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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.
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
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!
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.
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!
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
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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
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 :).
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'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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
When will it hit the stores?
The article on Gamespot basically said: "around the time XP is released".
-----
"The only difference between me and a madman is that I'm not mad." - Salvador Dali (1904-1989)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
For $399.99, they can take all the time they want. Especially since they don't significantly outperform the geforce3 which is available for about a hundred bucks less.
Yes, I'm bitter.
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.
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!
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.