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Radeon 8500/GeForce3 Ti500 comparison
RainDog writes: "The Tech Report has put together a pretty detailed comparison of ATI's Radeon 8500 and NVIDIA's GeForce3 Titanium 500 graphics parts. Despite being incredibly thorough, the review is also a pretty entertaining read. Definitely the best comparison of these cards I've seen to date."
Hopefully NVidia will wise up and drop the price on the GeForce 3 line...at a little over $200 (OEM), I can get two 8500's for the price of a single GeForce3 Ti500. And the difference is SO negligible. Since my idea of "practical uses for a video card" is not "watching 3DMark 2001 run all day", I think i can give up that unperceivable 10 FPS without any guilt.
Face it... many games optimize special cases for specific cards, many cards optimize special cases for specific games. Mostly the cards optimize for the current generation of games (since they can't know about new games), the games optimize for the current generation of cards (since they cant' know about new cards). It common practice, and it improves performance quite significantly. nVidia's new drivers delivered a 30% boost in performance for a lot of apps... care to guess at what they did underneath?
:-). Read Carmack's comments on the issue before you burn them at the stake for giving you a significant performance boost. The one thing they did wrong was not provide the ability to turn optimization off for benchmarking.
Admittedly, ATI did this to a fairly upacceptable degree in this case (since there was significant image quality damage), but they probably didn't optimize Quake because it was a benchmark, they probably did so because it's a popular game full of framerate-freaks who do things like hack their drivers to turn off texturing anyway
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
Also note that if your nVidia has TV capture ability, it's not likely to have Video4Linux compatibility. ATI All-in-Wonder cards have historically had this ability, through the GATOS project.
As far as TV-Out goes, it really annoys me how ATI protects this for the express purpose of protecting the bits that control MacroVision. I mean, under Windows there are always hacks for MacroVision even when there is no documentation available, and if you are a linux head and want to do this, you can use the framebuffer and XFree FBDev and mplayer in console mode to acheive TV-out that sucks for normal usages (unaccelerated) but suffices for those who want to copy stuff to tape.
All that said, the TV-Capture capabilities combined with a really nice 3D-chipset and open drivers make me want a Radeon AIW 8500DV. I'll wait til GATOS has official support though.
The problem with binary drivers is that:
1) You are stuck with Linux on x86. No *BSD, no alpha/powerpc/etc.
2) You are stuck with what linux kernel that nVidia deems ok. This may be fine for now, but when nVidia releases new products, and cease support of older ones, when you upgrade your distro to something with, say kernel 3.0, your screwed because they only support the GeForce 4 and newer (hypothetical future)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.