ATi's New All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 128MB

KillaBee writes "ATi has taken the wraps off their latest addition to their 'All In Wonder' product line of graphics cards with TV and video editing functionality. The All In Wonder Radeon 8500 128MB card, reviewed here, has ATi's fastest Radeon 8500 core along with a full 128MB of 300MHz DDR SDRAM (600MHz DDR). This is ATi's 'Swiss Army Knife' card that brings with it very competitive 3D graphics performance as well."

Comments

Graham

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI have this market all wrapped up at the moment, and the prices are good for both the AIW products and the standard Radeon cards. Drivers are a lot better as well. Nothing that is as good as a GeForce 4 Ti4600 though, but that is darn expensive :)

Re:Graham

[kwishot]

Hardly.

"ATI have this market all wrapped up at the moment, and the prices are good for both the AIW products and the standard Radeon cards."

The prices for the GeforceX products are good too, and the price difference is relative to performance.

"Drivers are a lot better as well"

Don't make me go there. ATI's website is hell (dont know how bad it is currently, but historically it's been a huge mess) so it's near impossible to find out which driver you need. Not to mention Detonator is the bomb.

"Nothing that is as good as a GeForce 4 Ti4600 though"

You just contradicted yourself.

"but that is darn expensive "
Again..price relative to performance. In technology, you're always going to pay top dollar for that "last little bit" be it difference between a 2.0ghz cpu and a 2.2ghz cpu. The Ti4600 chews up and spits out the Radeon cards. In the high end market (the one you're referring to) nVidia is most definitely king.

-kwishot

Re:Graham

[irregular_hero]

Don't make me go there. ATI's website is hell (dont know how bad it is currently, but historically it's been a huge mess) so it's near impossible to find out which driver you need. Not to mention Detonator is the bomb.

Hmm. Last I checked, the "Find a Driver" link on the front page went right to a selection screen for card and OS. Maybe that's a different ATI.

The poster that you're complaining about is actually right. In terms of the "all-in-one" Video Input-capable cards, ATI has always had the best set of utilities and hardware for people who didn't care about getting a bit higher in Quake's frame rate. Hydravision, ATI's multiple monitor-support software, is still head and shoulders better than any other video card manufacturer's setup. And ATI's "multimedia" applications are tightly integrated and work well. nVidia's "Personal Cinema" is quite a bit clunkier and not integrated with the other media "bits" as well. I know -- I use both.

Where ATI has always fallen down is the quality and efficiency of their drivers. They don't release performance fixes well or often enough, although they've made some good strides to get better. Now that ATI sells chipsets to other manufacturers (following nVidia's lead), we might see them start beating on the capabilities of their drivers soon enough.

Case in point: On paper, the Radeon 8500/128 has some features that could give it a definative edge on the Ti4. Unbound by drivers, it could very well have higher performance than most of the nVidia chipsets -- it already pushes the envelope set by the Ti3 very well. It has a highly efficient way of managing memory bandwidth -- of which it has more of than the nVidia card... It has an incredible shading engine that promises nearly double the performance of anything on the nVidia card... Its GPU, the PTIII, is theoretically capable of a higher fillrate at 32-bit than the nVidia card.

But, of course, it all comes down to how well the software interfaces with the hardware. The drivers need work. Maybe ATI will get it together, and maybe it won't.

It'll be fun to watch. I, frankly, can't wait until there's some good competition among video chipset vendors. I was getting bored after 3dfx tanked.

Re:Graham

[shokk]

Actually, most recent reviews have placed the Ti4400 at better than the 8500s and comparably priced. The all-in-one capability of this card makes me ambivalent between the two, though. Will I really record that much video to disk (already have a TiVo) or should I just continue to concentrate on the games? Maybe when the highest density DVD recorders are finally available. I think I shall game now.

Re:Graham

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh hell yeah!
I hate digging for drivers. And I'm lazy.

One driver to rule them all...

Re:Graham

[Anonymous Coward]

You fucking child; don't be an obnoxious twit. This is a forum for intelligent adults, not condescending fools who cast words to make them sound heightened and superior.

Do us a favour and go back to playing with the letter blocks.
Thanks.
-The Slashdot Janitor.

Re:Graham

[Propagandhi]

Hit up pricewatch and you can find an 8500 for under $200.. You pay a lot for that NVidia stamp of approval :)

Re:Graham

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and the better DirectX 8 support comes free of charge, huh? :)

ANOTHER duplicate story!??

[ThomasKregaard]

We seem to have gotten quite a lot of these lately, dear editors...

Re:ANOTHER duplicate story!??

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this a duplicate of?

Re:ANOTHER duplicate story!??

[rtaylor]

Bah.. not duplicate. Just prerecorded for later viewing.

ATI?

[SeanTobin]

I know this has been discussed before, and I'm not about to rehash it. I just hope /. is getting a good check for this one. Maybe next time there will be a nice link so we can buy it directly?

DAMN!

[kuyttendaele]

Just bought a ATI Radeon Aiw 8500 (64Mb version) 14 days ago :-( :-( :-(
Anyway wanne buy a second hard Aiw?

Karel

Re:DAMN!

[pennsol]

They'll give you an upgrade credit if you'd like to trade up..they'll also give you credit..i think $100 for trading in you Nvidia for a new 8500 AIW.. sounds like they're scared...I personaly wouldn't trade mt Geforce4 4600 for anything..;)

Re:DAMN!

[kawaichan]

Don't worry about it, that extra 64MB does next to nothing (ex speed increase)

you will have to wait a while for games to take advantage of those extra RAM, but by then, you would be drooling for something better.

RAM is cheap, ATi and NIVIDA just put more RAM so people would upgrade.

Re:DAMN!

[pennsol]

Sorry forgot to put in the LINK for the trade in details..;)

Re:DAMN!

[twilight30]

Some points to mention:

• It's available to US & Cdn. end users only
• You get more if you supply them with old ATI cards, I believe (about $50 US/Cdn, depending on where you are).

The FAQ is available here and applies to both PC and Mac architectures.

Re:DAMN!

[vawlk]

there are differences...

the 8500DV 64mb:
Firewire
Silicon based tuner (better quality)
slower clock

AIW 8500
no firewire
faster clock
tv is not as sharp

Minor Disparities.

[alphaparadigm]

Is it just me or are the specs onf the sight != to the specs in the post?

Aside from that, it looks like we have another good option for those of us who want to do tons of different things with our video card/computer setup.

whee

[Anonymous Coward]

whee

PCI?

[CmdrTaco (editor)]

I may be a minority here, but recently I've been searching for PCI versions of cards such as this ATI one. I've been trying to make a home made TIVO type box, and so far I have a FlexATX Sis620 board with a 533 Celeron in a Sahara1000 FlexATX case. The problem is there are only 2 PCI and no AGP, so I'm quite limited in my choices for quality capture cards such as the All-In-Wonder. Is there any reason why most of the video cards geared toward capability rather than gaming performance are also almost exclusively manufactured as AGP? I'd think hardcore gaming would be just about the only reason to need big boost in speeds.

Re:PCI?

[gricholson75]

I have a PCI version of the AIW Radeon in a p3 667 and it works very well. These cards are all over for around $120.

Re:PCI?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Dude, for the price of such a card, you could buy a tivo. With some money left over for the 100baseT card for it. I wasn't required to subscribe when I bought mine, and I don't plan on it. A dedicated solution, a cheap solution.. no dropped frames or segfaults. If you want to build your own, to say that you've done such a thing, good luck. But if you just want a kickass linux PVR... someone already makes it.

To be honest, I can think of many early PCI TV tuner cards you might buy, but without checking I'd think the performance on those would be horrible. Everything that is current, is high end, for professional use. $700 and up.

Re:PCI?

[Anonymous Coward]

dude, don't mess with those AIW cards

hop on ebay and grab a hauppage. got one in my car and on my pvr (i have a few fic sabre 1815) and they works great (fbsd)

Re:PCI?

[Gizzmonic]

t's Spring, and the need for a new video card presents itself. Why? Because the one you bought 6 months ago is "outdated," meaning it doesn't get the highest FPS on some benchmark site like the one whored in this article.

So is it time to drop the $400? To rely on buggy drivers rushed out by ATi or nVidia? To snarl at DirectX's mysterious problems, which may or may not be related to some of your older hardware not agreeing with your new card?

You've stared at the numbers on the site, and you don't see any reason why not. Did you know some sites exist (and make money) just by getting new video cards and "benchmarking" (aka "playing") them? Is this fair? Are you going to contribute to this universally unfair practice? Of course, you clicked through to buy from the first vendor listed on the site. You can hardly wait for the UPS man to come tomorrow (you can afford expedited shipping, you only paid 95% of what you'd pay at a retail store anyway).

As a savvy PC gamer, you've already downloaded the latest crack off Usenet. You never pay for software-why should you? The hardware costs enough as it is, besides, each game on the PC is just an iteration of Doom or Command and Conquer. Brainless blowing away, or boring resource management? You love 'em both. Or at least, they're available, and you play them.

You laugh at your buddies with an Xbox, because "I can build a more powerful system than that for half the cost!" You've scorned the Gamecube because "The Gamepurse is for kiddies!" Your Playstation 2, purchased for Final Fantasy X, lies collecting dust next to your DVD player (which sucks compared to the one on your computer-NATCH!)

You pause a bit to think about your computer purchases over the last year:

• Athlon T-bird and motherboard-$250.

• Athlon XP and motherboard-$400.

• "L337" Custom Water Cooled Case-$300

• 1 Gig RAM (purchased 256MB at a time)-$400.

• SB Audigy-$95.

• GeForce 3-$350.

Now this Radeon card will be about $400, but it's worth it! Buy a Mac? Never! They don't have games, and besides, they're too expensive.

Buyer's remorse never seizes your temples with its steely vice grip. You'll never lose your job at the helpdesk, and even if you do, Mom and Dad will be there to help you out. You're a sharp guy, and you're surely going places. Right after this game of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, that is...

Re:PCI?

[jchristopher]

OT, I know, but would you be willing to comment on what functionality is available to you on the Tivo unit without paying for a subscription?

I'm interested in getting one, and I only care about two things:

1. Ability to pause live show for a few minutes (phone rings, bathroom break, etc.) and then resume.

2. Ability to tell Tivo to record at a certain day/time. (ideally it would sit between my DirecTV box and the TV, and just record whatever is on the pipe at that time.)

If I get the box, can I do those without subscribing?

Re:PCI?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

#1 works out of the box. The thing by default records up to an hour's previous footage constantly, allowing pause, replay, etc. Changing the channel kills this (it starts a new buffer).

#2 is possible, and somewhat simple. You'll have to screw around a bit, to get a bash prompt on the serial port. Once there, you send a few pre-compiled binaries to it, allowing some more functionality (this doesn't require opening the thing, no idea how it affects the warranty). The simplest way would be to set up some script on a cron tab that shells in and manually starts up the appropriate binaries. You can of course manually record shows.

Also, the guide format is partially/completely hacked, but isn't public. It wouldn't be too tough to write a libwww perl script to grep tvguide.com listings, and reformat it in a way that the tivo would understand. I'm not sure what more I can say that would be legally safe.

Re:PCI?

[danknight]

In My Livingroom I have a P3 700 cloked to 933, it has 256MB memory and A Voodoo 3 3500, It is attached to a 29" Sony Fixed Frequency monitor that runs at 800X600. (it is an evaluation monitor serial #1 and 240VAC) That is the livingroom TV. It runs windows98. it has a wireless keyboard, PantherXL joystick, its on the network and it controls the cd player. I have been waiting for a video card to replace the vodoo, which was cutting edge when I bought it. The new AIW with full clock speed is just the ticket. the voodoo is around 3 years old now...

Re:PCI?

[Nameles]

ATI TV Wonder is where it's at. I believe GATOS works with it (for *nix compatibility).

Re:PCI?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Yeh, if they had a PCI version. This guy needs PCI for what he wants to do.

Besides, Tivo's dedicated solution is over-engineered enough to guarantee that you'll never experience dropped frames. Can't say the same about the ATI card.

Re:PCI?

[Anonymous Coward]

i have just about the exact same setup, with wireless kb and mouse, my ati all in wonder pro 64mb rocks for this purpse, so this new card is bound to rock

Re:PCI?

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to my friend's list.

-sinserve

Re:PCI?

[Nameles]

TV Wonder is just a TV tuner on a PCI card, enabling one to use anything else as a video card.

Re:PCI?

[Noehre]

Having used several PCI TV tuner cards over the years, I can tell you the performance is quite good.

I've captured hundreds of hours of video and with a clean source and good VitualDub filter chain, my copies of shows look like you went and bought them on DBD from Best Buy.

Well, maybe not that good, but close!

And a cheap Brooktree-based card does all that for about $20-30.

Re:PCI?

[cbj]

I've looked into such things recently as well. Some small companies out there make some rather unique solutions, but the price range of most is $300-$400 for the box. Although it sometimes seems dead, try http://www.linux4.tv/, a $300 product is promised in the May time frame.

Re:PCI?

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

We need a new moderation tag "-1: Quit looking in my windows and telling everyone about my life"

Re:PCI?

[Niet3sche]

Actually, I'm in the process of doing this myself - you can get a cheap ($30) micro-ATX case and a cheap ($29) micro-ATX motherboard (head to pricewatch.com - that's where I found the prices, etc.) and then it's off to get a P3 s370 CPU and an AGP card - the board that I found has one AGP and three or four PCI on a micro-ATX form-factor! Also, take a look on slashdot.org and do a search for "shuttle" - you'll see that this very thing was discussed a while back, and the concensus was that a PCI card will hit you for 30% performance losses in doing MPEG-2 PVR'ing. Take it easy; I'm waiting for my parts to arrive. I'd ultimitely like to do a 2- or 3-card setup so that I can record on one card, watch TV on another, and get listings from the third ... if only wavetop was still up! :) ~N~

must not be selling enough

[tps12]

Okay, are we going to have to see this every half hour? I am not buying one.

At least they have not reposted Katz's ad for his fucking dog book or whatever.

Re:must not be selling enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean Katz's ad for his dog fucking book?

Re:must not be selling enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Radeon 8500's are pretty much sold out in Montreal. You have the get a third party card (Forsa, Power Color) to actually have one

I hope ATI finally pulls it off

[wackybrit]

In the past, ATI's 'All In Wonder' cards have been pretty crappy compared to the other cards out at the same time. You wouldn't be running Quake1/2 at a decent res on those puppies with a good framerate.. whereas the TNT was far better but had far less 'features'.

Finally it seems video processing power has reached a level similar to that of CPU power. That is, the latest 'high-end' spec is overkill for 95% of applications, and very fast 'general use' products (such as the All-In-Wonder) are now actually pretty good.

This card will satisfy nearly all users except those who want to run Quake 3 at 1600x1200 in 32 bit color, and offers more 'user features' than regular nVidia based cards can currently bring to the table. However, unlike with past All-In-Wonder cards, this will actually be able to run most games at a decent speed in a decent resolution!

Good for ATI!

Re:I hope ATI finally pulls it off

[Anonymous Coward]

This card will run Quake III at 1600x1200 in 32 bit colour and at a more than decent rate as well.

This All-In-Wonder *is* a Radeon 8500, but with added video in, etc, capability. Ideal for connecting to your game console because your parents want to watch TV and you want to play GTA3 without your parents seeing the hookers, etc...

Re:I hope ATI finally pulls it off

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, much like other ATI cards, this one runs at half the framerate of the latest GeForce offering. Damn shame.

Re:I hope ATI finally pulls it off

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, and the drivers probably suck as per the normal ATI policy.

ATI sux people... get real

Re:I hope ATI finally pulls it off

[Anonymous Coward]

actualy your a fool. The 8500 is of the same generation of the geforce 3. the R300 will be released soon and will trounce a geforce 4. on a xp 1600+ system a geforce 3 will pull about 6500 3dmarks, a ti4400 and 8500 are in the 9000 range and the 4600 is a couple thousand above it. Radeons have superior image quality. I have no trouble getting atleast 60fps in quake 3 with max res 32bit color. and 4xfsaa on. also all the eye candy. Thats in a mod like urban terror with higher poly counts on everything.

Re:I hope ATI finally pulls it off

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like a true fanboy. I'm sorry that you spent your money on that Canadian shit. But if you're quick you can probably unload it before the hype dies down.

Same generation, and half the speed, as per usual ATI efforts. The R300 will be released around the time that nVidia release their GeForce 4 successor, and although it will come close in a couple of benchmarks will once again be soundly beaten. If Radeons have superior image quality, you have superior reality distortion quality.

Re:I hope ATI finally pulls it off

[CynicTheHedgehog]

The Radeon 8500 is actually neck and neck with the GeForce3 TI 500 (which performs better than a low end GeForce4). I'm constantly reading here and in other places that high end GeForce3 and 4 cards are "overkill," and I can tell from personal experience that a GeForce2 MX runs Quake3 in 1200x1024/32-bit color (with all the goodies) at a passable framerate. I think that this, combined with ATIs OEM deals (the mobility Radeon 7500 seems hot), they stand a chance to take quite a bit of market share from NVidia and the (IMO) overpriced GeForce4 line.

Re:I hope ATI finally pulls it off

[billcopc]

The Geforce4 line is only overpriced because they're going to milk the hardware freaks (such as myself). I paid 450$ (cdn, thus 300$ US) for a Geforce2 exactly two years ago, and that was a going-out-of-business sale at a local store. I ate kraft dinner for a week until my next paycheck came around, but I've been enjoying stellar 3d performance ever since. I'd much rather blow another 450$ for 2 years of multi-textured bliss than buy a cheaper video card every 6 months.

Right now my video card is selling for less than half the price, because the other manufacturers have caught up in terms of performance and compatibility. I've been playing Q3 at 1024x768 32bit full quality for two years now, while my buddies are just discovering the groovyness of railing some guy from 400ft away that previously appeared as a single faded pixel on their old TNT2.

I have nothing but praise for NVidia. They market excellent products and price them reasonably. We already have dozens of 99$ video cards, someone needs to appeal to the freaks and Nvidia does that perfectly.

Re:I hope ATI finally pulls it off

[wackybrit]

I paid 450$ (cdn, thus 300$ US) for a Geforce2 exactly two years ago

[snip]

Right now my video card is selling for less than half the price

You ARE joking, right? I bought my GeForce 2 (GTS version - equivalent to 'Pro' now) quite soon after it came out for £250 ($375 US).. You can now buy the same card second hand for £30! Almost a TENTH of the price. If you can still sell your second hand Geforce 2 in the US for $150, you have some dumbass buyers :)

Re:I hope ATI finally pulls it off

[billcopc]

Great Googly Moogly! I'll buy ten of those f30 cards. They're retailing for 229$ CDN, about 150$US here, which is about three times what you say they're worth up in your nick of the woods.

Can I throw out my TV yet?

[geoffsmith]

I already use my computer to watch movies, TV shows. My LCD monitor seems fast enough to handle it, and the quality is awesome. With a card like this, and a DVD drive, who needs a TV any more?

I just miss the remote.

Websurfing: The Next Generation - StumbleUpon

Re:Can I throw out my TV yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

um...the all in wonder radeon's (7500 and 8500) come wtih a remote.......

Re:Can I throw out my TV yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

who needs a TV any more?

I do. I don't think my friends are going to want to crowd around my 19" monitor to watch Buffy.

Re:Can I throw out my TV yet?

[andrewjnr]

It come's with a remote dude... A radio USB remote no less, you can hook it up downstairs, and watch it on the TV upstairs, with no loss of control.. I'll be looking into getting a PCI version this.

Re:Can I throw out my TV yet?

[Namarrgon]

Yeah, but just you try using it. I have one, and I find it frustrating as hell - the mousepad isn't pressure sensitive, so it's very hard to maneouvre accurately. Not to mention its "programmable" buttons can only be programmed to do useless things.

Go buy a MouseRemote from X10 (yeah yeah, just do it), and get the MaX10 software. So much nicer to use, far more flexible, and it's a regular pre-programmed universal IR remote & X10 gadget controller too :-)

Re:Can I throw out my TV yet?

[vawlk]

I have both the aTI remote and the x10 and I can't seem to get the damn x10 to work with the ati software.

Not a duplicate!

[Anonymous Coward]

The last All-in-Wonder story was about the stripped-down cheapo extra-good-value AIW. This story is about the 128MB beefed-up version.

Re:Not a duplicate!

[damien_kane]

So what does that make this story then...
Slashdot tech review special edition?

And to think some people pay for this...

No more ATI for me

[TheSHAD0W]

I used to be a big fan of ATI; in fact, I'm using one at this very moment (at the time, the Radeon VE was one of the few readily available dual display cards, and I had no luck with two cards in one system). But I've found their drivers to cause serious problems with Win2K, my console OS of choice, and will not be buying any more of their cards. I'm in the market for a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 (seems there's one company already making them) with dual outputs, and when I find one, bye bye, ATI.

Re:No more ATI for me

[Coolfish]

hear hear. Just like Matrox, I thought they had some inovative technology that other companies weren't really interested in (the Rainbow Runner G, Dualhead, etc. for example). But the simple fact remains that just like Matrox, ATI has awful customer support, and terrible drivers. Then, once you figure "okay, this technology has had time to mature, i can expect some solid drivers", tada, they discontinue the product.

So what do you do? Get a video card that has all these snazzy new features, but you bring it home and the drivers don't even suppor it yet? (my Ati Radeon VE refused to do both monitors at acceptable resolutions, and it took them a long time to even acknowledge the issue). I've figured I'll go with a company that at least appears to support their cards properly, Nvidia. I'm looking forward to my next upgrade.

Re:No more ATI for me

[WildBeast]

yeah it's a real pain, I had to install WinXP instead of Windows 2000 and only the MS drivers worked, ATI ones where a disaster although my friend says that the ATI drivers has been fixed now.

Re:No more ATI for me

[ctr2sprt]

ATI has a long and noble history of releasing the worst, lowest-quality, most unusable drivers ever. It wasn't enough that they wrote horrible drivers: they refused to make any efforts to improve the situation. They refused to admit there was a problem; they refused to fix the bugs; they invariably claimed it was a motherboard problem when I complained. I swear, if ATI would hire some people who had the slightest clue how to write decent drivers, nobody would ever have heard of NVIDIA.

They've made so many good products crippled by unusable drivers. It's kind of a shame. I know I'll never buy an ATI product after my one experience with them. I've already talked several friends out of purchases. Even if it should ever come to pass that ATI has the best cards (and drivers), the company's attitude has convinced me never to buy any ATI product, no matter what.

I wonder how many other people feel this way about ATI. I know of at least a few.

Re:No more ATI for me

[BrookHarty]

Mod this up, dont every buy the bull "Drivers will mature".

Learn from past mistakes, even if the hardware is good, they write bad drivers, bad software, and they lie about benchmarks.

Im sticking with Nvidia, and My version 2880 linux nvidia drivers rock my linux world.

Re:No more ATI for me

[Anonymous Coward]

"console OS of choice"

yer a fucking wanker who's a poser.

Re:No more ATI for me

[Tim Browse]

As a game developer, I can back this up re: driver problems. We had a crash bug in the Matrox G400 OpenGL driver, and supplied Matrox with an example program.

They then asked us what our program was doing - we thought "Er, aren't you the driver writers? Can't you tell?"

So we gave them the source in the end, including some of our engine. Eventually they came back and said that it was a problem, but they wouldn't be fixing it as the G400 was not their latest hardware, and so it had lower priority. They might fix it in the future - maybe.

BTW, at the time, the G400 was the latest card you could buy from Matrox. They basically told us that they wouldn't fix bugs in the drivers for their most recent currently shipping product.

We were not exactly impressed.

Tim

Re:No more ATI for me

[(H)elix1]

Here is another Matrox story... I have a Matrox G400 Marvel - nice TV tuner, (hardware) video capture, good stuff. They only had drivers for win98, but drivers for win2k were right around the corner. The box ran better than I expected, but still had the stability and 2G file limits with the win9x core...

Fast forward a year and a half. The blessed win2k drivers come out. The card turns my $300 card (lots for me at the time) into nothing more than a tv tuner card under win2k -- after much weeping and nashing of teeth, they tell users they will give a $50 rebate to the new and improved G450 Marvel -- without any hardware encoding.

I'm also one of those poor slobs who got stuck with a HP dvd100i too. Stay way clear of it. The best part is when HP asked for $100 to "upgrade" the DVD+RW to record DVD-R like they said it would in the press release. That, and none of the laptops with DVDs will actually read a data DVD+RW I created with it. Total waste of money.

Argh. Never again for both of those folks. Not that I am bitter....

Review skimps on the video recording features

[Brento]

As an All-In-Wonder Radeon owner, just want to clear up the things the article glosses over. You can't set it to record the same show no matter what time it comes on, you can't view listings more than 7 days in advance, and unlike a Tivo, it won't record similar shows for you. This is not set-it-and-forget-it software, and people need to stop comparing it to Tivo. It's much closer to a VCR than to Tivo: you have to manually program it, and it's just not that smart. (The quality's outstanding, though.)

Re:Review skimps on the video recording features

[56ker]

Articles are generally based on press releases which emphasise the good points of a product - for an unbiased opinion you need to ask someone who actually has one before buying.

Re:Review skimps on the video recording features

[interstellar_donkey]

for an unbiased opinion you need to ask someone who actually has one before buying

Or go to a review site that does'nt just rehash the promotional lititure (or in this case, copy from the back of the box)

Re:Review skimps on the video recording features

[seann]

Did you know that the ATi AIW series are just like a TiVO?!
They even say TIVO on the box!
Why right now I have my tv in, and video going out!

Re:Review skimps on the video recording features

[castlan]

That is very informative, thank you for the information. I was wondering about that very issue. Ever more importantly than "similar" shows, would be a readily available advance warning indicator of all new shows, so that I could decide for myself if I like new shows, and I wouldn't have to miss any piliot episodes. While it isn't like any television I regularly watch, I did stumble across the Collin Quin show, and found it a mostly enjoyable, less heavyhanded alternative to the corpse of Saturday Night Live. Unfortunately, that was also the last episode.

As for an All-in-Wonder not performing as a TIVO, there is no hardware reaason why it couldn't, that's just a feature of the software. From my understanding, the TIVO requires a subscription for those advanced services - unless you buy the "lifetime" of the device option, which puts the cost up with Replay TV. Now there is software which is working on PVR functionality for Linux, so that you wouldn't need the included Windows software to run basic PVR functionality. It isn't likely that the "Free Software" would be able to get broadcast listings.

But as for complaining about only 7 days in advance, I have digital cable via Comcast, and I don't recall ever seeing listings go past 5 days in advance. Occastionally the service goes out, and I see no listings... it once had 4 days, and then after it recovers, it takes some time to get past 4 hours in advance. I wouldn't mind a steady week's headway in programming. This can also lose synh with reality
on occasion, like when a program has temporarily shifted its time slot to make way for a sporting event.

Back when Politically Incorrect was occasionally worth watching, to do so was virtually impossible (when I had work the next day) because I need sleep, and the VCR was rendered ineffective when Mr Mahr would air whenever Nightline felt like resting, be it 11:45 or 1:00AM. I have seem it start around 2:30. Other times I'd tune in early, just to see a toothy Ilyana "my name is, Opr---Ilyana" doing her thang. So tell me, how far into the broascast future does TIVO see, and how accurate/flexible are it's claims? Was it able to adjust for the Buffy Musical's overtime?

The only significant problem to having Full TIVO like functionality is the television programming schedule. If this was freely available, there is no reason why PC PVR couldn't supplant standalone consumer devices. Now, does anybody know of any way to get such TV listing services into a computer? Is there any service that provides such listings, for free or a fee? Or would I have to spilce into some co-ax to siphon the Comcast/TIVO/satelite schedule?

Re:Review skimps on the video recording features

[Sorklin]

TIVO is as accurate as the information that the company received from... (I forget the name of the company that does the listings). The information is as up to date as your last successful call in.

So if ABC says Mahr is on at Midnight, that's what time TIVO records it. If they have an accurate time, then TIVO records that.

As far as special things like Buffy, yes it did know to record for an extra 10 minutes. It also knew that Jerimiah was going to be on 15 minutes late last week.

It knows that a show is pre-empted for a different show. It knows quite a lot -- a lot more than I'm willing to sit down and figure out on my own.

I don't know the All In Wonder's functionality, but if you're going to compare it to TIVO, you have to compare a lot more of the features.

Does the card allow you to record one show while watching another show that has already been recorded (without dropping frames)? Does it allow you to watch the show it is recording 15 minutes behind what its recording?

Is it always recording so that if I want to pause or rewind, I can. If after watching it for 20 minutes, I decide I'd like a to record it, is it able to record the entire show (including the 20 minutes I've just watched)?

If not, it aint a TIVO.

I can Vid cap right now to my hearts content. But that aint TIVO either. Because if it doesn't have all those wonderful extra features, whats the real difference between it and a VCR (with VCR+)?

slashdot

[tps12]

As if this duplicate of a blatant advertisement is not insulting enough, I just got a taste of a Flash banner ad. Thank you, slashdot, once again.

And I thought page widening posts were fixed. I guess I was hoping for too much. Instead of fixing slashcode they just break it differently.

Someone should organize a boycott of slashdot or something.

Re:slashdot

[IanA]

that advertisement(flash) errored for me when trying to resolve due to editing hosts file :)

try here-> a huge hosts file to help stop ads from appearing

Re:slashdot

[tps12]

Thanks for the link. That looks to be just the ticket.

But does it work in Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

The card would be kinda useless without drivers...

Re:But does it work in Linux?

[bcjanes]

It all should work, except for 3d. The ATI cards have had excellent 2d support in Xfree for a while now, and progress is being made on the 3d support.

From what I can gather, the mach 64 series, and Radeon 8500 series should have 3d support by Xfree 4.3 or 4.4

I certianly hope so, they are excellent cards IMHO, and the only real player left for open-source accellerated 3d.

Yes, I know that Nvidia makes drivers available for linux for the Gforce series of chips, but they are propietary only, and not officially supported. Try calling up Nvidia's support line and asking for help.

Nvidia won't release their specs so the Xfree project can't easily write good drivers for them. I don't know about you, but I really don't want a kernel level driver that is closed source mingling with my kernel. How are you supposed to fix it if it breaks something?

nVidia Ti4600 based card with video-in?

[Anonymous Coward]

ANd how do I watch TV on an nVidia Ti4600? Oh, I can't except by some very low quality USB dongle. No thanks. That is why ATI has the market for graphics cards with video-in/out capability all wrapped up. And ATI's drivers are a lot better ... than their older ones!

Hire me

[Anonymous Coward]

I need a job.
I have been reading slashdot most of the time of employment for the last few years, so I am well qualified at most programming positions.

Send email to me directly if you have a job that might interest me.

Thanks

-a

Re:Hire me

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, send me the code and I will send you payment in the post. Oh, the code I need is a nuclear power station control application - our platform is Windows 98, and the language is VB6. We need it quite quickly as the core appears to be heating up right now.

Re:Hire me

[Anonymous Coward]

Sub Main result% = MsgBox ("WOULD U LIEK TO SHUT DOWN THA REACTOR?", Vb_No, "DANGER! OVERHEATING IMMIENENT") If result% = Vb_Yes Then ' TODO -- emergency shutdown code End If End Sub

Re:Hire me

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, does that come with usage documentation. The people round the power plant are right Homers (in joke) so we need clear documentation. With pictures of donuts to make sure that it is read.

Re:Hire me

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey could you tell us what state you are in that is running Win98 for their control applications and in VB6? I would really like to know where this powerplant is so that I can be at least 5 states away from there when it crashes.

Linux Drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

But what can linux do with it?

Seriously, I'm hesitant to upgrade if I can't make full use of it's capabilities. Anyone know of a good source of info on drivers, for all the whiz-bang features?

Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[steppin_razor_LA]

I am the "proud" owner of a Radeon All In Wonder. I dropped close to $300 on the card. I bought it hoping to set up a home theatre PC. I was looking forward to experimenting with broadcasting the video via 802.11 to the downstairs office so that my GF could watch while working.. etc.

ATI totally caved to Microsoft and only supports their "latest" video capture API (DirectShow). Well guess what even though DirectShow has been out for a long time, there doesn't seem to be a lot of support for it -- even from Microsoft. So if you want to use NetMeeting or Windows Media Server or Real Server -- you can go suck an egg.

The video capture software they bundle it seems to capture into a proprietary MPEG2 format that doesn't play on other computers. If you want to share something you captured, you need to re-encode it.

There are third party applicaitons available -- I think that FlashMPEG can do capture for it now.

All in all, I am *REALLY* disappointed with the card. The hardware seems fine, but the software & support just blow.

How is the Linux support?

[j09824]

Are all the features available from Linux? Are the drivers open source, or are they semi-closed, like nVidia's? How good is OpenGL performance on Linux?

Re:How is the Linux support?

[fwankypoo]

I'm not sure how much suppor there is for the video capture features of the card under Linux right now. However, ATI releases all the specs to their cards so that people like the DRI project can develop drivers for them (which is much cooler IMHO than NVidia's closed drivers). So, while it may take longer for the drivers to mature, they will most likely be free software.

A little off your question...
I've seen a few people complaining about their AIW Radeon's, etc. I just have to say that (owning an AIW 7500) the drivers are much more mature than what they talk about. I've had no problems using the capture functions, no problems with any game (D3D or OpenGL) and it DOES encode to non-proprietary formats (MPEG2, AVI, etc) to allow for editing w/out conversion.

The quality is fantastic (I can't wait till I get somewhere where I have reception). I recommend getting one of these card if TV+good 3D acceleration is your bag.

Re:How is the Linux support?

[eimaj]

Unfortunately there is no OpenGL support for the 8500 under Linux.

I was disappointed that ATI doesn't appear to be willing to fund 8500 development through Tungsten Graphics like they did a few years ago (when TG was called Precision Insight).

I was just in the market to buy and new card, and as much as I wanted an ATI, I ended up buying a GeForce3. I don't like that NVidia's stuff is a closed binary implementation, but at least they take the Linux market seriously enough to support it.

Re:How is the Linux support?

[eimaj]

I just remembered, it is possible to buy OpenGL support for the 8500, but the driver costs as much as my GeForce3 did. :P

Re:How is the Linux support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, except 8500 with their driver for OpenGL beats socks out of nVidia under both Linux and Windows

Not to mention quality of rendering which NVidia was always sucks at... (raw power - they always cool at that one.. but quality - ugh.. Quite noticable at LCD)

Re:How is the Linux support?

[vawlk]

I agree. I was once an ATI hater too. I used to despise trying to get drivers to work correctly, but unlike many others who are basing their opinions on cards 2 or 3 generations ago, I gave them another chance.

And guess what.

Best hardware purchase I have ever made. The drivers are a TON better than before. They still aren't perfect but they work, and quite well. Updates are now atleast monthly with quite a few "leaks" in between.

Compared to my geforce owning friends, I have no more issues than they have with their drivers, and in some cases less, which is suprising because my card (8500DV) does so much more than play games.

As I sit here, the TV is paused in an overlay window on top of this text area just waiting nicely for me to continue when I am finished.

Sure it takes a leap of faith to "change", especially when a company has wronged you in the past. So how many of you are running AMD?

You never know...your old issues may be holding you back from a truely amazing experience.

Re:How is the Linux support?

[Anonymous Coward]

As for TV features, they seem to be supported for "All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500DV". I have no idea if the new card works, since it's very possible they changed the device pci id, but it should be possible to get it working pretty easily if that's the only major change.

Gatos Supported Cards

Re:How is the Linux support?

[dinivin]

nVidia's 3D drivers are not semi-closed. They are completely closed.

Dinivin

Re:How is the Linux support?

[leereyno]

I'll take closed drivers that work over open ones that are non-functional or non-existent any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

Re:How is the Linux support?

[fwankypoo]

This may be the case for the AIW 8500 128 (no DV) but I can't say for sure. I know that the AIW7500 uses a different (analog) tv capture circuit than the (digital) 8500DV, if the 8500 sans DV uses the same digital capture device, then it may be safe to assume that it's supported by GATO.

Re:How is the Linux support?

[dinivin]

Thankfully, not everyone feels the same way.

BTW, nVidia's closed source drivers don't work for everyone.

Dinivin

Re:How is the Linux support?

[jrfonseca]

You seem to forget the advantages of open-source. Why do you think Linux got popular in the beginning? Surely wasn't because it had more features than the other closed source OSs. It was because people could improve it and suit it to their own needs.

When the closed source drivers don't work for you or the vendor stops supporting them don't come crying to the DRI developers. I hope that this never happens, but realize that you're aiming to your own foot when you make these broad statements dispising their work.

Making an OpenGL driver is an herculean endeavor since involves dealing with complex things such as low-level programming and 3D rendering, and to complicate even further usually there is lack of information due to intelectual property issues. Spite of that, open-source has shown to be a viable (if not better) alternative than closed-source in so many fields so why not 3D graphics as well? Is just a matter of believing in it and work in that sense.

Re:How is the Linux support?

[leereyno]

I'm not forgetting the advantages of open source, I'm just saying that a closed source solution that works beats an open source solution that doesn't hands down.

Re:How is the Linux support?

[leereyno]

Yes, it is good that not everyone feels this way. If they did then I might have more competition when it comes to getting a good job. All those guys who are more interested in ideology than getting the job done are never going to take a job away from me, which is a comforting thought.

Re:How is the Linux support?

[jrfonseca]

It's clear to me that you just see what is right in front of your nose. Every single sucessful open-source project was beaten by closed source solutions during a large initial period of its life. Now if the users didn't support it during that stage - bug reporting, bug fixing, etc. - then they would never had reached to a point that they beat the closed source solution. There is nothing about ideology here. You just don't have the ability of looking forward in time, but perhaps this isn't needed in your line of jobs!

"competitive"

[Anonymous Coward]

meaning your frame rate will suck with the latest games.

Review written by a student.

[Anonymous Coward]

Start paragraph with declarative sentence of the subject of said paragraph. Add filler. End paragraph with summary of paragraph. Repeat. And repeat and repeat and repeat.

Glad THEY aren't charging a subscription.

300 mhz DDR?

[doubtless]

Powered by a 240MHz. Radeon 8500 GPU and 190MHz. DDR RAM (380MHz.), the 8500DV proved to be both a well-rounded, and well-endowed, graphics and video solution

I wonder why the post says 300MHz DDR RAM.. another editing mistake?

Abouts Review

[Anonymous Coward]

http://pediatrics.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm ?site=http://www.guysex.com">Abouts Review

Includes some info on its Linux Support!

Useful in X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this sort of hardware useful to someone using Linux and X Window System?
Or is this primarily something for hardcore MS Windows gamers?

I suspect that unless you use Windows and play a lot of computer games, this
video hardware would not be too useful. It seems overkill for X, where a plain
old MGA based 2D card is primo for speed and clarity. Very few 3D cards look
good under X. And they get hot enough to fry bacon. I don't see the point in adding
all that extra heat to the inside of your case unless you are going to make good
use of it.

Abouts Review!

[Anonymous Coward]

Abouts Review

Includes info on its GNU/Linux Support!
(Summary)
OGL Works under Linux
Only support DirectShow (M$), so no capture in GNU/Linux.

Ads!

[Anonymous Coward]

If I subscribe to Slashdot will I be able to filter these advertisement stories?

Port all the ATI apps to linux ...

[motorsabbath]

... and give me linux drivers and I'd buy one. I'd keep my nVidia(s) around, in the same case, for games though. The video editing would be nice and worth the cash.

Trade-In Program

[jimmcq]

You can get up to $150 off a All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 128MB AGP through ATI's Trade-Up Program.

Basically if you order the card through them you get an instant $50 rebate... Then when you send in an old ATI card or even a different brand of graphic card, they will send you a $100 rebate.

Re:color me wide

[Anonymous Coward]

1. If you get page widening from parent post, just get Mozilla. It's free, fast, and just plain better.
   
2. The title of this page should begin with ATI, not ATi.
   

Helvetian Military Sword

[distributed.karma]

Somehow 'Swiss Army Knife' sounds a bit mundane these days. And we all know that 'Swiss Army Chainsaw' already exists and has more blades than Larry Wall can count. Therefore, I propose the term SwissCard for this beauty. (Something under that name is already being made by Victorinox, but I rest assured none of the /.ers care about IP SchmIP issues.)

Re:Helvetian Military Sword

[Anonymous Coward]

Blade, I think they should go for something with Blade. Helvetian Military Blade.

Please stop posting minor product announcements as

[captaineo]

Slashdot editors - Please stop posting minor product announcements as news items. There are lots of other sites that do a better job of covering this kind of thing. Please keep it to "Stuff that matters."

What about a Digital broadcast TV Tuner?

[BenJeremy]

Man, I'm getting a bit sick of waiting on ATI... the AIW Radion 8500 is the same as my original All-in-Wonder from 1996 with a new graphics chip plugged in.

ATI promised DTV a couple of years ago and has yet to deliver on the promise. Why deal with flaky drivers and questionable benchmark tactics when I can just get a TV wonder that does EVERYTHING the AIW adds and have the FREEDOM of selecting whatever graphics powerhouse card I want?

Meanwhile, NVidia has pretty much caught up to ATI in the All-In-Wonder type packaging with the Personal Cinema-based cards and fluid VIVO support. With an external tuner, NVidia can even potentially deliver DTV as a retro-fit.

Ugh. ATI disappointed me way too many times for me to ever get excited about their products again. Sadly, my first ever PC video card was an ATI EGA Wonder in 1988 (hooked up to a Mono TTL monitor simulating EGA with 16 shades of grey)... I still have it in a doorstop somewhere around here.

Re:What about a Digital broadcast TV Tuner?

[-tji]

I agree.. This NTSC tuner merits a big yawn for me.

DTV makes more sense for PVR functions. The data is already compressed digital. All you have to do it save it to disk. And, the quality is leaps and bounds better than our 50 year old NTSC standard.

It's about time they got on board with DTV. I would be the first in line to buy one.

Re:What about a Digital broadcast TV Tuner?

[Noehre]

Hate to burst your bubble, but this will never happen since cable companies encrypt their DTV steams. This makes it possible to limit people to using their specific set-top box.

You will probably never see a DTV decoder/tuner in a PC.

HDTV decoders, on the other hand, you can already buy today!

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[bonzoesc]

What, ATI's annual driver release not good? Say it isn't so!

...

Wait a second, this is ATI we're talking about. They're even worse than Creative with drivers, I swear. There was a time when I had to switch between three sets of ATI drivers for Half-Life, UT, and Quake 3, each switch requiring two 3-minute reboots in Windows 98.

The only way to use the TV functions on any ATI card is with an external program. I recommend DScaler, which does some fancy processing to the signal to make it look good enough to eat (unless it's squid day on Iron Chef).

Is the resolution limited to 800x600 for AIW?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the 64 meg version of 8500 aiw was limited to 800x600 while you could get 1024x768 with the 64 meg aiw 7500(while using both tv and monitor). I tried the 7500 aiw, but was dissapointed with the display when watching dvd's on my 17".

I'm thinking about matrox's g450 dual head, as I can run this, while I cannot do so with the latest ati radeon.

So what happens with 64MB?

[erroneus]

Okay maybe I'll get modded down -2 fricken-moron for this...

...but what is wrong with the 64MB version? Does it go into swap space or something?

Re:So what happens with 64MB?

[Wordplay]

In the sense that it'll use your system memory via AGP, pretty much. Performance-wise, it's pretty analogous to going to HD swap from system RAM, though not quite as drastic of a performance difference.

Geo

Re:So what happens with 64MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

bullshit nothing takes advantage of 128mb these days, not yet

toms has an article on it if your not feeling lazy

Re:So what happens with 64MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 128MB version puts 64MB between you and the Joneses nextdoor.

Re:So what happens with 64MB?

[rchatterjee]

The 64MB version is the AIW Radeon 8500DV the 128MB version is the AIW Radeon 8500 (notice no DV). The DV of the 8500DV means it has dual IEEE 1394 ports integrated onto the board. Also the 8500DV uses a chip instead of a analog tuner. On the downside the AIW Radeon 8500DV is underclocked so there are no major heat problems on this overloaded board and the video ram is rated for lower speeds, the AIW Radeon 8500 on the other hand runs at the same speed as normal Radeon 8500 boards (i.e. not LE models) and has the same higher rated ram.

doody list

[jchristopher]

I've still never forgiven ATI for not bothering to write drivers for Windows 2000 that supported dual display for their Rage Pro/Mobility series of cards, thus stranding thousands of folks with laptops with ATI video built in.

ATI says it's Microsoft's fault (yet somehow Nvidia figured it out).

This is a great feature, especially for laptops, since you can run PowerPoint on one screen and your notes on the other.

ATI seems to have a nice history of never/rarely providing driver updates once they release a new chipset. This is incredibly dumb - the Rage Mobility M1 is still used in brand new, shipping systems, yet the drivers for Windows 2000 are like 18 months old, feature-wise!

Thus, they make my "never buy again" doody-list. Next laptop will have Nvidia.

I forgot to mention MPEG2 in hardware!!

[BenJeremy]

Another nice feature would be a GOOD MPEG2 *ENCODER* in hardware, available for video in encoding AND firewire encoding as well. Not software, and not quarter frame - full 720x480 30fps encoding at high quality for seamless editing. This is what I REALLY need for a complete home video suite.

My current set up consists of a 60gb 7200rpm drive (data), 30gb drive (OS and software), TV Wonder for basic VIVO and PVR fucntionality, Firewire card for my Digital8 camcorder, 20in monitor (ancient Nanao Flexscan), and a DVD-ROM drive running on a 1ghz P3 with 512MB RAM. The addition of a good MPEG2 encoder that can handle real-time capture of the DV stream into full-frame MPEG2 would be perfect.

Re:I forgot to mention MPEG2 in hardware!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you are such a stud, why don't you just go and shell out the bucks for a hardware encoder? I'll tell you that you'll never get one (at least not a good one) from ATI and those other assclowns. Or you can just wait a year for a realtime software solution.

Re:I forgot to mention MPEG2 in hardware!!

[vawlk]

the 8500DV version can encode at 720x480x30fps and has 2 firewire ports built in.

Why I don't buy ATI

[The Pi-Guy]

HEH. Long story, but I'll make it short.

4 years ago, I was buying a "new" PC. Given the choice between the less expensive nVidia and the more expensive ATI, I stuck with the brand I had heard of (never heard of nVidia before) and went with the ATI. Wrong choice. It was an ATI Rage 64 or something, I forget, Rage LT PRO, I think it was. There was NO hardware 3D OGL acceleration, and minimal D3D. Out rolled a new DX release, and out rolls a buggy as hell uncertified driver. It took them like 10 releases to get it right, and they still didn't have hardware support. Under Linux, the situation was somewhat better - the opensource drivers used acceleration, and I got a lot better frame rates. But it would lock all IO on the box until I telnetted in and chvt'd on occasion - and sometimes it wouldn't even let me telnet!

So the point I'm trying to make is, for your own good, don't buy it. Not flamebait, but just wait until you see the EXACT CARD in the EXACT BOX you're getting running the EXACT SOFTWARE you're gonna run. For your own sake.

--joshua

ATI? Yuck.

[topham]

Aside from it taking me 3 months to get my ATI card working as it SHOULD...

(All-in-Wonder Rage 128) I finally can get the TV-tuner working and watch TV while I use dual monitors.

Never did figure out HOW I GOT IT WORKING.
(This under Win2K)

ATI drivers *SUCK*. Their DVD support SUCKS (I have a standalone MPEG2 decoder card, I've had it since I was using a Pentium 166, it has always played DVDs flawlessly.) On my Pentium III ATI's DVD support glitches now and then.

I was better off under W95 with my Pentium 166, & creative Labs decoder.

I will not consider an ATI card again until they improve their driver support and pull their head out of their ass. (Mpeg2 encoding should be done in hardware, it takes a Pentium III to do it in software, and you can't do much else...)

Re:ATI? Yuck.

[Anonymous Coward]

mpeg2 decoding is nowhere near as intensive as you think. Back when I first got a dvd-rom, I had a p2-266 doing software decoding and it only used up 70-80% of the CPU. I later got a hardware decoder only because my video card didn't have tv out. A celeron 433 used up 40-50% of the CPU and with a 1.2 ghz athlon it doesn't even noticeably spike the load.

Re:ATI? Yuck.

[esper_child]

I got this working, but the ATI AIW 128 had to be the primary video card or it wouldn't work. But when I did it my Voodoo 4 wouldn't play UT properly so I scrapped the whole thing and left the Voodoo 4 as my only video card in there and just swapped cards whenever I want to use the TV functionality.

Re:ATI? Yuck.

[Nonillion]

This has always been my beef with with hardware manufactures who think the processor should do all the work via software. Dedicated hardware will always kick ass over its software brothers. There is NO excuse for this, I would rather pay more for a video card that has its own smarts and can figure out how to do things without the processor holding its hand.

Crappy "winmodems" and "winnics" are a prime example of this...

rm -r windows

Re:ATI? Yuck.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dam your a lame fuck
rm -rf windows

Re:ATI? Yuck.

[Anonymous Coward]

All Radeon Boards have built in onboard DVD decoding (i.e. you don't use decoder card and the CPU usage still stays at only 1 or 2%. The best looking DVD playback i've seen on a computer was using PowerDVD 4.0 with hardware decoding enabled on a system with a Radeon 8500, it looked at least as good as my progressive scan DVD player on my TV.

Maybe you just need something newer than something from the TNT days.

Re:ATI? Yuck.

[Noehre]

Did you the miss the fact that ATI has been releasing Beta 8500/7500 drivers at the rate of about one every 2 weeks for a few months now?

I have like 10 driver version sitting on my computer for my 8500.

And they all work nearly perfectly!

Re:ATI? Yuck.

[Ded Bob]

ATI drivers *SUCK*. Their DVD support SUCKS (I have a standalone MPEG2 decoder card, I've had it since I was using a Pentium 166, it has always played DVDs flawlessly.) On my Pentium III ATI's DVD support glitches now and then.

Got DMA? :)

Seriously, Win98 will sometimes forget the DMA setting on DVD drives. You can set it back, but upon the necessary reboot, it will forget it. I had to uninstall and install the drive. Without DMA, my DVD would pause every couple of seconds.

Re:ATI? Yuck.

[topham]

Enabled or disabled DMA the DVD playback to ATI cards is no-where near as good as the seperate card I bought with my DVD drive.

I had very good results with the MPEG2 decoder and my DVD drive on a Pentium 166mmx -without- DMA enabled.

On my Pentium III 500Mhz with the ATI card and DMA enabled it isn't as good.

Re:sweet

[jchristopher]

when can I get one with mac support?

If ATI's past history holds: 12-18 months, if they decide to sell one at all.

Better comparison...

[McVeigh]

is available at Anandtech here it compares the AIW 8500DV (with gets the editors choice award)it also has similar offerings from Matrox and Nividia, if you want to see whats out there.

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[seann]

You blatently missed the "Custom" capture setting that you can, "customeize".

This is not a troll.

Try capturing to stright DivX or some jazzy jeff alternative.

I have the Butter knife of video cards!

[taya0001]

the sis 3d/2s blows this ATI away

Re:I have the Butter knife of video cards!

[zCyl]

the sis 3d/2s blows this ATI away

Dude, my Trident 8900 will rock your sis's world.

get a second tv...

[SethJohnson]

Hey. Sometimes the technical daredevil solution is not the best one. I'm speaking from the position of someone who has spent countless hours and weekends on projects like the one you attempted to provide some video (porn?) over your home network for your 'GF' (Gay Friend?).

Granted, your ambitions may have been cheated by ATI's laziness in leveraging some half-assed package provided my microsoft. But even if it had worked, do you really need your computer AND your girlfriend's computer wasting CPU cycles on encoding and decoding video files and tying up your home network with all that data? The lowtech approach of running coax or whatever in parallel with your ethernet cables and plugging it into a seperate TV set might be a more reliable and easier-to-implement solution.

Don't get me wrong, though. I'm not mocking your project. It just echoes some of the technological boondoggles I've sucked myself into.

Re:get a second tv...

[steppin_razor_LA]

I didn't want to deal w/ a cable run + buying additional equipment to get DSS throughout the house...

Whether or not the project has merit, I should have been able to do it...

:)

Re:get a second tv...

[SethJohnson]

Yeah, I agree. It's another one of those situations where technology just hasn't quite caught up to our ideas yet...

TV Out Quality?

[wahay]

I'm looking for a card with decent TV out. I want to watch all this cool video I've encoded on a real TV where the women in my life won't complain. Has anyone seen any sort of review coverage of the quality of TV outs on cards like the 8500 (or some nice Geforce?). I know the sharpness will never be great, but if geometry (trapezoid, pincushion) and scaling (overscan!) can work, that would be good enough for me.

Gaming Garbage?

[locutus2k]

A friend bought an All-In-Wondder card, and not supprisingly, it had problems with counter strike. go figure. The ATI cards are cool when it comes to video capture, but am I the only one who will sacrifice that for good graphics?

You said it first..

[xtal]

Anything which does many things, does none of them well. Get a standalone capture card, and don't by ATI unless you want miserable driver support. I got burned on a ATI TV Wonder (the software just locks my machine up constantly) and a ATI All-In-Wonder a few years ago. Nvidia chips have never caused me grief, and always have the world's best drivers, updated regulatly.

I was burned by ATI....

[Anonymous Coward]

I got burned when I bought my last ATI all in wonder card.... the drivers were awful, their software was shitty and the performance in games was worse than my old geforce 256 in a good number of games.

Fuck ATI. Once they produce some quality software/drivers that aren't A) bloated B) Flakey C) slow I will not buy one. They also need to have some linux drivers that don't suck.

Dual monitor limitations?

[NanoGator]

Hey dudes, curious about something: I used to have a Radeon 8500. The dual monitor support was capped at 1280 by 1024 @ 60hz. I really want to run > 60hz since I can see the flicker. Anybody know if:

a.) It can run higher than 1280 in dual mode (I really like 1600

b.) Can it run at a higher refresh rate than 60hz?

It doesnt bother me if they two monitors MUST be the same rez/refresh, but I need the higher refresh rate. Does this particular card support that? If not, does Nvidia make one that does?

Re:Dual monitor limitations?

[archen]

I installed a dual LCD type setup for a the graphics guy at the place I work. At first there was a horrible flicker on one, but we upgraded his computer and got the newer drivers (2x..) and the flicker went away. If you really want to spin the ATI roulette wheel, you might want to give that a try.

Re:Dual monitor limitations?

[vawlk]

something was messed up in your configuration. 8500s can run 2 monitors at different resolutions and refresh rates.

Doesnt work so well in win2k, but some people have had success.

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[emissary47]

i have used ati products for quite some time ... but i was so disappointed with their
drivers, and ati's linux support (read: drivers) isn't that great.

i just bought a fresh nvida card because they have (yes i know it's closed sorce) very
good linux drivers, the are fast and i can play quake 3 in 1280x1024 or use
tvout to watch dvd's on my tv.

i think what ati has to do, get the drivers working, also ati should consider more linux
support (drivers!), i know many gnu/linux using people who have
nvidia cards just because they are working very well, and i won't buy any ati products
until they have: a.) better drivers b.) linux drivers

to be fair, ati does support linux, but i think they have to realize, that people dont like
to wait a half or even a year before their graphics board is working the way it should be ...

i think ati builds good cards, but their drivers have ever been, and are still crap,
i remeber years back where i used windows and gnu/linux in dual boot, ati's drivers for
windows had many problems, but i had a 3dfx card back then
so i don't cared that much.

all i can say is, if you are willing to wait that someday the drivers are good, then buy
ati's cards, as i said before, i don't buy their products anymore.

Hehe, tell me another

[sgtsanity]

In about a week from now, at the end of April, the GeForce 4 TI 4200 will be released. According to Firingsquad benchmarking tests, the GF4 TI 4200 (quite a mouthful) out-scores the Radeon 8500 while being less than half the price, even while not overclocked. And while it doesn't have some of the features of the ATI card, that isn't an excuse for the $200 price gap. So, in conclusion, Nvidia is far better and ATI isn't even close to controlling the market. PS: Oh, and that was all before the new drivers Nvidia released today, which are said to increase performance greatly on the GeForce 4 line of cards.

Re:virtualdub

[Anonymous Coward]

it is a nice proggy, but it doesn't run on Linux.

It is open-source, but porting it would be a huge PITA. There are all sorts of Windows specific features in there (plus assembly language).

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[Anonymous Coward]

like, duh. ATI sux people, get real.

I can't count how many times I've been in arguments with ATI zealots. They're like Chevy S-10 drivers: They think they have the hottest "baddest" thing out there when in reality what they have is piece of crap. They'll argue till their head explodes though... I try to leave 'em alone, they will learn what a POS they have although they will never admit it.

ATI drivers have always sucked. I'm guessing the hardware probably isn't that great either.

A.T.I. == P.O.S.

At least I know what my next video card will be !

[msergeant]

For all the people out there that are bitching about drivers being cr@p for ati cards I'm betting they haven't seen the recent drivers which get both of my ati cards (7200 & 7500) performing better than their nvidia counterparts. I also have the advantage that when I run a unix derivative on my machine I don't need to muck around with kernel modules to get the damn graphics working, open source drivers are a wonderful thing and with 3d support coming for the 8500 in the next version of XFree what more can I ask for, my only wish is my laptop had an ATI based card rather than the paltry Cyberblade XP which has less X support than the nvidia cards !

Re:But does it work in Linux?-threadmill

[Anonymous Coward]

"How are you supposed to fix it if it breaks something?"

By that time, you'll be upgrading to the next latest. Weeee.

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a time when I had to switch between three sets of ATI drivers for Half-Life, UT, and Quake 3, each switch requiring two 3-minute reboots in Windows 98.

Luckily none of that time was lost on actual work clearly.

Re:At least I know what my next video card will be

[msergeant]

Ohh and one thing I didn't think of if you ever wanted great 2d quality this is the card for it, I'd much prefer to sit in front of my 19" sony with an ati 7200 or 7500 card as the image quality is crisp as opposed to the gefoce 3 I have which makes the text blurry to read no matter what frequency the monitor is on :/

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[WhaDaYaKnow]

I bought an 8500DV late last year because of it's soon to be released component output cable. It was touted as the best solution for home entertainment systems because of the component video output, not available in any other graphics card.

We are now half a year further and no component output cable. The FAQ dully states:

Q12: Is component output enabled with the initial shipment? When is it available? How do I get component output?

A12: No, component output will not be available with the initial shipment. It will be available in 2002. You will be able to purchase an upgrade package from ATI with an adapter to connect your graphics card to your HDTV through YPbPr.

Great, so that will be, what, 31st December 2002?

It's amazing how companies get away with these kind of false promises. Several emails asking for a more specific timeframe went unanswered (after requiring me to go through a rediculous amount of trouble finding a way to actually get a proper email address).

An other important thing to mention that I keep running into: NEVER trust information on a web-page. The company will modify it without any record of the previous version (only a few weeks and it's out of Google cache as well), leaving you with no prove whatsoever.

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[Seeker5528]

i just bought a fresh nvida card because they have (yes i know it's closed sorce) very
good linux drivers, the are fast and i can play quake 3 in 1280x1024 or use
tvout to watch dvd's on my tv.

Do they support the device filesystem yet?

Later Seeker

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[Anonymous Coward]

do you people not have a fucking shift key, or what?

AIW PCI

[redog]

I bought an allinwonder PCI 4MB RAm in 96 it kinda worked as far as video input and output but the TV player program was as buggy as windows 95. I am still using this video card for a second display on my main system and even remember using it in a dual display eith a 2 MB S3 card back when win98 had just cameout. The hardware is rock solid. BUt using windows 2k I can tell you they have never made an attempt to expand the drivers or applications associated with this card. At the time I bought the card till 1999 there was next to no ATI website much less a support site. These guys seem to employ awesome electrical engeneers, but dont seem to want to hire any worthy programers. Makes you wonder if the senior programmer is overpaid.

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[NonSequor]

There has been a patcheto add devfs support to the nVidia kernel module for a long time (over a year at least). Even if you don't use the patch you can always create the devices in rc.local.

ATI Wondercard

[pipingguy]

Can it output 1600x1200 on one monitor and do 1024x768 on the other?

Does it come complete with a TV tuner and (S)VHS inputs?

I'm still waiting for Matrox to make a splash.

Paul

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! What the hell is the matter with a Chevy S-10? At least unlike ATI cards I can get it to run every time I turn the key.

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[jafuser]

I agree. I quit buying ATI because of their horrible drivers and the crappy software that came with it. Their video capture software left a lot of room for improvment. I hate GUIs which are over-done in appearance which hide the buggy bloated code underneath.

I miss not having the ability to capture TV images, but then again I don't watch much TV anymore anyway.

A bit of karma whoring

[DeltaStorm]

I know I'm a whore, but AnandTech has a nice Round-up of All-in-Wonder cards, as well as some competing cards.

Re:A bit of karma whoring

[Anonymous Coward]

you sir, are a whore

Lots o' mem...

[certron]

Wow. That's a lot of memory. In fact, that's how much RAM I have in my system right now. Let us think about this for a moment... Could it be possible (even feasible) to have a faily stripped internal system (simple cpu, ram, little or no expansion cards) and have the GPU be the main processor for a computer system? Perhaps it is a nutty idea, and now that I think about it, how far away is that from your average game console? Still, it would be nice to be able to use the very powerful graphics-optimized chips for things other than simply graphics. (All that dithering and interpolation, though, not really good for exact mathematical calculations. Great for making computer-generated images look more realistic, but maybe not the best for any sort of precise mathematical calculation.) Or am I really wrong? Hey, at the very least, I'm a little off-topic. :-)

certron

Re:At least I know what my next video card will be

[Anonymous Coward]

There's mods for the PCB that'll fix that.

128MB of ram?

[tomstdenis]

Am I the only one who thinks that is a bit overboard?

I mean at 1024x768x32bpp that is enough to store 42 full frame buffers!

Something tells me they are chucking ram at it to lure in stupid people. Really I'd rather have 32MB of super-fast memory than 128MB of sorta-fast memory.

Tom

Re:128MB of ram?

[vawlk]

Smoothvision
FSAA
Multi monitors...

all of which uses much more memory than a basic 3d card. If you think they are just throwing ram our for sales then you don't know much about graphics cards.

GPU memory is not just for frame buffers anymore.

Re:128MB of ram?

[Anonymous Coward]

600 mhz DDR RAM... You think this is Sorta fast?!?! What the hell kinda video card you got that outperforms that?

Re:128MB of ram?

[tomstdenis]

Smoothvision
FSAA
Multi monitors...

all of which uses much more memory than a basic 3d card. If you think they are just throwing ram our for sales then you don't know much about graphics cards.

GPU memory is not just for frame buffers anymore.


42 monitors though?

I mean you'd have to go out of your way to fill the ram with textures/vert lists.

I'd still rather have 32MB of ram that is say 800Mhz with a fast GPU then say 128MB of sorta fast ram just because for everything that I will be doing [e.g. playing games, desktop tools] I don't need more. I suspect the vast majority of people who would buy it are in the same boat.

Tom

Re:128MB of ram?

[ErikZ]

Memory is mainly taken up by textures. You know, it how you see things in 3-D games.

I don't see the memory requirements going down in the near future. As graphics become more detailed and game programmers put more objects into the game, the memory requirements of textures will continue to rise.

Re:128MB of ram?

[tomstdenis]

Memory is mainly taken up by textures. You know, it how you see things in 3-D games.

Geez, thanks for the lesson, no shit they use textures.

But at 128MB you can store a 11585x11585 texture in memory [well a little less since you have to make way for the frame buffer]. Most game textures are at most 64x64 so that would ammount to 16384 unique textures. The average game has around 200 textures per map so I'd say thats ok.

When it comes to games sure a plethora of textures is nice but I doubt a game with 4000 textures would really look that much more spectacular then a game with say 200~300 textures provided that the textures are of decent quality and designed well for the task [e.g. they tile nicely, etc..]

Tom

Re:128MB of ram?

[ErikZ]

Hey there Mr. Hostile, when your first post mentions only ONE thing that the card could keep in memory, it was easy to assume that you were ignorant.

For instance, an 11585*11585 texture would not fit into memory. That's ignorance.

And seeing how you're bitching me out in a public forum without checking your math, well, that's stupidity.

Assuming 256 colors, that's

11,585*11,585*256 = 34,358,329,600 bytes

roughly 32 GIG.

As to what could possibly use all that space, Everquest. Try walking into an area that has a bunch of nearby. You machine should slow to a crawl as all the textures get loaded, and unloaded, and loaded again.

"Ok, now we need a full set of textures for this new metal we've come up with, Bozium. It looks different than the brass, iron, rusted iron, steel, gold, platinum, admantium, or bone. So we'll need a new set of generic textures for boots, gloves, daggers, swords, axes, shields (Small, med and large) helmets, breastplates, chain mail, and, er, magic pants."

"Don't forget the specialty textures for those 'one of a kind' weapons and armor we'll be creating with this new metal."

Re:128MB of ram?

[tomstdenis]

And seeing how you're bitching me out in a public forum without checking your math, well, that's stupidity.

Assuming 256 colors, that's

11,585*11,585*256 = 34,358,329,600 bytes

roughly 32 GIG.

Um where does that 256 come from?

SQRT(128*1024*1024)=11585.2375029603946397834340 28 726

or a 8192x8192 16bpp texture which is still enough for 16384 64x64 16bpp textures.

On a decent 32MB card @ 1024x768x16bpp with two frame buffers you get 30408704 bytes to use for textures. That is enough room for 3712 64x64 16bpp textures.

Getting back to my original point. I'd rather see a 32MB card with super fast ram [e.g. make the speed the selling point] then a card with a b-zillion bits of ram.

Find me a [decent] game that uses more than 3712 64x64 textures at once and I'll shut up.

Tom

Re:128MB of ram?

[ErikZ]

"Um where does that 256 come from?

Textures are just BMP files. To calculate the size of a BMP file you times the height, by the width, by the color depth.

I looked up a texture tutorial to make sure. They said you had to reduce your texture to 256 colors.

Why are you using 128? Why did you SQRT the calculation? 16bpp? I had to look that up; you mean 16 bit color, right?

That's 1024*768*16 = 12,582,912 bits

Divide that by 8 (Which I forgot to do in the first post) and you get 1,572,864 bytes.

Divide that by 1024 and you get 1,536 K, or 1.5 Meg per frame.

Cards can already do 200fps in Quake, but in my EQ example the rendering actually STOPS as the machine tries to load up the textures from the drive. Why do you need the card to load fewer objects from memory any faster?

The ability to load 10 times as many objects at the same rate as we have now is far more valuable. Games will have more detail in the future, which means more objects. Let's put my future card up against yours.

My Card has 512 Meg of memory.

Your card, has 64 Meg, but uses the textures in the memory 10 times as fast.

The future game: Has 10 times as many objects on the screen. Players are stunned by the details of the scenery, their vehicles, and the other people walking around in the game. It's almost lifelike.

My card: Is completely filled with textures. From 10 types of grass, to 500 types of human model textures.

Your Card: Is far faster at rendering a scene, but every time you turn around and see something that uses a texture that isn't in the card's memory, your screen stutters as it tries to load the texture from your hard drive. It stutters a lot.

If you still don't see my point, let's ask a real game developer. I'd be happy to try and contact Verant and find out what they think. I'm sure they've been thinking about this problem a LOT with their new Star Wars MMORPG.

PS, you're right, I miscalculated in the first post, instead of 34,358,329,600 bytes, it would have been bits. Divide that number by 8 to get bytes, and then divide by 1024 to get 4,194,132k

Or 4 Gig.

Re:128MB of ram?

[tomstdenis]

Textures are just BMP files. To calculate the size of a BMP file you times the height, by the width, by the color depth.

Um since when? A 8bpp image takes *1 octet* per pixel. That is ... a 1024x768 8bpp image takes exactly 1024*768=768KB of ram.

I don't think you are in much position to tell me "how things are" if you can't handle simple arithmetic.

Alot of your other points are friggin moot. I mean 200fps? Well lets see. My monitor is at 75hz so 200fps is kinda a waste.

Also I'd rather pay for good gameplay than graphics. Sure graphics set the mood but games with decent graphics already exist. Just by slapping on new graphics and textures and models doesn't make new games more interesting.

Also, if you write a game that needs more than 3000 textures at a time you a very bad game designer. I mean looking around my room I can see that I can make a fairly decent reproduction with say a few hundread textures and good use of lighting/shading.

At some point graphic cards will have 4GB of ram, run at 2Ghz and consume more power than a microwave on high for 20 minutes. And you know what? At that point in time people will still be unhappy with the lack of originality in what could amount to a series of bloody quake3 arena clone games.

Tom

Re:128MB of ram?

[ErikZ]

An octet? Where do you come from? It's called a byte. 8 bits to a byte.
Alot of your other points are friggin moot. I mean 200fps? Well lets see. My monitor is at 75hz so 200fps is kinda a waste.

So then why do you want the memory to be even FASTER? That was your whole freakin argument!

Also I'd rather pay for good game play than graphics. Sure graphics set the mood but games with decent graphics already exist. Just by slapping on new graphics and textures and models doesn't make new games more interesting.

Well no kidding. And I'd like to win a million dollars. But neither of these statements have anything to do with what we're talking about. The useful memory size for video cards

Also, if you write a game that needs more than 3000 textures at a time you a very bad game designer. I mean looking around my room I can see that I can make a fairly decent reproduction with say a few hundred textures and good use of lighting/shading.

I'm glad you agree with me. Just one room would require several hundred textures; imagine a game with a hundred indoor rooms, and then outdoor settings on top of that.

Re:128MB of ram?

[tomstdenis]

So then why do you want the memory to be even FASTER? That was your whole freakin argument!

My point [since you missed it] was that to make a gammers card "better" you have to optimized what is most used. Sure enough ram is a requirement but a fast GPU is a stronger one.

e.g. Its worth more to speed up your GPU and memory bus then it is to add more memory.

Another thing you seem to mistaken is that you can re-use textures. For example, I could have an array of say 15 different wood textures. There is nothing saying I can't re-use them.

Also another question to ask. Would quake3 be any more fun to play after the initial 10 mins of excitement if it had photorealistic graphics? I doubt it.

Gameplay gameplay gameplay. Its way more important. Personally when I play 3d games I like the sort that let you tinker with the environment. e.g. move boxes, mark walls, etc... Stupid doom clones where all you can do is bumb into walls are fun and all, but nothing "new". Look at Medal of Honor. Sure its fun at first but in the end its just a Quake3 clone with new graphics.

Tom

Re:128MB of ram?

[ErikZ]

My point [since you missed it] was that to make a gammers card "better" you have to optimized what is most used. Sure enough ram is a requirement but a fast GPU is a stronger one.

How do you figure? What's most used is already being optimized, and you've already said it's fast enough in previous posts. Now my point is that you have to improve the biggest bottlenecks to get the best performance out of a card. Loading a file from disk instead of the card's memory is a HUGE bottleneck.

And I understand you can reuse textures.

Yes, I understand gameplay is vital to a good game, but improving gameplay is beyond the capibilities of any graphics card, so dragging out this point time and time again is pointless!

Looking for Fun don't Borther

[Hangtime]

As someone who has had to support ATCrap in the past, I just don't recommend the cards to friends. Many a night has been blown trying to get drivers and settings working for ATI cards. Quite frankly, its not worth it. Yes, there are some nice perks to having an AIW, but being able to use it is another matter. Nvidia has eaten them alive at the OEM level due to this. Had a friend that worked in the server group at Dell and told me one of the major reasons Dell does a significant portion of its business through Nvidia now, is because Dell was tired of trying to support ATI video cards.

ATI drivers sucked, suck and will suck for the forceable future and if they don't get off their hands and get them right they will end up exactly like 3DFX.

Re:Looking for Fun don't Borther

[vawlk]

I've replaced my VCR with my 8500DV and the last few driver releases have been very good.

It is a nVidia world right now. Games are being developed for the geforce cards and the rest of the competition have to adjust to the market.

ATI is finesse, nVidia is brute force. The ATI hardware is far above anything nvidia has. nVidia makes cards to go fast. ATI makes cards that look good.

the GF4s will sacrafice texture quality (anisotropy) for anti-aliasing (jaggies) whereas ATI does the opposite.

Personally, I will put up with a few bugs here and there for the image quality and extra features that come with the card. And I'm comfortable knowing my 6 month ATI card supports more future standards than the newest geforce, so I am happy with that.

ATI isn't going anywhere. Over 30 companies have joined up to sell the 8500 and beyond. Many of which dropped support of the nVidia line.

nVidia may be king of the gamer market right now, but ATI was, and still is, the graphics chipset champion by far.

Re:Looking for Fun don't Borther

[spongman]

i bought an 8500 recently (to replace my Geforce2) and i have to say that the drivers are pretty good. nothing like the horror stories I've heard.

Drawbacks..

[Rustjive]

Perhaps there are two drawbacks to the new All-In-Wonder card, or maybe more, but these seem fairly obvious.

The price of the new board can't be cheap. Compared to the next generation of nVidia boards, prices seem very top of the line. Of course, even if video performance doesn't match up with the nVidia boards, ATI can count on the features that make it an All-In-Wonder board. However, the main thing that the new, upgraded DV board offers is the boosted RAM, and the increased clock. This is somewhat hypocritical in itself. Which brings us to the second drawback, performance.

The original 8500DV, with it's 'paltry' 64 megs, didn't perform so badly. Sure, it was smoked by the new Ge4s, but as other commenters have remarked, you don't have a real need for the performance that the Ge4s offer, unless you are going to be on of the zealous people running Q3 at insane resolutions with 4x FSAA. HotHardware didn't do a bench with the original DV against the new one, but I'd be interested in what came up. Furthermore, anyone buying the DV looking for heavy game performance as well is few and far in between.

What ATI really needed was not a slightly faster All-In-Wonder board...what it needed was the next chip. It's only a matter of time before nVidia perfects their version. - In hindsight, I realize I've made some pretty questionable generalizations...oh well. :)

Re:Drawbacks..

[Rustjive]

Well, it would seem that my wish has been granted, as Anandtech has posted their own review of the board up, complete with benches (although short) on Page 20:

http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1609&p=1

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[bonzoesc]

Yeah, I only fire up the DScaler when it's time for some hot hot South Park action, but I never remember because TV isn't as fun as Super Mario Kart in ZSNES. There's an over-done GUI with nice fast code underneath, right there.

WHY are ATIs drivers so bad?

[Dixie_Flatline]

What exactly is slowing them down? I have the 8500 (not the AIW), and I bought it because of the dual head support. It looks great under linux, and I'm pretty happy with the way they make it work under Win2K. But what's the deal? I paid money for the card, and I got flaky drivers that do a poor job of displaying 3D occasionally, and cause more crashes in the time that I've had it than I EVER had with Win2K. nVidia seems to manage okay. And it isn't that they're trying to support something they know nothing about. They designed the damn card, so where are the drivers?

Why, why, why? I'd love to reccomend this card without reservation, but I can't. I love the 8500, but I always have to add the caveat that the drivers are kinda lousy.

Re:WHY are ATIs drivers so bad?

[Forkenhoppen]

I have an 8500 too, and I must agree that the drivers are a tad flaky. (I've had several "spontaneous" reboots so far, though they've been fairly far between.) Just a few observations about this card and it's drivers..

- 2D transparency of windows and stuff in 2K and XP is done using the 3D acceleration parts of the card. Sometimes, after running software that makes rather heavy use of pixel shaders, I'll end up with anything transparent suddenly being mono-color. I suspect they had a state-saving problem in that particular version of the drivers... suffice it to say, the latest driver version fixes this issue.

- As a developer, I've been using this card to write vertex and pixel shaders, and let me tell you, this thing does not react well to incorrect values. As an example, I once accidentally fed a mangled pixel shader pointer value to the SetPixelShader call in DirectX, and the following render call I made caused the computer to reboot. Ditto happens if you specify an incorrect specification for vertex information. It's a shame they don't check for obvious errors like this, something nVidia does. (Although I should point out that part of me is extremely thankful that the card does react badly to these problems. Otherwise, I probably never would've discovered the problem in the first place.)

- The OpenGL texture-loading-into-memory issue---which I really don't know much about--is not yet fixed in an official driver release, as I understand it. So most people will still be experiencing the texture memory chug in Quake III, which appears to be part of what this review is based on. I'm not sure if the other tests are OpenGL or DirectX, but maybe this'll shine a little light on why there's a bit of that discrepancy. (Was the texture shuffle thing an issue in DirectX too? Anyone know?)

- Windowed 3D rendered contexts that are rendering slow can end up feeling like they're lagging by a bit. Compared to a Geforce3, it can seem like the Radeon8500 is a slow mule, but I think it's just from being triple-buffered instead of double-buffered. (Incidentally, this might also be responsible for another issue I've seen crop up while moving from a Geforce3 to a Radeon8500; the base memory footprint, graphics memory-wise, tends to be larger on the Radeon8500. This is more of a feeling than a documented fact, but I suspect that when you're working on a Radeon8500, you actually have less texture memory to play with than on a Geforce3.. even when they both have the same on-card memory and AGP aperature sizes. I think this would actually make for an interesting comparison sometime, if someone would actually make a benchmark that compared the amount of stuffs you can stuff into each of these cards.)

All in all, I'm happy with my purchase. This is probably the most stable set of drivers I have seen come out of ATi ever. Granted, I'm not running multihead, so I don't know how much added complexity that throws into the equation, but.. hey, it works, and a hundred times better than the Rage Pro and Rage 128 drivers did. For instance, this one calculates clipped vertex coordinates correctly, something the Rage Pro had issues with in OpenGL. And I had an issue that bugged me about the Rage 128 too, but I seem to've forgotten it.. : )

Still, I have one issue that's been bugging the daylights out of me with the Radeon8500, more because I can't logically figure out why it would be happening rather than because it's annoying. I've been playing this old game called Oni, and while it runs faster than ever with the new card, and looks simply amazing, I've begun to notice that.. well.. the texture coordinates on the level geometry actually jump around ever so slightly. It's really quite bizarre to watch... : )

Re:WHY are ATIs drivers so bad?

[dunkelfalke]

the crashes and problems with image quality in 3d on radeon 8500 have often NOTHING to do with buggy drivers. the biggest problem of this card is that joke of a cooler. many people expirienced the same problem but almost always the problem was solved with a replacing of that cooler-wannabe with a real one.

this of cource only works with a built by ati video card. third party radeons mostly have a better cooling solution but a broken firmware.

Re:WHY are ATIs drivers so bad?

[SurfsUp]

Still, I have one issue that's been bugging the daylights out of me with the Radeon8500, more because I can't logically figure out why it would be happening rather than because it's annoying. I've been playing this old game called Oni, and while it runs faster than ever with the new card, and looks simply amazing, I've begun to notice that.. well.. the texture coordinates on the level geometry actually jump around ever so slightly. It's really quite bizarre to watch... : )

It smells like an integer precision problem in the game itself. Do you have any way of checking out the same game on an NVidia card, say?

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[vawlk]

I hardly call Mpeg1 and Mpeg2 proprietary.

by DEFAULT, it records in ATI's .VCR format (hacked mpeg2), but recording in other formats is not hard at all and just a simple config in the setup area.

The ATI File Library lets you convert the proprietary format to mpeg2 in minutes (just strips out the ati stuff). No one I have sent files to has had any problems with my captures.

Some people with better machines are encoding straight to divx now.

I don't care.

[jag164]

This is news?!?!?! The world's worst vid card vendor releases a new piece of shit card and this is news?!?!

God help my children.

Re:I don't care.

[Rustjive]

Way to flame.

The good, the bad, but still a lot of the ugly

[Namarrgon]

I run XP and an 8500DV. I have my share of complaints about the software & drivers, but now that I've found a config that's merely annoying instead of hopelessly broken (with the aid of a software update and a lot of workarounds), I can say that most things do work, some of them quite well.

However, there's still some plain stupid things that remain broken, like the massive memory leak(100s of MBs) when ffwding through their own .vcr files, or how it's unable to remember the Custom capture setting if you happen to choose one of the .vcr format settings, or the random crashes on scheduled recordings, to pick three out of dozens.

I reported all of these issues and many more in the MMC 7.5 software, months ago. I offered my help in reproducing them & tracking them down. I got no followup, and surprise surprise, they're all still broken in the recent MMC 7.6 update.

The hardware is definitely done well, quality is great, and I'm usually willing to give software a chance to mature, but seeing these kinds of major bugs persisting in software through that many revisions, I've lost a lot of faith.

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[Tsian]

I concur. Ati combined with Via is a nightmare. While I'm sure VIA is somewhat responsible for my problems (logitech webcam, nooo thank you. SBLive... if I'm in a good mood!)

And my problems with ATI drivers and this is hell. Latest *supported* drivers and software, load vid in... play a bit, crash.

I've been told going back to 7.1 MMC might help, but do you think ATI offers it?

Incidentally, ATI also does funky things with OEM parts, generally releasing sub par OEM cards which are underclocked (thanks for telling me that in advance!).

GF4

[Anonymous Coward]

my new GF4 has svideo in, which I intend to attach to my vcr, which has a serial connection to the computer so I can tune in channels. Sure, it isn't as all purpose as a tv tuner card, but it gets that hunk of metal out of my case that is a signal decoder. Besides, every tv tuner card I tried sucked, even the more expensive ones.

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[Anonymous Coward]

>You blatently missed the "Custom" capture setting that you can, "customeize".

Too bad on the first versions it was pretty well hidden and the capture software blew up all the time.

Trying to capture an entire movie (which works GREAT with a Bt878 and VirtualDUB) directly into DiVX is a total pipedream with this card.

another review of this card

[lmd]

You can read it here if the above link gets slashdotted. They have more pretty pictures than the review at hothardware. This review is slightly different in that they used a Pentium 4 instead of an Anthlon XP.

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[stevarooski]

I own an earlier ATI All-in-wonder, and the drivers are indeed lacking in that they're flaky as hell. And hey, wasn't there a big flap about ATI optimizing their drivers specifically for Quake 3 not too long ago in order to appear more competative while running everyone's favorite 3D office app?

Also, comparing ATI drivers to Creative is just downright cruel and unusual. I'm still waiting for an official (read: functional) Windows 2000 driver for my Creatve DVD card. I think I'll be opening a skishop in hell before THAT ever gets released.

Sound?

[amorsen]

The AIW Radeon 8500 seems to have S/PDIF output for sound. Can that be used as a regular sound card? And does Linux support it?

Re:Sound?

[Ilgaz]

S/PDIF is the digital sound transport standard. E.g. you can hook it to an amp which accepts S/PDIF signal and you can have pure digital sound w/o analogue signal loss.

I guess its not an output,its input indeed. For DV Capture etc.

If its output, therotically you can use it as a sound card but I don't think its a reliable way to do.

S/PDIF is an internationally accepted hardware sound transport standard. Posted this to say that it has nothing to do with Operating Systems.

Re:Sound?

[amorsen]

I mentioned S/PDIF because I am considering the purchase of a Radeon All In Wonder, and the marketing materials say that the 8500DV includes Dolby AC3 output via the S/PDIF interface on the card. According to the marketing materials, it can be used to output sound when playing DVD's with the included software DVD player in Windows. There is no mention of using it to output any other kind of sound.

What I want is to send out sound from other sources, such as compressed sound files or even games. I am not sure why that would not be reliable, if it works at all.

Re:Sound?

[Ilgaz]

to my knowledge is, It outputs either raw AC3 or it helps software to decode Dolby ac3 and sends decoded AC3 data which is 5.1 S/PDIF indeed.

So, its a DVD thing in fact. Maybe in future, DivX can take advantage of it.

So, think it as a DVD helper thing. Also reading how much people hates driver/software support of ATI, I wouldn't go for it. I mean, they are speaking about lack of Windows support, no need to be hopeful about Linux support. Dolby AC3 is a closed source thing btw.

it didn't do 187 FPS Q3

[leuk_he]

It didnt get 187 Frames per seconds on quake 3. that is really bad. with other words: all benchmarks require a lot of FPS now or they will say: buy XXX instead.

Some games can use that 128 MB now. THe best reason to buy such a card is to have "the best stuff".

-128 MB sounds better that 64MB
-It is faster (this card has faster memory).

If those posts are real,ATI must be stupid

[Ilgaz]

Gee... As a 3dfx voodoo 3000 owner, I know when Dx9 etc ships and no miracle happens I will have to replace my card. Maybe just to get new drivers installed.

Also,as a 3dfx owner, I don't feel comfortable buying a nvidia card and see its boot screen (video rom etc) just because I don't like that company itself and the way they left us in cold. I know, they bought the arch/blueprints of 3dfx instead of company but doesn't change my feelings since I have to hunt for some good guys modified drivers (AmigaMerlin now) to make at least gamma settings work.

The problem is, my only problem with my current card is, driver support and not having good drivers to unleash cards full potential.

What I see over and over is, those rants... Matrox drivers suck, ATI drivers suck. Also hardware geeks say too. They even say those chips are excellent things wasted by badly drivers.

I mean, if drivers suck, seems people like me will end up buying nvidia :-(

Re:If those posts are real,ATI must be stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I was also a Voodoo3 3K owner, bought a 3rd party one just after 3dfx collapsed. Unfortunately, the 3rd party manufacturer must have been pretty stupid, since the fan it came with was no way sufficient to keep it stable.

Now, to get to the point, I recently replaced it with a no name brand GeForce2 Titanium 64Mb, and it's very slow to power up my monitor. It doesn't show a bootup BIOS screen ;)

Why I am not buying an ati aiw pro.

[modipodio]

I was in the market intialy for a tv capture card and a seperate 3d card for my gaming needs.The os's I run are mandrake,freebsd and win2k.

When I first saw the ati all in wonder pro ,(before the first aiw review was posted on slashdot ),I had little prior experience with ati and thought that for the money this could well be the card for me .

The features which I found attractive were that :

*It seemed to be a decent enough gaming card.

*It had the ability to capture tv and video,(at what one would presume would be decent quality for the price ),

*It had a cool remote

*The promise of open drivers appealed to me due to the current selection of os's I am running.

Now before purchasing I decided to do a little research to see if the card would live up to my expectations ,The answer was that the card did not and Now I will explain why not.

I looked at many ,many reviews of this card and All of the reviews I looked at were done under windows , the reason for this was , to put it bluntly ,that the linux drivers for the card are crap.They do not work correctly and are by all reports extremely inconsistant ,(some things work some things dont ,cause crashes ,not good preformance etc),However from what I could discern the foundations were there I could still use some of the cards features under linux and as I am obliged to run win2k I could still use all of the cards features under windows.

However under further investigation It turned out that the windows drivers and the windows software by all reports was also shit.It was at that point that I decided to not buy ati and take my cash elsewhere .

I am still in the market for a capture card and a decent 3d card for gaming which wont break the bank, as it is I am quite busy so this is not the biggest problem for me right now so I am willing to wait , but when it comes time for me to buy in a months time I can not see ati's aiw drivers for windows or linux being much better and hence I will have to shop elsewhere.

? 64MB Riva GeForce 4 + Hauppage WinTV Theater ?

[Drashcan]

What is the advantage (if any) of this ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500 128 MB over a combination in the style Riva GeForce4 64 MB + Hauppage WinTV Theater???

Anybody experience with the Hauppage TV/Radio cards (under Linux)?

THX

Straight DIVX

[castlan]

Sweet. Have you recorded a full length movie with DIVX? How about MPEG2? Do they play under other programs, or are they proprietay/custom versions of these formats? Have you tried playing back these captures on another computer to see if they really are standard issue?

What kind of resolutions does it allow you to capture at? greater than 640x480? 320x240? 720p? How about what kind of framerates does it allow? How about Raw video? Are there any Lossless compression options?

Why is the sky blue? what is the sound of one hand clapping? What rhymes with orange? Wh... sorry about those last few, I guess I was on a roll. None of this is even necessary, but it would all be nice to know.

Re:Straight DIVX

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

I have with MPEG-2. A friend had a Hi-8 camcorder tape of him playing with his dogs (when they were still alive - the dogs, not my friend) that he wanted to transfer to a digital format.

I had just recently purchased and installed an AIW Radeon 8500DV on my machine running Win2K and thought this would be a perfect opportunity to check it out.

I captured at 720x480 at around 30fps (IIRC) in MPEG-2 format. I used Cyberlink's PowerDirector Pro software (free with my DVD burner) rather than the crappy Ulead software that ATI packages with the card and it turned out great.

I then used that data file to burn a SVCD (Super Video CD) in MPEG-1 (480x480) format and a standard video DVD in MPEG-2 (720x480) format, both of which turned out with much better quality than I would have ever expected.

If there were any dropped frames, they were not visible to my untrained eye. My friend and his wife were both very happy with the quality of the video.

I have also transferred video from my JVC DV Camcorder with the included Firewire ports, and it's just as easy to use.

Again, I recommend using the Cyberlink software over the Ulead software that comes with the card, but then when was the last time that the SE (special edition) softare that came packed with hardware was any good anyways?

Re:Straight DIVX

[seann]

High ho silver.

Have you recorded a full length movie with DIVX? How about MPEG2?
Yes. Yes.

Do they play under other programs, or are they proprietay/custom versions of these formats?
It's divx, it plays under any divx supported program.

Have you tried playing back these captures on another computer to see if they really are standard issue?
Yes. I send them to people all the time. (Home videos of camera, episode of star trek to my girlfriend who missed it because she was working)

What kind of resolutions does it allow you to capture at? greater than 640x480? 320x240? 720p?
It's hard to get away with caputing 720 mpeg, that's a lot of data at once for my 7200 ata-100 drive.

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[Anonymous Coward]

Pity you didn't think about it...

Plugging something into the component input is usaless if it isn't a component quality signal in the first place. An adapter cable gives you nothing.

DVD+RW, DVD-R

[castlan]

I don't know about HP specifics. But as I understand it, DVD+RW drives are supposed to write DVD+RW disks, and DVD+R. DVD+R is supposed to be fairly universal, much like DVD-R, but with a slightly higher chance of compatibility problems when compared to DVD-R disks.

Now in addition, most DVD-RW and DVD+RW drives can write to CD-R disks. Are you saying that that in assition to CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD+R, some HP drives can also write to DVD-R disks?

That doesn't seem likely, but if they do... Sweet! I have always avoided HP WORM drives since experiencing the continual crap they seemed to have put out since their 2x CD-R days. But if they are making a drive capable of DVD+RW, DVD-R, and CD-RW, then perhaps I should give them another chance....

Hey, have you checked out the functionality of your Matrox card under a Free Software OS? Perhaps the Xfree86ers have done a better job than Win2k in this case? That is, if you don't mind a seperate utility for your tuner functionality. As for hardware encoding, do you mean MPEG or MJPEG?

Re:DVD+RW, DVD-R

[(H)elix1]

The Register has links to most of the information on the DVD+R $100 upgrade, along with some other threads wworth reading. From personal experience, the DVD burner will create "generic" CD's (able to be used by nnormal CD-ROMs) if you enable a compatibility program if you use the DLA software (makes it a big floppy, closes session when you run the proggy). Only works for CDs, not DVDs. The "create data DVD" software does not work in any drive that I have tested, unless it is in the box tthat has the HP dvd100i (or the samsung cdrw/dvd sm-308b is the only other drive that can read these bloody DVD+RWs). My bad if I said DVD-R, it is DVD+R.... the +R are a few bucks cheaper today.... and will probably be the "bulk" CD+RW like we have today. As a side note, most of the software does not work on win2k server -- pro is ok, but they never say that on the box or press.

The matrox card plays tuxracer and quake3 our of the box. I tried the video capture stuff a while back, but it did not work well for me. The old G400 marvel did hardware MJPEG, which could be cut into different formats. The card did most of the work, so I could really make a 400mhz P-II w/SCSI drives go far. I'm not sure where things are today - I have access to a rt2000 whenever I need to chop real video - but for home use it is not worth the hassles.

NEVER update drivers for ATI

[gosand]

OMFG - don't get me started on ATI. I have an AIW-pro 32MB card. It was great after I installed it, never had any problems (ok, except with UT). Then one day I come to find out that they had new drivers/software. Since I thought the TV software could be better, I downloaded all of them. BIG BIG BIG mistake. After installing the new drivers, my video signal would just drop whenever it felt like it. Not playing games either, during normal PC activity. I couldn't get it back. My monitor gave the message "Video Cable Connected?". I had to reset the machine, and we all know how Windows likes that. (couldn't even CTRL-ALT-DELETE). I used to have no problems playing Ghost Recon, and after the driver install, it would only run for about 2 minutes before locking up. Several emails to ATI support went into the black hole.

It took several attempts, but I finally uninstalled the drivers and software, and installed the ones that came with my card. But even now, I still have the occasional problem that I never had before. Yeah, the TV functionality is pretty cool, and the main reason I got the card was to transfer some video tapes to digital format, but I highly doubt I'll buy another ATI card. YOU LISTENING ATI ???!!!!

Rat-bastards.

Two major drawbacks

[ScrewTivo]

First, it needs an IR controller so you could change channels if you require a cable box. Second, when DTV becomes a true standard encryption may be located in the TV not in the cable box so you won't be able to intercept the feed. In this case an existing AIW card will probably be obsolete for TV watching.

Anyway I gave my brother a 7500 AIW a few weeks ago and he loves it, but he doesn't stress his video cards.

Unified Driver Model

[Anonymous Coward]

NVIDorkIA (I hate them) has long had a unified driver release across its line of cards. Well, long as in several years. This meant that they updated drivers for old cards along with drivers for new ones, which meant that old cards support new OS's, get tiny performance advances once in a while, and generally improve over time (except when the drivers break).

ATI on the other hand for a long time had independent drivers, and just dropped support for old cards after a while. Recently they moved to a unified driver model for their Radeon cards. I guess it is too early to really tell, but the drivers are more stable and perform better than previous drivers, and they all get updated at the same time with the same driver set.

I hope they really do improve; it's too early to say for sure. Over the years I had plenty of stability problems with NVIDIA, but rarely visual defects. Until now ATI always had a good selection of both. I recently got a Radeon card, and it definitely beats the ATI card I had several years ago for both compatibility and stability, and to beat the NV part on stability, although it does have occasional problems showing a correct image. At least this time I have a little bit of confidence that support won't disappear within a year or two when it drops off the bottom of the sales chart.

Yogizmo!

[rodentia]

gizmonic. gizmonic. go, gizmo.

Why I won't buy another AIW

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an old AIW Pro (Rage Pro based) and I'm realizing it was a dumb purchase. How long does the average TV set last, 10 years? The AIW TV tuner is trash in about 2 when you replace the video card.

Re:Don't buy it! Drivers STINK

[WhaDaYaKnow]

It's supposed to be a cable from DVI to component. I'd think that should warrant for pretty damn good quality.

(OT) - the last questions nobody else would answer

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

Why is the sky blue?

Because if it was green, you'd never know when to stop mowing.

what is the sound of one hand clapping?

"Cl-" (other acceptable answers include "(whoosh)" and "Mu.")

What rhymes with orange?

"Door Hinge".

Glad to be of service :-)

Re:(OT) - the last questions nobody else would ans

[castlan]

Wise and generous, I applaud you, but only with one hand. I suppose you have never witness the great prophet Bartholomule provide a practical solution to this koan. I myself solved this riddle at an early age, before knowing that it was intended to be an unsurmountable challenge. Verily, the answer does produce less of a sharp, satisfying thump, and more of a hollow click, but it is nonetheless a sufficient answer.

Relax your hand, and then make firm your wrist, while flexing your finders. Occilate your hand primarily using your elbow, as if you would fly. Continue to oscillate your arm back and forth with greater force while keeping your fingers loose, and you will soon find your fingers maintain a momentem which breifly goes against the rest of your hand. The confilcting motions can symbolize your spiritual desires and your rational mind, or they can simpley show that you are a simpleton who likes to clap with one hand.

Now you should mediatate on the arthritis growing in your knuckles, and the marvelous inflammation in your carpals, without wasting any more time on a finger-rack... I mean, keyboard. That would be some mild computer-nerd S+M mixed in with trancendental philosophy it seems.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

One bad card four years ago turns you off to ATI forever? Nice logic.

Re:So...

[The Pi-Guy]

Yep. Absopositively. This was supposed to be a "high-end" card, it cost me MORE. And from what I've heard, the driver issue hasn't gotten any better.

--j