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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."
We seem to have gotten quite a lot of these lately, dear editors...
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.
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!
mogorific carpentry experiments
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.)
What's your damage, Heather?
- 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.========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
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.
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.
Evolution: love it or leave it
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.
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?
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?
Linux is unix training wheels, while BSD *is* unix.
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.
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.
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.
-AndrewJNR, NSO, The Don College
...
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).
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.
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?
Thanks for the link. That looks to be just the ticket.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
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...)
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.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
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.
..don't panic
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?
"Derp de derp."
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.
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
I miss not having the ability to capture TV images, but then again I don't watch much TV anymore anyway.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
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....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
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 :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
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.
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
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).
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?
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.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
gizmonic. gizmonic. go, gizmo.
illegitimii non ingravare
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?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
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."
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
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.
"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.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
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.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
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!
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.