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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."
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
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?
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.
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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).
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?
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.
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
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... : )
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.
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