They run nVIDIA cards since a long time anyway, so whey would they switch? And this card, because of its price is targeted towards them. So, if ATI fails to give these people highly optimized drivers so they can wave their benchmarks around, the Radeon 8500 won't be a success. And this would be a shame, 'cause nowadays there are only three serious players in the GPU market: ATI, nVIDIA and Matrox. And I really don't want one to leave, we've enough monopolies and enough closed-source software, thanks...
Xenu brings order!
The original Radeon card I have works great in Linux using DRI from XF86 4.1 and kernel 2.4.8. However, even now, there is no hardware T&L support and there are some glitches here and there. So I wonder how much different the Radeon2 DRI driver will have to be. And where is ATI in all of this? I commend ATI for releasing enough specs to the DRI developers to support it, but why haven't they taken an active role in development? It's their hardware. If they want us to use it, they ought to support it fully. Don't they see how big the market is for well supported hardware in Linux? Talk about a way of differentiating your product!
And no, closed source drivers (ala NVidia) are absolutely not acceptable for a whole multitude of reasons:
1.) Breaks away from attempts at Linux hardware support standardization. (XFree86, DRI, etc.)
2.) Puts vendor in total control of compatibility with future dependancies and hardware owners at their mercy.
3.) Eliminates community feedback and quality control by source examination and review.
4.) Shows backwards thinking on the part of the vendor. Closed source drivers in no way whatsoever protect their "intellectual property" (if you actually believe in that sort of thing.) Do you really think their competition doesn't have access to disassemblers, decompilers, SET microscopes, etc? Who are they protecting against?
Driver support from ATI has been non-existant. Many 3d games and applications do not work under Windows 2000. ATI is aware of the problems, but has no intention of ever fixing them. They seem much more interested in trying to convince the consumer that it's somehow a Dell problem, even though many laptops use the same chipset and suffer the same problems.
Drivers for WindowsXP or any other OS will likely never be written, nor will the existing drivers ever be updated to work better with OpenGL or future games.
They fooled me once: so now they've got the last dollar they will ever get from me. I'd buy something with a Trident CyberBlade before I'll give ATI anymore money and I encourage you to do the same.
Nvidia now has a laptop chipset and I'd prefer to give my money to a company that will actually keep their drivers current. Even the greatest video chipset is worthless without good drivers.
This is all the same crap they were spouting about the Radeon before it came out.. ATI can talk and talk and talk but when it all comes down to it they have horrible drivers and NO tech-support whatsoever. If you have ever called their so-called support line and heard 'the busy signal' for 3 days straight you would know this. Is it ironic that their tech support line is the same line as their Return-Merchandise-Authorization line??
Were you using different versions of GLX and the kernel driver? (i.e. GLX 9.6 installed and attempted to use a new driver such as 1.0)
The only cause for crashing that I can see is you had an incorrect GLX installed (maybe even Mesa GLX?).
Dijkstra Considered Dead
I applied to ATI in their driver development team once a long time ago, but alas they never responding (bastards!). ATI has, IMHO, pure crap drivers, and while I want to support them out of patriotism, the reality is that I encourage friends and coworkers not to get ATI cards because of that simple fact. From machines that spontaneously rebooted, to machines to BSOD'd when the screensaver became active: I would wager that a good portion of Microsoft's stability perception problem is actually because of ATI's incredibly poor driver quality (IMHO).
Only existed in the Rage Pro era!
I have used a Rage 128 card last year. UT, HL, NFS...no problem at all. Please give the guys a chance. You can't call a company "makes crap drivers" only because it does not give you more speed with frequent driver releases.
Meanwhile, some of you will know the quality of some NVidia drivers...they just didn't call them Betas just because of their marketing department.
Not to flame, but ATI's drivers blow. Ask any owner of one of their cards (I have an AIW 128). It doesn't matter if the card kicks the GeForce 3 down the sidewalk, if the drivers suck upon release, you can put money down on people returning them for a GeForce 3 because Tribes 2 crashes/runs slower.
ATI has some good hardware. My AIW runs excellent in Linux (well, after the 3.3.6a X release) They just need to hire better programmers.
Slashdot's been around since 1970, right?
Maybe they'll consider porting to a compiled language someday. Until then, I look forward to Slashdot's unavailability on its lunch hour, as well as geeks giving one another the knowing virtual smirk and smarmy high-fives when their traffic brings down another server.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Also, ATI... please get *proper* linux drivers if you want to improve your market share....
I will probably get flamed mentioning this - but - how many more of these cards is ATI likely to sell if they have robust linux drivers than if they do not?
Is the linux power-gamer market that significant?
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Two of the feature of ATI 8500 Radeon are:
"motion blur and depth of field"
The motion blur effect has been discussed and elsewhere several times. I believe the consensus now is that it is a good thing; you can deliver smooth motion at lower fps by 'fooling' the eye.
However, to me depth of field seems curious and somewhat anachronistic.
Depth of field is, as I understand it, some unwanted side effect you get with standard SLR cameras (135mm format) and other larger formats. Ok it can be used as a wanted effect, but that is not the point.
Todays digital cameras simply do not have that side effect, i.e. the depth of field. Basically because of the close distance between the lens and photoreceptive area. To me it therefore seems very funny that one introduces an older technology which is not really in use much longer. Ok, perhaps when using binoculars in some games or something similar. But in general? I'm sceptic.
mmm.. lesbian fighter pilots...
ATI Makes decent cards, but lousy drivers. Never, EVER expect your spiffy new ATI card to work in an OS delivered 6 months from now. Likely it won't.
... or do all ATi cards have crappy game support? I have an ATI AIW 32, and on a few games (Q2) I turn up all the settings to max, and it looks really nice. On Tribes 1, I do the same it looks fine, running at a decent FPS for me. On Tribes 2, I turn the settings up all the way, and the terrain looks like a paint-by-numbers: Sold colors in clearly divisible areas.
I love it when a hardware company decides to lift their embargo and all the "independent" reviewers dutifully follow the herd. Compare the three articles and see if you can determine which images/text came directly from the press kit.
Which is more pathetic: the fools who follow ATi, or the fool who follows the fools?
First off, although we don't always see things the same way I definitely agree with Tom on his statements that ATI should not have chose to present the Radeon 8500 this soon. Even had NVIDIA not released their Detonator 4 drivers earlier than expected, the Radeon 8500 was in no shape to be evaluated at all. The drivers were buggy and they lacked support for the full Radeon 8500 feature set. Although it's definitely interesting to see what the Radeon 8500 can do, ATI should be very worried that too many of you will get the wrong idea about the product. All I can do is present you with the picture as I see it.
I for one am glad to see NVidia has some real competition. However, it seems that ATI's driver department is going to let it down again. Although the card hasn't been released yet, I don't have much hope that the drivers will improve very much before the release. I hope that ATI will prove me wrong, in which case a Radeon 8500 may very well be my next purchase.
So, another one of the 'our not yet released hardware will kick the ass of the hardware that already has existed for months'.
So, what makes you think that Nvidia doesn't already have a card that smokes the Radeon? Because there has been no press releases?
Well, considering that Nvidia is not a stupid company, why would they want to issue a pressrelease that hurts their own sales of the GeForce 3 by promising that they will release a much better card in the near future?
As soon as the GeForce 3 sales slows down, due to everyone anticipating this new Radeon card, expect a press-release from Nvidia.
//Humming
I'm too stupid to preview.
That more or less sums it up. Nvidia has got WAY better drivers than ATI. Detonator 4 is going to blow away ATI. However, I am in favour of ATI or some other company coming up with newer cards. Competition is always good. But I dont see ATI seriously challenging NVIDIA in the forseeable future.
Also, ATI... please get *proper* linux drivers if you want to improve your market share....
Don't Panic
NVIDIA is really starting to dislike the licensing agreements they have to give m$ for including features in D3D... m$ doesnt seem to be backing off from them though.
(its kinda like the ARB for OpenGL, but unlike OpenGL D3D forces the companies into it because they dont have the alternative of proprietary extensions... a very good thing for competition in the 3D hardware market actually, m$ actually is stopping the formation of a monopoly)
Marketing: For those looking for the sweet spot between price and performance...
English: You can't afford the card we're reviewing, nerd-boy. Buy this cheaper one instead... Unless of course, you're interested in our exclusive terms. You've got two kidneys, right?
Marketing: ATI has already revealed extensive details on two of the Radeon 8500's key technologies...
English: ATI's underpaid hardware engineers are hard at work turning the mad fantasies of marketing types into reality. Results will vary...
Marketing: It's the Radeon 8500's ability to do many simultaneous texture effects that has led John Carmack to predict that the new Doom graphics engine will perform twice as well on a Radeon 8500 as on a GeForce3.
English: Please, God, Please let the new id Software titles play on our hardware...
Marketing: The revised API is set to launch at the time of Windows XP's release in October but may first arrive on the ATI driver disk.
English: Keep your pants on, Bill. It'll take a few seconds to get lubed up.
Marketing: For the first time in a PC, the Radeon 8500 will include a component video connector that can connect the card to an HDTV. This component output, which will likely come as an adapter for the DVI-I connector, will make high-quality progressive-scan DVD playback possible on a PC.
English: Not that you'll actually be able to do any of that. We're not going to cross the MPAA, Hell no!
Marketing: The performance-enthusiast market makes up only 5 percent of overall graphics sales, so ATI doesn't expect the Radeon 8500 to be a top seller.
English: Everything we've got is riding on this card, so if you don't buy it, we're going to go bankrupt and be bought out by nVidia.
Marketing: The Radeon 7500 is designed to be very fast in the current crop of games.
English: This card will be obsolete and unsupported in six months. Sell a kidney so you can buy the better card.
Marketing: What the Radeon 7500 lacks in future-proof performance it makes up for in display features.
English: Six months? We meant three months.
Marketing: Both the Radeon 8500 and 7500 are priced competitively against Nvidia's GeForce3 and GeForce2 Pro.
English: You're getting bent over either way, so why not buy from us?
Marketing: Summary - This is a great card and we reccomend you make this a part of your workstation.
English: Summary - If we say anything bad, ATI won't let send us any more toys.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Bet some guys could argue this kind of graphic could be used to train the reflexes of some lybian fighter pilots.
I'm starting to get a bit tired of Tom's preachiness. Throughout his review he menions that the recent release of the Detonator 4 drivers shows a lack of "sportsmanship" on the part of NVidia, and that the timing of the release was inteded to hurt ATI's release of the new chipset.
You know what, Tom? That's business.
NVIDIA is out to make money, and just happens to produce a goddamn good product while doing it. NVIDIA released (or is about to release, anyway,) a fully featured upgrade to their product to *gasp* beat out the competition? What horror! What an attrocity! The thing works, it's better, get over it. In the words of Coolio, "If you can't take the heat, get your ass outs the kitchen."
On the other hand, if Nvidia has been keeping this driver away from the public for an extended period of time for no other reason than to "drop the bomb" on ATI, well... that's quite dispicable, and could be considered harmful to us, the faithful consumers. And by a substantial period of time, I mean a month or more. A few weeks difference is strategy, a few months is downright rude. ;P
I'm interested in buying the best product for my money, not the little games that ATI and Nvidia play with each other. So I don't want to hear about Tom's personal conspiracy theories and rants. "Here are two cards. This one costs this much, the other one costs this much. This one is better and here's why." Anything else is irrelevant.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
You always have to put the cards in the same PCI slot as well. Failing to do so results in different PnP settings. The other solution is in BIOS set them all to manual PNP/PCI/IRQ settings. Otherwise PnP is different pn each system, regardless of the BIOS settings.
Check it out.
I belong to the ______ generation.
The new Radeon beat the GeForce 3 in several benchmarks, even against nVidia's new Detonator 4 drivers. Note that this means that nVidia released an expensive card that didn't run at full speed. Does ATI do the same thing, or are their drivers optimized before relase? I dunno.
What's really impressive is that ATI can match the power of a GeForce while providing all the other features. You get excellent picture quality, DVD playback, and a complete Tivo all in one package.
The price is high (but remember it's a 64MB card!) but should be reasonable around Christmas.
-B
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.