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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.
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!
Erik
"You," Bite me.
"Each and every one of you." Bite me.
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
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.