Dual GPU graphics solution from ATi?

Graphics Guru writes "Last week TweakTown posted an exclusive picture of the ATi Radeon 8500 MAXX with believable accompanying information also regarding the highly anticipated ATi R300. 3DChipset is today reporting that they have confirmation that the 8500 MAXX is indeed real and is due to be shipped fairly soon. Here's what someone from ATi told them: "The ATI Radeon 8500 Maxx is for real and the card is already in full production and about to be shipped soon. ATi has finally nailed certain issues with the dual chip. Final testings have been done and you should here noise from ATi regarding this offering." You decide if it is real or not, a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions!"

Comments

Rocking v2.0.

[saintlupus]

You decide if it is real or not, a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions ...as soon as the next version of the drivers come out, I presume. This is an ATI product, remember.

--saint

Re:Rocking v2.0.

[linzeal]

With ATI's recent transition to the catalystunified driver model with frequent updates I would say that has already happened. Hell the rv250 and r300 have already been spotted in the last update, so they can't be that far off.

Re:Rocking v2.0.

[Alan Partridge]

how can you derive any information from that sentence? It's complete gibberish - if someone could explain to me how one might "rock (something) to massive proportions" I'd really appreciate it.

Re:Rocking v2.0.

[Marque_Off]

Unless the reliable, established tech that can get a month after month. No drivers. They promised drivers for this card out there. Then I think that buying this monster are no drivers for the slick talk of lying about driver out.

The gaming industry would that they were just as far as far as well. I, too, was a great job testing all of a flop. It's too hard to do the slick talk of producing Win2K drivers for today's games, but people to gameplay innovation. People don't want games just driving people aren't going to do the mod community is cool, but people aren't going to do the R300 has been delayed significantly, I think that these new video cards offer... the best with duel gpu problems, but people to write drivers about my words, there is slowing down as Windows2000. I, too, was released around the drivers!! They consistently LAG the samething about driver out.

I strongly discourage anyone from graphic intensive to some killer crazy cards....2 GPUs: that be? The technology the corner, so that be? The gaming industry is well-supported in one point. I upgrade windows to older cards in one point.

I think if Slashdot wants to get this one for today's games, but not next year's. And the doors to be part of money. HOWEVER, ATI stinks? Tom's hardware did.

Re:Rocking v2.0.

[brsmith4]

I have read this four times and have but one thing to say: i don't get it.

Re:Rocking v2.0.

[griblik]

Amen to that. I used to be a software tester, and did a lot of testing stuff on different platforms, OSs, branded kits etc. The ATI cards were generally good cards, but they threw up a lot of driver problems - if there was any sort of hardware issue in the test matrix, you could pretty much guarantee it'd be an ATI card that did it.

petition worked?

[larry bagina]

I wonder if this online petition had any effect...

ATI hopefully for Linux Doom III

[Anonymous Coward]

This GPU plus those 8500 OpenGL drivers being paid for by the weather channel should make a kick ass system for Doom III.

Stereo

[oever]

2 GPUs: that means 3D viewing. One for red and one for blue. I better find them goggles.

Re:Stereo

[jra101]

The goggles do nothing!

Re:Stereo

[Brymouse]

Mod Parent up, it a simpsons quote, from the epsiode when they film the new radioactive man picture in springfield.

Ranier Wolfcasttle (sp?) has a wave of sulfiric acid hit him, and his goggles don't help :-)

Re:Stereo

[ceejayoz]

So everyone who makes a Simpsons reference should be immediately modded up?

D'oh! (mod me up) :-/

Re:Stereo

[jandrese]

What? I'm not going to mod up some random offtopic post, even if it includes a badly quoted line from the Simpsons.

The real line should be: My eyes...the goggles--they do nothing!"

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

ATi

[Bongalot]

UntiL ATi makes their own *nix drivers, im stickin to Nvidia. Those 3rd party drivers for ATi are pretty shabby and not worth anybody's time.

-=Crazy stuff happens w/ the Bong and me.=-

Re:ATi

[dinivin]

UntiL ATi makes their own *nix drivers, im stickin to Nvidia.

You mean like the linux drivers that ATI wrote for the Radeon 8500 and 8800? Guess you'll be switching to ATI now, right?

Dinivin

Re:ATi

[linzeal]

They wrote them for the 8800 they just magically happen to work with the 8500, ;)

Re:ATi

[13Echo]

PowerVR is making some decent drivers for the Kyro boards. I use a Kyro 2 in my Linux box, and it plays all of the games just fine (Wolf, Quake, etc.) These drivers are just betas right now, but they are going to be switching to the same library as the Windows versions with the release of the first official drivers (akin to the nVidia driver model for Linux). The interesting thing is that these drivers seem to work faster in Linux already than they did in Windows. RTC Wolfenstien seems to be much more fluid in Linux for some reason. It will be interesting to see how the final drivers turn out.

I think that some of these companies are finally taking the initiative to write drivers for Linux. I hope that the trend keeps growing.

Which industry?

[FortKnox]

a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions!

Which industry would that be? The gaming industry is slowing down as far as graphics go. Mark my words, there is going to be a shift soon from graphic intensive to gameplay innovation. People don't want games to be any prettier (or don't notice much of a difference). Notice how the mod community is getting bigger and better? Its cause they take the graphics engines and add innovation.

I'm rambling, but I think that these new video cards aren't going to be this big explosion that they were in the past. Sure they are big and powerful, but people aren't going to fork over the cash to get this one when they can get a good GeForce2 that can play their games just as well.

Re:Which industry?

[MilesBehind]

I kinda doubt this. Looking at games coming down the pipe, like Doom 3, the new unreal tournament, neverwinter nights, etc, I am pretty sure that graphics are gonna be a factor.
People will never realize that they can use current hardware to play a large number of good games. Innovation that was key in games like X-com, elite and other classics will always be doomed to oblivion if it doesn't go hand in hand with visual flash.

Re:Which industry?

[Scaba]

Beliieve it or not, people actually may want both innovation and cooler graphics. Why do you think the two are mutually exclusive?

Re:Which industry?

[FortKnox]

Because they are both time restrictive. If you want a game with great innovation, you need to buy a graphic engine and work solely on the innovation. If you want pretty graphics, you spend a ton of time on the engine, and little on the game.

If you do both, either your innovation or your graphics will be outdated by the time you finish.

Re:Which industry?

[Telastyn]

Actually as far as I can tell the major limiting factors now wrt to graphics cards is heat and powersupply issues. About half of the people I know with a GF4 have had to make major modifications just to get the card displaying properly. Joe average doesn't want to swap power supplies, or add cooling fans; hell, Joe Average took alot of work just opening the case to put the card in...

Plus if anyone remembers ATI did this before with another MAXX card that suffered horribly from limited, crappy drivers that assumed too much, and didn't work. Good idea, bad irl.

Re:Which industry?

[chrysrobyn]

Which industry would that be? The gaming industry is slowing down as far as graphics go.

Hi, FortKnox, I'd like to disagree with your "marked words". I'd say that anything that dramatically increases the performance of graphical gaming will be welcome. I grew up playing PC-Man, Friendlyware PC Arcade and other ASCII games. I eventually progressed to Doom, to Quake (by way of Heretic, which I liked more than my friends). On opening day, I bought Warcraft III. Turns out my 16 meg Radeon doesn't play it perfectly smoothly, so I may end up buying a new video card by the end of the year for my dual G4. In my case, the vid card is clearly the bottleneck.

People have been talking a deal over the years about how consumers don't want anything prettier (or won't notice), they're happy with what they have. Game play is what's important. Don't try to tell me that Myst was more than an eye candy excuse. Sure, consumers are happy with what they have now, but it turns out that pretty is what sells in the stores -- nobody wants to read a novella describing "game play", they want to see screenshots!

I'm rambling, but I think that these new video cards aren't going to be this big explosion that they were in the past. Sure they are big and powerful, but people aren't going to fork over the cash to get this one when they can get a good GeForce2 that can play their games just as well.

You actually remind me of the neigh-sayers (or nay-sayers, depending on where you're from) a decade, two or three ago saying that games were nothing more than a distraction on computers. Nobody ever designs a computer for the things, and certainly nobody would fork out over $500 just to play games! Can you tell me which industry is driving which? I won't say that iD is single-handedly responsible for Intel's bottom line over the past 10 years, but I will say that consumer's demand for "prettier, better, smoother" has been responsible for a great many computer sales. They don't need 2GHz Pentiums / Athlons to balance their checkbooks or play with Mozilla (yet).

The ultimate in game play, I'm willing to bet, is an eyepiece or two that behaves as a huge, high-res screen, but takes up the entire field of view. That will be a great number of pixels (dare I guess 10k horiz by 5k vert per eye?) Maybe we'll have some game play innovations along the way, but there is certainly a need for more innovation. Perhaps we'll be stopping by 32" LCDs (or OLEDs) on the way, banks of seamlessly tiled conventionally sized screens, or even something different. The fact of the matter is, consumers are happy with what they have -- until they see something better. That's where the bucks are. Where would Gateway/ Dell/ Compaq/ Toshiba/ HP/ Apple be without those consumers wanting the next pretty thing?

Oh, and yes, I do see the mod community getting bigger. They even have some great successes. But, do you see them modding Wolf 3d? Doom I? Or do they move on, exercising the latest engines to the fullest of their abilities? Would they prefer engines that allow them to show on the screen what they have in their heads?

Re:Which industry?

[Jahf]

I'd have to agree and it is a welcome change. I was dreading being able to play Neverwinter Nights on my 800Mhz P3+Radeon All-in-Wonder, which is 2 years old now.

Turns out it runs fine at nearly the maximum settings. I'm quite pleased that I don't need to buy a 2+ Ghz machine just to do my preferred games.

Sure ... it would make things even speedier, but I got tired of having to upgrade every 12 months just to play the latest FPS or RPG.

It gives me a bit more confidence that around Xmas this year I can buy a 2+ Ghz machine and state of the art GPU and have a solid machine for 2+ years, which makes the upgrade far more worth it. Plus, it means there is a chance the new games will be worth playing through more than once.

All welcome shifts in the gaming world.

Re:Which industry?

[PapaZit]

On opening day, I bought Warcraft III. Turns out my 16 meg Radeon doesn't play it perfectly smoothly, so I may end up buying a new video card by the end of the year for my dual G4.

I wouldn't be so sure that it's your video card. Warcraft III plays fine at 1024x768 with all the options on on my Duron 800 with an old Voodoo 3 card. On my wife's new-ish iBook, 640x480 is still a little jerky with all of the options on.

I suspect a lack of Mac optimization from Blizzard.

Re:Which industry?

[linzeal]

Ok with the new unreal, doom, and lithtech engines all readily available why would anyone make their own engine?

Re:Which industry?

[Anonvmous Coward]

The specs on the box require an Intel p2 400 or better, and a Mac 400 or better...

Seeing as how Mac's got a significantly higher instruction per cycle ratio, I do think your comment about lack of Mac optimizations is justified.

Anybody wanna bet it was just a recompile? heh. :)

Re:Which industry?

[jafuser]

Tell me about it. When I got Morrowind, I first got a GForce4, but that seemed to have trouble with my existing system, so I decided to go ahead and get a new system. So I upgraded from a 1Ghz Athlon to an Athlon 2000+, new case, *8* fans, DDR memory, and since the A7V333 supported simple hardware raid, I bought two 80G drives and reinstalled Win2K on it, all for one game :)

I had two ATI All-In-Wonder cards, and I finally abandoned them when I got tired of constantly hearing about bugfixes coming "soon" that never came. That, and I really hated their application software for TV and video capture. I hate overdone metaphor GUI's.

Re:Which industry?

[gmhowell]

I've got an Athlon XP 1800+, GF3, etc. And while it cost a bit a few months ago, I'll be set for at least a couple of years. The last machine I built lasted for about five years. It's good if games don't require the latest and greatest, because that means I don't have to split my money between hardware and software. If I just have to buy software, I can buy more games.

Re:Which industry?

[afidel]

hahaha. Sorry but when NWN runs at an average of below 30fps and a low of like 6fps on a 1.2gig athlon with a geforce3 ti200 I doubt graphics will slow down any time soon. This is with full graphics details but environment shadows off and the number of light sources at minimum, 1280*1024. With everything turned on it was like 24fps avg 4fps min. This is for an RPG, not some first person shooter like doom3.

Re:Which industry?

[TaliesinWI]

Wouldn't NWN look a touch nicer with shadowing and light sources on, with the res bumped down to 1024*768 or even 800*600?

Re:Which industry?

[afidel]

it's all about field of view =)
I need to see a good distance so I can snipe or cast more than one spell on a guy before he gets into melee range. Besides even with number of light sources turned down and environment shadows off the game looks amazing. Last night I came out of a cave into a full thunderstorm, there was rain falling and creating ripples on the pond in front of me, the grass was moving with the wind and the trees were swaying. The lightning was bright and even though I have light sources turned down it made some nice effects. I think that Bioware needs to look at the light source issue because it appears that some scenes are creating more light sources than there are available hardware lights, which means that performance turns to rubish whenever this happens. Other than that the game is absolutly georgeous.

Re:Which industry?

[Quarters]

The game oriented graphics card industry will not slow down until there are cards that can do polygon/pixel resolution at at least 1600x1200 with enough fill rate to draw ten passes and still maintain at least 60-75fps.

Once you can get multi-pass polygon/pixel resolution at acceptable performance levels the need textures becomes moot and very interesting things will start to be produced.

Re:Which industry?

[robson]

Mark my words, there is going to be a shift soon from graphic intensive to gameplay innovation.

+1 Funny.
Seriously, it's a good and noble goal, but it's not realistic. Game publishing houses are out to make money, and they have a passionate fear of risk. Gameplay innovation is a significant risk.

Vote with your money. If you buy innovative games, publishers will listen.

Re:Which industry?

[robson]

Ok with the new unreal, doom, and lithtech engines all readily available why would anyone make their own engine?

Because it's a seductive challenge. It's seductive for engineers because it's a new engine, their engine, from the ground up. It's seductive for designers and artists because they might end up with an engine that's more powerful than anything they could have licensed.

It's often a recipe for disaster, though -- developing an engine and a game at the same time. Trying to generate content without being able to prototype it in the game.

Re:Which industry?

[ThrasherTT]

Field of view changes very little with changes in resolution. Go ahead, try it.

FOV is based on the "camera angle" (which is probably hardcoded in NWN) and width/height ratio. In 800x600, you actually have a wider FOV than in 1280x1024.

Re:Which industry?

[ThrasherTT]

I disagree. At that point, we'll be looking for polygons> per pixel and 2400x1800 resolution with internal 64 bit color calculations, 64 bit Z buffers, 100Hz, etc.

We will only be satisfied when we can jack our optic nerve directly into the video system.

Re:Which industry?

[Disk Pickable]

If you do both, either your innovation or your graphics will be outdated by the time you finish.

In which case, you end up with Team Fortress 2 - at last report, scheduled for release in time for Christmas, 2029.

Re:Which industry?

[Cuthalion]

I'm pretty much hitting the edge of what my GeForce 2 MX can do. While it's not got the fillrate of the actual GeForce 2, either one of them will be lacking features required by Doom3, and my card certainly is struggling on most recent titles. (i.e. Dungeon Siege, America's Army, hell, even RTCW could have run better with a faster video card)

Re:Which industry?

[FortKnox]

WC3 is a great example of placing graphics and not modifying gameplay.

Argue all you want, its still your standard RTS.

Re:Which industry?

[Cynikal]

untill games are 100% realistic in speed, motion and graphics, there will never be a "fast enough" videocard. don't predict things that you cant be sure of, or some day someone will laugh at you cause you thought 640K was more than anyone would ever need...

Re:Which industry?

[jafac]

Quote me as saying, in 1980, while sitting in front of a TRS-80 model II, with my 8th-grade teacher trying to explain how to calculate interest on a home loan:
"Games are the only legitimate use for computers."

Re:Which industry?

[mrfunnypants]

Thats a pretty seclusive statement. Yes I could argue all I want, but you are incorrect. Is it an RTS? Yes most certainly. Is it a standard, whatever the flip that means, RTS? No, I and anyone else with anyone intelligence to be inclusive would agree.

W3 has included so much new innovation for anyone to say its just standard either a.) hasn't played it b.) Has abs. no clue about what they are talking about or c.) Is a troll.

The answer I would say for you is C., so congrats Troll continue trolling away. Ahh jeesh and I bothered replying to this dribble.

Re:Which industry?

[darc]

Listen, you can't charge more for innovation! You CAN charge money for better graphics. nVidia can charge us $400 for a Geforce 5, but blizzard can't make a really innovative game and charge us $400 for it. It simply doesn't work. Innovation demands a longer development cycle, which is clearly not good.

Bottom line: Pretty colors can be a subsitute for innovation, according to game developers. Anything that sells eh?

Re:Which industry?

[robson]

Listen, you can't charge more for innovation! You CAN charge money for better graphics. nVidia can charge us $400 for a Geforce 5, but blizzard can't make a really innovative game and charge us $400 for it. It simply doesn't work. Innovation demands a longer development cycle, which is clearly not good.

Bottom line: Pretty colors can be a subsitute for innovation, according to game developers. Anything that sells eh?

I think you're confusing game developers with hardware vendors.

Re:Which industry?

[Moonshadow]

I completely agree. I recently got ahold of a copy of Quake III, and had it running at home (college student at home for summer). My 14 year old brother, who is a gamer himself, asked what I was playing. Upon my response, he promptly retorted "that's it?? People make this big deal over Quake III - it looks just like every other FPS out there!"

I remember when Quake 3 first came out - it was amazing. Now, it "looks like every other game out there". Utterly incredible. I remember the days of playing Dangerous Dave and Zaxxon on my 8088, and thinking that they were incredible. In past years, graphic quality has been critical because there has been so much room for expansion. However, now, there's only so much you can do with eye candy.

The next area of innovation will be in gameplay. FPSes were innovative...when Wolenstein and Doom came out. There have been a few definitive games, but for the most part, there has been little innovation in that arena. Now, there's room for it.

Doom 3, while looking amazing, will not do well if the gameplay isn't above par. It's possibly the best-looking game to date, but gamers are becoming increasingly disillusioned with graphic candy, and are craving better gameplay.

Re:Which industry?

[talonyx]

But, do you see them modding Wolf 3d? Doom I?

Yes, there are still people modding Doom 1 and 2... go over to doomworld.com and check it out. Helluva lot more gameplay than today's "walk around corner and kill single enemy" bullshit.

Re:Which industry?

[MullerMn]

(by way of Heretic, which I liked more than my friends)

It's a bit sad when you like a game more than you like your friends.

Perhaps you need better friends?

Re:Which industry?

[Razor Sex]

Not everyone wants to mod the newest, best engine. Take www.teambg.com for instance. They are still modding the Infinity Engine, which is the engine used in the Baldur's Gate saga, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, and probably some others I'm forgetting, even though Neverwinter Nights (made by the same developers as all then aforementioned games) has coem out with a MUCH better engine.

Dual GPUs

[Rupert]

Right, like all those dual CPU desktops I see.

Re:Dual GPUs

[Lionel Hutts]

It is very hard to parallelize most ordinary computation. It is very easy to parallelize much of 3D rendering (though not all of it). It shouldn't be surprising if we end up in a world with single-CPU systems with large arrays of graphics processors.

Re:Dual GPUs

[DrSkwid]

like this one

dual p3 1ghz

I got the mobo & cpu's cheap with an eye to moving it to a server when I buy my next PC at probably around the 4Ghz mark

Re:Dual GPUs

[sporktoast]

What a GREAT idea!

I'll start up a computer company to capitalize on the hig demand for such systems. We'll put all the horsepower into killer graphics and put them in cool looking boxes.

I think I'll call the company SGI. With a plan like this, we'll be around FOREVER.

Re:Dual GPUs

[mcdade]

Ya.. well there is a large difference between dual CPUS and dual GPUS, for starters if you look at the time a cpu is busy verses not, it's a huge difference. The cpu is only busy about 20% of the time, the rest of the time it's idle, unless you run seti or dnet, which will use the idle time in the background, but most computer systems are busy only when you load a program or doing some sort of work (no, reading slashdot isn't 'work'). Rest of the time the processors just sit there and does nothing.. well they keep the system going but that's it. As for a GPU, while you are playing quake 3 arean, those processors are blazing away the entire time you are playing, they never stop working, so having two would definately be an advantage.

Dual CPU's on the desktop are a waste of money, by the time you need the extra horsepower, it's cheaper to buy a new chip which will be faster (moore's law), though i have found using dual cpu'ed servers give it about an extra year of life at a fraction of the cost. Currently using a dual 500mhz celeron, which is 2 yrs old and there is still no load on the system, having that extra processor to handle tasks on a true multithreaded OS rocks!

Re:Dual GPUs

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Dual CPU's on the desktop are a waste of money, by the time you need the extra horsepower..."

That's not necessarily true. I've been running dual for a couple of years now, and the benefits I see to it are far deeper than adding 'extra horsepower'.

I'm a 3D artist. I use Lightwave primarily, but also use Photoshop and After Effects quite extensively. I spent a LOT of time waiting for stuff to get done. My boss got me a dual Athlon 1600 with a gig of RAM early this year. She didn't get it for me because she wanted me to halve my rendering times, but rather she wanted me to make better use of my time while the computer was busy.

Lightwave is multithreaded, but not very elegantly. As a matter of fact, I rarely enable the multithreaded option. Instead, while it's rendering, I set up processes on the other processor to continue on with what I'm doing. Sometimes I'm building the next model, sometimes I'm generating a texture in Photoshop, or I'm setting up a composition in After Effects.

So while my computer is busy rendering, I'm still busy being productive. Some of you are saying "Yeah, but you'll never get 2x the processing out of it." And you know what? That's basically true, at least in a benchmark point of view. I get close to double clock speed when I have a rendering running on each processor, but I doubt I hit 2x. I don't need 2x anymore, though. About a year ago I started layering my animations. That means that my computer would render elements of a scene, which render much faster than the entire scene. As each frame is generated, it gets added to the composition in After Effects. So while my computer is rendering, I'm busy in After Effects getting it all put together. This sure beats waiting for the rendering to get completed. Heck, thanks to this technique (and the dual proc), I rarely have 'over-the-weekend-renderings' that have the potential to go horribly wrong.

Would I be better off with a second machine? No. For the amount if money that was spent on my machine (roughly $1,500 sans monitor and hard drives), I probably could have gotten more 'pixels rendered' per minute. But, it'd be a huge blow to my workflow switching between two computers. It wouldn't take very long for the 100mbit connection between them to become a huge bottleneck. As a matter of fact, I'm not sure it would have been all that cheaper. We'd still have to get me high end video cards and monitors for each machine.

Are dual proc desktops for everybody? Not really. The best benefit you'd see is that Windows 2000 behaves a LOT better. Explorer and IE are both very multithreaded, and are much more responsive. As a matter of fact, my Athlon 1.2 gig machine at home felt sluggish compared to my old Dual P3 550. It kicked the 550's butt at rendering, but when it came to browsing the web, doing email, etc, the dual 550 was much more responsive.

In short, dual processor machines have their place. If you primarily play games, you probably won't care much. But if you do CPU intensive work, it'll make your life a lot easier. Unless, of course, you like having nothing to do while your machine is busy.

Re:Dual GPUs

[Shadow-Man]

You know SGI is still around and making some of the most powerful media/graphics workstations around don't you?

Re:Dual GPUs

[Nameles]

I second this. My boss at work runs this for his workstation/server. OC'd them to 1125 each. It works rather nice. Has almost .5tb to boot.

Re:Dual GPUs

[gurensan]

I've had a dual celeron 433 for two years now. It sucks when doing software OGL. However, I *can* run a decent GPU and both of these processors in a sufficiently multi-threaded app and get performance that blows away all sorts of new-fangled 60ghz machines. The big issue isn't how much faster it can do what it does, but that it can do it twice in nearly the same time.
I'll never go back to uniprocessors.

Re:Dual GPUs?

[Oculus Habent]

3dfx tried this before they went under. They made a few really powerful cards. They molex connectors on the card to power the fans.

I would expect much greater things from ATI. If the power/price combo is right, nVidia may have to consider the dual as well.

Really now...

[levik]

... Do we need to have a Beowulf cluster of chips and memory on a video card? This is yet another example of the trend in cumputing that has strived to make things better by making them bigger and giving us more of them.

"Optimization, shmoptimization! Just cram a second GPU in there and we'll be fine."

I really wish people would just stop coming out with new hardware for a couple of years, so that we can all save a few upgrade bucks, and the software industry can get their act together, and start writing clean, well optimized, stable programs, instead of trying to always catch up to the bleeding edge that nobody really asked the hardware companies to push.

Re:Really now...

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently purchased Neverwinter Nights. Up until a couple days ago I was using an olrder ATI Rage-128. While not the highest end card it should have ben fine with the low settings. It wasn't. it was downright embarasing. On the least detailed setting it lagged. I've seen older games look better and have higher frame rates.

But, for various reasons I decided to replace the video card and went with an Nvidia Ti-4600. (wanted, and use the video-in), NWN now runs reasonably well with everything maxed. A suprise since my machine is a Pentium III.

While this should be just another, 'new video card solved the problem', it isn't. Nothing explains why the performance sucked as bad as it did except NWN being written for the latest and greatest Nvidia card. Disregarding other cards in the industry.

If it weren't for how horrible ATI's drivers are I would have bought a new-er ATI card. But, Nvidia owns the market, and ATI can't write drivers worth a damn.

Re:Really now...

[GigsVT]

So you spend less money on hardware, and more money on software. Big gain. In games especially, programmers time is not free.

Re:Really now...

[idfrsr]

this is a good point...

If we keep pushing the hardware requirements of our systems up, I would hate to have to see what the power bill of my first game of next latest/greatest FPS will be.

If booting my system ever causes my block's lights to dim, I think we may have a problem...

I can just see now....

"Check out this, its the new GeForce 10X, it comes with its own tiny nuclear power plant. Have to watch out for melt down, but its lead lined in case it blows... "

Re:Really now...

[levik]

I think it is a big gain, since you will only be spending money on the software if it offers tangible improvement in stability or performance or both.

With today's constant hardware upgrade cycles you can be forced to upgrade to a new OS because your old one does not support USB 2.0c, it only supports USB up through 2.0b. And you're screwed, since that new digital camera you got only works with 2.0c. So you end up spending money on new software and new hardware.

With the hardware part of the equation frozen, you would only be forced to spend on the software, and that spending would be motivated by tangible improvements rather than broken back-compatibility.

This is all a pipe dream of course. But I sometimes wonder... Why is my 1.4G pentium 4 not even 10 time faster than my 33MHz 386 was in '92?

Re:Really now...

[idfrsr]

I also had problems running NWN when I got it. It had to with OpenGl drivers supported by microsoft no less.

I have had my card for nearly 2 yrs now and you think that I wouldn't have to fiddle with it, but no go...

That said I love the game:)

Re:Really now...

[div_2n]

There does exist a duality between power requirements vs. speed. The only problem is that the the majority of R&D work being put into chip development from chip manufacturers is going towards speed. Only every now and then do we hear little blips about some new technology that is 10 to 20 years away that will reduce chips size and ultimately power consumption.

Of course, it is always possible that distributed computing and clustering coupled with ultra high speed bandwidth could turn computing power into a ubiquitous utility just like electricity. But that is another discussion altogether.

Re:Really now...

[linzeal]

That's not quite true anymore. The new catalyst drivers and even the cyborg custom driver sets are doing pretty good. When there was a problem with gta3 rendering too much fog it was fixed in a matter of days, pretty slick.

Re:Really now...

[GigsVT]

Why is my 1.4G pentium 4 not even 10 time faster than my 33MHz 386 was in '92?

I don't know about you, but I remember running Windows 3.1 on a 486/33, it was slow as hell.

You may have forgotten after using fast computers for so long, but really, the times I have to actually wait for a program to load are few and far between, whereas the 486 had me waiting for up to 30 seconds if I tried to do anything even a little complex.

Really the only programs I use now with noticable load times are Mozilla and Nautilus, and things like that. I rarely use them anyway, I use Opera as my main browser, and the shell to manage files.

Re:Really now...

[Zathrus]

Probably because it's cheaper to build new hardware than it is to try and optimize what's out there. Seriously.

If you can spend $1M on hardware development and come out with a new chip that's 20% faster or spend $1M on software and put out drivers that are 5% faster, where is the money better spent? Besides which, you can charge for the new hardware. Charging for the new drivers is not acceptable to consumers.

Freezing the hardware for "a couple years" is not acceptable. Companies will simply cease to exist. Upgrades are part of the business model of the industry, and that modern systems are capable of doing virtually all tasks home and business users would require of them is part of the reason for the technology bust in the past couple years.

Look, it's simple. If you don't play the latest and greatest games, or don't care if you can play those games at uber-high res with all the effects turned on, then you don't need to upgrade. And yes, you can generally play the new games just fine on an older computer (my system is an Athlon 750, 512MB PC133, 32MB GF2 and runs DS and NWN just fine. Plays Q3 just fine. Will it play UT2 just fine? I doubt it... but it's 2 years old now).

As for "nobody asked hardware companies to push" -- speak for yourself. Go look at the Doom3 demo. You simply can't do that on current hardware with any semblance of speed. Yeah, you can run it on a GF3/4/ATI 8500, but you'll have to run it at a lower resolution and turn off features. Run it on a GF2? An ATI 7500? An MX anything? Maybe. It won't have anywhere near the eye candy.

Once we're to photorealistic scenes being rendered in realtime with no drops below ~60 fps on large, outdoor scenes you can say we've gone far enough. And by that time we'll probably want 3D or something else that will continue to push the bleeding edge.

Until then, there is room for improvement. And there's a lot more room on the hardware side then there is on the software side.

Re:Really now...

[goldmeer]

Why is my 1.4G pentium 4 not even 10 time faster than my 33MHz 386 was in '92?

Probibly because you don't have DOS 3.3 and the application from 1992 installed. Who knows you might be able to get by with the old Word Perfect and Visicalc "office suite" I'm sure that the framerate on Microsoft Flight Simulator V2 would be impressive!

Too late

[Milinar]

This has been around for a while on Wildcat cards - you know, the ones that cost many thousands of dollars. If you're talking about the "industry", though, you can't leave them out.

Here's a URL:

mmmm

[idfrsr]

I would be interested to now how this architecture would work.

Would the piplines be split between each processor? or do they share the entire pipeline architecture? ...

Or do they have differently pipelines for each GPU?

All this questions....

Re:mmmm

[druzicka]

The previous version of ATI's MAXX video card used dual chips in a SLI (Scan Line Interleave) configuration. One chip would draw even numbered rows of pixels, while the other would draw the odd numbered lines.

Re:mmmm

[Pinky]

no, no, no, no.. ATI uses every second frame. One chip renders one frame the other renders the next. The way you run pixels shaders and the like doesn't differ in a multi chip card. It's like having two cards but each card re=nders every second frame. the main problem will be synchronizing the two cards so one card doesn't get too far ahead of the other I mean consider;

this is how it works in theory:

chip1 (working)
chip2 (working) / chip 1 (output on screen)
chip1 (working) / chip 2 (output on screen)
chip2 (working) / chip 1 (output on screen)
chip1 (working) / chip 2 (output on screen)

now.. if chip 2 has consistantly had easier frames then they might go out of sync and you'll get

time between frame 1 and 2 80ms (times are not realistic)
time between 2 and 3 1ms
time between 3 and 4 80ms
time between 4 and 5 1ms..

this is nt usefull to have two frames very quick then a big gap between the next frame.. ironically, FPS will remain high despite the fact you're only getting effective half the frame rate.

Doing SLI has its problem too.. like tearing (a probably worse problem).

I wonder if ATi's MAXX cards try to keep the distance between frames constant or if they run ansychronously...

single CPU cards are a better choice

[truffle]

The Nvidia Geforce 4 4200 generally runs most things about 50% faster than a radeon 8500 and costs less. It's definitely the best value gamer card on the market.

Here's a good article with some benchmarks on this great value card.


http://www.hothardware.com/hh_files/S&V/abit_ti_ 42 00.shtml

This is a nice concept card, but it's not going to put ATI on top.

money for moogles

Re:single CPU cards are a better choice

[ShavenYak]

My Pricewatch search found the cheapest Ti4200 card to be a Gainward at $138. I found a Radeon 8500 for $93. Both prices include shipping. Looks to me like the Ti4200 is about 50% more expensive for the 50% greater performance. The performance difference is even debatable; the price is not.

Re:single CPU cards are a better choice

[linzeal]

Wtf are you talking about? Show me a single 4200 that costs less than an 8500, I'm waiting. The 8500 was made to compete with the gf3, not the gf4. Apples and Oranges.

Re:single CPU cards are a better choice

[Pulzar]

I don't know where you shop, but 8500 is significantly cheaper at every store you can find, and the performance is almost the same! (Tom's Hardware VGA charts).

Re:single CPU cards are a better choice

[ShavenYak]

Erm, I merely corrected a post that had an incorrect price comparison between the Radeon 8500 and the GeForce4 Ti4200. Call me a TRUTH afficionado if you like. I have no special love for ATI, in fact I'm considering buying a GeForce because my old Rage 128 card rarely breaks 40fps in Q3, and I have no idea when good Radeon drivers for Linux will materialise.

Re:Bull

[levik]

Ummm... ATI had nothing to do with the voodoo 5, you know that, right? Anyway, the ATI driver support is supposedly improving. Maybe if they concentrated on making solid drivers about figuring how to make things look faster in Quake3, they would have a better reputation on the market.

But..

[iONiUM]

But is it going to be Cg compatible?

Maybe the next computer animated movie will be real time rendered in the theatre by a computer using this card.

Two really good reasons to avoid ATI

[CathedralRulz]

I, too, was once impressed by the slick talk of ATI marketing. Yet today I strongly discourage anyone from buying an ATI chip. Here are two solid reasons.

1) ATI has a history of lying about driver support. The Rage Fury MAXX was released around the same time as Windows2000. I, like many other people, believed ATI when they said that they would develop drivers for the platform, that they were just around the corner, so that buying this card over the already-Win2K compatable NV cards would not be a waste of money. HOWEVER, ATI left the Maxx buyers high and dry when they announced, several months later, that they were incapable of producing Win2K drivers and had given up trying.

2) They consistently LAG the cards produced by NVIdiea by wide margins and, while trying to stuff a bunch of useless features down dev's throats, lack the freedom of a programable GPU that the Geforce3 (and higher) cards offer... the cards that game developers are all optimizing their hottest new titles for.

Want a little evidence of how badly ATI stinks? Tom's hardware did a great job testing all of the cards in one huge benchmark here.

Re:Two really good reasons to avoid ATI

[roju]

While I agree with you that I wouldn't recommend ATI to someone looking for a hardcore performance card, well, or a performance card at all, I have to disagree with you on your second point in (2).

I seem to recall reading many an article on how much better ATI's programmable GPUs are. Something to do with the NVidia cards only allowing like 8 operatations in the vertex shaders, whereas ati cardds allow much more freedom.

I can't remember any specific links, but if you really want I'll look into it. If I'm mistaken, let me know, I'm curious as to how the hardware stands these days. Those benchmarks were just painful to look at though, I have an AIW Radeon, and ouch.

Re:Two really good reasons to avoid ATi

[The Pi-Guy]

Yup. I, too was fucked out of my money, by their
awful driver support.

About 4 years ago, when I was buying my new PC
(for the time... 400MHz P2), I had never heard of
nVidia. I had two options: nVidia card (cheaper)
or ATi card (more expensive.)

Well, never having heard of nVidia, I went ATi.
HAH! There were never any drivers for my poor ATi
Rage LT Pro... MAYBE if I was lucky, I could get
a half-decent framerate in the DirectX sample...
but there was NO OpenGL acceleration at all!!
Mind you, this was under 98, NOT 2000 or any
other platforms that are especially difficult.
The Linux drivers (UTAH-GLX) weren't much better
either - every other launch of a 3D app, the
machine would go down, requiring me to SSH in and
reboot. (I couldn't just restart the X server,
that didn't work. ARRRGGHHH!)

But, we also had another machine with an ATi
card, that time a P2-450 with (I believe) the
same card, except with digital out. That machine
ran 2000. Well, there were drivers once, all
right... the "recommended" drivers were the ones
that came with 2k (they said it themselves!), and
THEY SAID that those drivers didn't provide
acceleration. So, they also had the "alternate"
drivers. I gave those a shot - couldn't hurt
anything, no? I grabbed those. Now, I have an ATi
logo sitting in the taskbar, allowing me to
adjust nothing since it's a LCD flat-panel. It
looked promising... I ran my little app, Snake3D. The machine locked hard. "#$!%!!" I remember
not even trying DirectX, and I immediately went
back to the software drivers.

So, learn from my fuck-ups, and don't buy it
until you see it running in your favorite OS
(whatever it may be), running your favorite game.
(Preferably something graphically intensive -
make sure it's not software rendering, and turn
it to high quality.)

Or, if you just want to screw off ATi for fucking
everyone else off with high-priced cards and
missing drivers, go for a GF4. You don't need a
duallie GFX card anyway. :)

But whatever you choose, have fun!
--j

Re:Two really good reasons to avoid ATI

[Pulzar]

Want a little evidence of how badly ATI stinks? Tom's hardware did a great job testing all of the cards in one huge benchmark here

That's your evidence? 8500 gets slightly lower scores than Ti4200, and costs almost 50% less. True, 4400 and 4600 are faster, but price/performance easily goes to 8500.

Re:Two really good reasons to avoid ATI

[shawnkirst]

2) They consistently LAG the cards produced by NVIdiea by wide margins and, while trying to stuff a bunch of useless features down dev's throats, lack the freedom of a programable GPU that the Geforce3 (and higher) cards offer... the cards that game developers are all optimizing their hottest new titles for.

Uhhm. No. That's not even slightly correct. You are just flat out wrong there pal. The R200 (Radeon 8500/FireGL 8x00) do in fact have programmable GPU's. As a matter of fact, R200 is the only card out ATM that can do DX8 ps1.4, and ATI's extensions to OpenGL for fragment programming is vastly superior to anything that nVidia has. And if anyone is cramming stuff down the throats of the development community, it's nVidia. With all the hype and malarkey flying around their announcement/release of Cg.

Re:bad news for Linux?

[levik]

Oh please... Anyone who is going to be interested in such a card will probably not want to get it to play DVDs or use Photoshop. And a serious gamer is probably a Windows user to begin with. However good Linux's desktop support is getting recently, Windows is still running circles around it when it comes to gaming. It's just a fact of life.

Re:Cool

[DeltaSigma]

If you were paying attention to John Carmack you'd know what cards are already bringing it to life. Specifically the Geforce4 TI 4600, currently appears to be the Quake God's best reccomendation, though Radeon's 8500 series is rumored to be what was running the Doom III preview at the recent E3.

Reading over Carmack's finger, one can see that he is currently having the most success with NVidia drivers and the card will therefore not only be fast, but should support every feature he builds in.

I'm currently building my own system that is focused on Doom III. My best reccomendation for a graphics card is by Gainward; the GeForce 4 PowerPack! Ultra/750 XP Golden Sample. It retails for right around $350.00. However (as far as I know), it still holds the best benchmarks of the GeForce4 series.

There is something to be said about Carmack's opinion on ATI hardware (which is good overall), but for the sake of assuring your computer will be running Doom III perfectly I must stand by the opinion that the GeForce4 TI 4600 is what you need...

If there are specs...

[Cyclops]

...that allow XFree86 drivers to be built and work potentially as well (or better) as their proprietary couterparts (or even better, if they work on Free Software drivers), I'll gladly buy this card. If not, oh well, my Matrox Millenium G200 still has pretty good 2D, and 3D is just about a tad slower than geforce's Free drivers (not the proprietary ones), so its a win-win situation... they sell one more card, and I finally can enjoy good and decent 3D :)

Cheers

Re:If there are specs...

[Fourier]

Quit spouting anonymous FUD. ATi has generally been pretty good about releasing specs to qualified XF86 developers. The original Radeon is currently supported pretty well by XF86 DRI, and 8500 support is in development. (The 8500 also runs using ATi's FireGL 8800 binary drivers.)

As for the 8500 MAXX, no word yet. Odds are it will probably be a while before XF86 supports both GPUs.

Wasted Cycles

[killmenow]

Assuming:

1. It's true
2. It is a viable product
3. reliable drivers become available
4. people buy them

How much wasted GPU cycles will there be? I mean, even die-hard gamers don't do it 24/7/365...So if a few thousand get out there in desktops that are only taxing these cards a few hours a day, how long until somebody writes a distributed processing app like seti@home or The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search to run on these GPUs?

I mean, if people can trick the TCP stack into doing distributed math, they can certainly trick these GPUs into doing it to...

Promises, promises...

[bachelor3]

...would surely rock the industry to massive proportions!

Yeah, they said this about the final Kiss tour as well.

Re:Promises, promises...

[Tenebrious1]

OMG, Kiss broke up???

Re:Bull

[Coolfish]

hear hear,

ati drivers are bollocks. as well as matrox.

i'm glad someone points this out everytime there is a story about these jokers releasing some whiz bang hardware that probably wont work cuz their drivers are poop!

-
uberfag, and proud of it.

Argh!

[Lethyos]

I *just* purchased an nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4200 a few days ago! I hate that one lemma that states that the new hardware you want will not come out until you've paid top-dollar for what's currently on the market.

Why?

[eison]

Isn't this throw-more-chips-at-the-problem, require-more-power-produce-more-heat-slow-down-inn ovation-in-everything-but-raw-speed idea a good part of what killed 3dfx?

Re:Why?

[Twiceblessedman]

Actually it was not releasing products on time and purchasing STB that killed 3dfx. ;)

Re:Why?

[Cecil]

Agreed. Some of us actually liked 3dfx's brute force ("more power!" *tim allen grunts*) approach to 3d.

A video card with it's own power connection? Sweet. Finesse is for weenies. ;)

There is a 2D & 3D GL driver for the Raedon 85

[Anonymous Coward]

I know this was a troll, but there is a driver for raedon cards.

Sure it is not specific to the latest card in this slashdot article, but I'm sure the drivers will be made to work with the new Raedon soon enough.

Dual GPUs aren't new

[wilpig]

I only saw one comment that came near this so far. If everyone here will recall 3dfx's parting shot before they left the industry was a dual gpu card called the Voodoo 5 5500 and they were working on a quad card also. With nvidia and ati being so competitive in the field it pushed out a good company from the market place which slowed down the innovation in the industry. Before the Voodoo 5500 came out there was the wildcat cards, they are still going for outrageous money for high end CAD systems. They had the ability to tie together multiple cards/GPUs and split up the video processing power. The only real drawback was you had to be running Windows NT4 no other drivers were ever released for them.

I say all of that just to come back to the point who really needs more than 60 fps anyway? Your eyes can't tell the difference much over the 40 - 50 range. So who really cares if your new GeForce4 can do 120fps in quake. My old voodoo 5500 does 40+ in very nice color.

Re:Dual GPUs aren't new

[RayChuang]

If I remember, ATI's Rage Fury board used two Rage 128 Pro chips on the video card. Problem was, the performance increase wasn't really worth the extra money for the two GPU's on a single card, especially when nVidia introduced the GeForce series of GPU's.

Think about it: the GeForce4 Ti4600 only needs one GPU chip to achieve its amazing 3-D performance; why bother with the engineering and chip cooling hassles of a dual-GPU setup?

Re:Dual GPUs aren't new

[Strog]

There were several dual chipset cards out there in the 3d workstation market. The term GPU came along with the Geforce 1. There was some reason to distinguish between chipset and GPU.

I have a dual chipset 3d Labs Oxygen RPM card sitting in a box at home. It has 64mb, dual outputs and won't do anything less than 24bit color. The drivers were NT 4.0 only but you could make them work with Win2k too.I haven't found any *nix support even from the commercial xserver vendors. Driver issues will kill you. This was a killer card running Maya 2.0 (later 2.5) on dual monitors on a dual cpu system with a gig of ram.

So it still sits in the closet gathering dust. Sad ending for a $1500 card (4 years ago) that still does decent OpenGL.

Re:Dual GPUs aren't new

[ejungle]

why bother with the engineering and chip cooling hassles of a dual-GPU setup?

Well, because they've been developing dual GPU technology for over half a decade now, it isn't terribly difficult for them to do. That, in combination with the fact (as the article mentions) that their next generation GPU is still in development. Releasing a dual GPU card is an effective way for ATI to stay competitive in the high-end consumer graphics segment whilst they finish development of their next GPU.

As other posters have mentioned, ATI is notorious for driver trouble. For the most part though, they are being sensationalist. With few exceptions, ATI drivers are plenty stable. Unfortunately, they are damn slow and do not make full use of the card's capability. An excellent example of this is the consistent disparity between DirectX and OpenGL benchmarks for ATI cards. Admittedly, on occassion ATI drops the ball. Such was the case with the Fury MAXX driver for W2K. Then the quake3.exe debacle.

The point is, I wouldn't recommend buying brand new tech from anyone, nVidia included. The reward of being an early adopter and having bleeding edge performance for a few months is easily outweighed by the risks. In the case of ATI, being stuck with crappy drivers for a while. In the case of nVidia, being stuck without Linux drivers until they decide to release them. Either way, I fail to understand why people blame the manufacturers for their own stupid purchasing decisions. Even in the case of a company promising this or that, and you basing your decision on it, that is a risk you took. Sure, you can be pissed off at the company all you like, it doesn't change the fact that it was you who made the purchasing decision.

Finally, I have a guess as to why ATI has such driver trouble. It seems to me that nVidia has much tighter co-ordination between their hardware and software teams. That is, their new chip designs recieve input from the software team. I'd guess that they won't put into silicon anything which would fundamentally break the driver codebase. ATI on the otherhand doesn't seem to have this level of integration. Their hardware team comes out with some amazing tech, but leaves the software team struggling to keep up, as they have to essentially start from scratch each time a new chip is designed. Even if I'm reading too much into the situation, it is clear there is better communication amongst nVidia's hardware and software teams than there is with ATI's. At least to the extent that nVidia's software team can start designing their drivers comparitively early in the development process.

Okay, I'm done ranting now. One thing of mention is that most of my boxen have ATI cards in them, and I've never owned an nVidia product. However, this doesn't mean that I'm an ATI fanboy.

Stop Slamming ATI

[N8F8]

I read a lot of people complaining about ATI. I think people need to put a little perspective on things. NVidia came out of the blue and used their superior 3D chipsets to grab the mainstream Video market. ATI's response was slow at first, but is really gaining steam. I've got a Mobility M4 in my laptop with great new OpenGL drivers. In my home PC I've got a Radeon 8500 LE that runs 99.9% of all the DirectX games. In the case of the former, my 2D performance was the biggest factor. In the latter, the price gap for comarative performance was a joke. $99 for the ATI Radeon 8500 LE (NewEgg.com) vs $180 for a Nvidia GF4 4400. NVidia is now using their market dominance to bleed the market (a familiar strategy that eventually backfires). Not to mention the beautiful All-In-Wonder I bought for my parent's computer that has the best MultiMedia and TV Tuner I've seen (DScaler ain't bad but can't seem to pick up as many stations).

For all you GNU/Linux junkies, ATI has been much more forthcoming in information for developing XF86 drivers than NVidia(proprietary binary only).

Re:Stop Slamming ATI

[Zathrus]

For all you GNU/Linux junkies, ATI has been much more forthcoming in information for developing XF86 drivers than NVidia(proprietary binary only).

People who whine about this just prove how inane and stupid the free software movement can be.

Look at this, and virtually every other thread, regarding ATI. See how many complaints there are about the poor drivers despite the superior hardware. Contrast to nVidia, whose drivers support every card made going back 3 years, have great performance, and are usually very stable.

Now tell me again how there aren't trade secrets in that driver code?

Re:Stop Slamming ATI

[Art Tatum]

Now tell me again how there aren't trade secrets in that driver code?

There aren't. ATi just sucks at writing drivers and nVidia doesn't.

Re:Stop Slamming ATI

[Zathrus]

Funny... seems that everyone but nVidia sucks at writing 3D driver code, since Matrox has similar issues.

Oh, but I suppose that nVidia should just give away whatever tricks they've built into the drivers to eek more performance out of lesser hardware.

Riiiiiight.

Re:Stop Slamming ATI

[gurensan]

Technical info is great but I'd like to see a sample implementation. That alternate frame rendering thing sounded great even when the rage fury maxx came out, but the XF86 drivers didn't do it. That's why I didn't buy the card. Why doesn't ATI just go ahead and release their Windows driver under the X license and let the XF86 people tweak it? They might get something that works just as well on both windows and X, and maybe better than they had originally released.

Re:Stop Slamming ATI

[WNight]

If nVidia has secret code in their drivers, it's because it's third-party code they aren't allowed to release.

They aren't trying (in a serious fashion) to hide any tricks from ATI or Matrox. Binaries aren't that hard to disassemble, especially when you can feed known data to them over and over again. It's hard for a layman to understand, but to a driver programmer, this is part of the job.

Re:Stop Slamming ATI

[The Man]

Have to disagree. Nvidia's drivers crashed my box hard at least a few times a week - even when I wasn't using GLX apps. Since I replaced the card with an ATI and started using the stock XFree drivers, no crashes. Imagine that. And, yes, I did use the very latest nvidia drivers. But then, it's hardly unusual for binary-only stuff to crash; I almost never have problems with anything I've built myself but any binaries from elsewhere seem to be highly crash-prone. So no thanks to that. The ATI card is plenty fast and X doesn't crash on me so I'll stay with it.

Re:Stop Slamming ATI

[KiwiSurfer]

Look at this, and virtually every other thread, regarding ATI. See how many complaints there are about the poor drivers despite the superior hardware. Contrast to nVidia, whose drivers support every card made going back 3 years, have great performance, and are usually very stable.

This may be good for Microsoft and Linux users, but what about users of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and all the other x86 OSes? Users of these OSes (including myself) have to put up with the substandard "nv" driver, which does not even support hardware OpenGL. Even the open-source S3 drivers has more features (such as XVideo support) than the standard nVidia drivers, despite the fact nVidia cards are clearly superior to S3 cards from a hardware perspective.

In contrast, ATi is very well supported across many of the various x86 OSes which XFree86 supports. The ATi driver, which was developed using funding from ATi even does hardware OpenGL aswell as many other enchancments. ATi, aswell as companies like S3, has done more for open-source software than nVidia has done. They have donated an entirely open-sourced driver to XFree86, enabling it to be ported over to different systems -- while nVidia has opted to only provide a driver for Linux systems running XFree86 only.

I bought a nVidia TNT2 card just so I could get a video card that worked with FreeBSD/XFree86. But my next purchase will be an ATi card due to the simple fact that it is superior to nVidia when it comes to drivers that works on FreeBSD/XFree86. I couldn't care less about the quality of the Windows drivers since I hardly use Windows these days.

And in a year or so

[prisoner]

when they get the drivers straightened out, I'll think about buying one.

Picture

[jwilhelm]

Here's a picture of it off the forum:
http://www.jeffwilhelm.com/files/r250.jpg

Re:Picture

[gazbo]

Right - so there's an S-video out, a vga out, but just what the fuck is that massive connector in the middle?

Re:Cool

[levik]

Might wanna hold on to that cash :) Carmack himself said that by the time Doom III is out there will be a new generation of cards that are much more suited to running it.

Re:Bull

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Cat,

The rage maxx Fury had a 98 driver, in fact im running it on my only 98 box in the house. Did you mean a 2000 driver? That doesnt exist, YET.

The driver released was 95/98/me only

Get your fact straight before posting.
In Fact heres the link,

http://www.ati.com/support/products/pc/rage128pr o/ ragefurymaxxdrivers.html

Re:Cool

[undeg chwech]

I'm currently building my own system that is focused on Doom III.

Why?

If you wait until the game is released you can buy the same hardware for half the price.

Linux 3d Support

[linux_warp]

I got a radeon 8500 right now and I regret the day I ever bought it. No 3d acceleration support in linux. Until they fix that the next card I buy will be a nvidia. Anyone know when ATI plans to make drivers for their cards for linux?

Re:Linux 3d Support

[foniksonik]

Why didn't you should take it back for a refund and get a card that works for you?

Re:Linux 3d Support

[dinivin]

People really need to do a little research before posting here...

In fact, there are two sets of 3D drivers for the Radeon 8500 currently available:

1) Closed source DRI drivers available from ATI
2) Open source DRI drivers available from the DRI development team (very new, probably very unstable).

Dinivin

Re:Linux 3d Support

[linux_warp]

Odd, please post the links to these closed source ATI drivers, I have yet to find them.

They have drivers for their other cards, but not the radeon.

Re:Linux 3d Support

[dinivin]

ATI's linux driver page

The drivers for the FireGL also work on the Radeon 8500, which has the same 2D and 3D core.

Dinivin

Multiple 3d contexts?

[yuktar]

I'm hoping that multiple GPUs will mean the ability to smoothly handle multiple GL contexts. This is the main thing that still separates consumer level cards from the professional quality ones, like the various 3DLabs offerings. If you've ever tried to run multiple OpenGL applications at once, or possibly multiple D3D apps as well, you've probably suffered severe 3D slowdown due to the overhead required by the context switching.

Feel the heat

[wazzzup]

Is it me or sometime soon are we going to have to plug our computers into the 220 socket where the washing machine used to be?

Besides, who needs clean clothes when your getting 200 fps ;o)

Re:Feel the heat

[Lord_Slepnir]

Look at it this way...if you get hungry while playing quake, you can just pop some cookie dough into the CD drive, and 10 mins later, cookie!

Re:Feel the heat

[radish]

Cool, does that mean everyone in europe (220-240 is standard here) will get to play games faster than you guys? :)

Re:Feel the heat

[ThrasherTT]

I'll certainly need clean clothes after sitting next to a 300 degree F radiator playing games for hours on end, drooling over my 200 fps.

If my original Radeon VIVO

[shepd]

Hadn't constantly crashed my Win2k box when I bought it for $600, I might not be so bitter.

But when you write a driver and refuse to run a machine with it for more than an hour, and then, worse than that, ship the product and try to sell it for $600 upon release, you do get a bad name.

ATI deserves every flame they get until my radeon supports VfW without an ungodly amount of hacks. And video capture is the absolute least amount of the problems with the driver that shipped (the fact that your DVD support is gone if you lose/ruin your driver disc would be number 2 on the list).

ATI can keep their crappy products. Of course, now I've switched over to Linux, I'm starting to buy their products again (looks like third party drivers written without full specs of ATIs cards are more stable than ATIs own -- who'd-a-thunk-it?).

>ATI has been much more forthcoming in information for developing XF86 drivers

Which would explain why third party X11 drivers are better than their windows drivers. Man, you have to have one really poor set of coders to be beat out on the quality of the drivers for your product by people hacking out code as a hobby.

Re:If my original Radeon VIVO

[shepd]

That's $600 CDN (including taxes). Not too mention I got mine in Canada before the official release here (strange that a Canadian company would release their cards in their home country after a foreign country), and I got it within a week of it hitting the streets in the US.

That should explain it...

hyperlink

[asv108]

BASIC HTML

Re:hyperlink

[jwilhelm]

Yea yea yea... I was just trying to get the link up; I know HTML.

What about heat?

[inkfox]

I had a Radeon 8500 in my box and had to remove it because it runs much, much, much hotter than my GeForce3, and because it was more susceptible to heat problems. (The DVI-D output starts to fail as it approaches 60C or so.)

What's ATI doing to keep TWO of these in one box from overheating?

Re:What about heat?

[inkfox]

"What's ATI doing to keep TWO of these in one box from overheating?" Maybe they can put a label on the box: "Buy a decent exhaust fan instead of whining in a forum you dumbfuck."

It's a Lian Li PC 70 aluminum case with four fans. The Radeon 8500 ran hotter than my XP1800, which is pretty inexcusable when it's so sensitive to temperature.

Re:Bull

[two-bookoo!]

how can you see it work for yourself, if you don't trust them, i mean i personally don't buy anything that i don't trust.....

Multifunction Card?

[Kufat]

Judging by how hot my Xpert128 runs, I think we can expect advertising copy along these lines:

The ATI Radeon 8500 Maxx: Your High-End Desktop Graphics and Affordable Home Heating Solution from ATI!

Re:Multifunction Card?

[darc]

Great idea. Now we just get a dual proc athlon, and the Radeon 8500 MAXX, and we adapt that "Foundry in every home" story on slashdot a while back.

I can melt alloys with my PC!

Rock the industry?

[Saurentine]

"You decide if it is real or not, a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions!"

(emphasis added)

When did Slashdot start hiring cheezy '80s Hair Metal band rejects to post stories to the front page?

It's "News for Nerds", not "News for Mullet-Sporting Losers Who Can't Get Over Their High School Glory Days".

Flamebait? Maybe a little. ;)

Re:Rock the industry?

[GLevangelist]

Dude, don't you, like, get it? Everybody now talks like that! Whoa! Totally tubular! Rocks! Sucks! Woohoo! Awesome! Excellent! Bogus!

Re:Rock the industry?

[Manaz]

Those are the words of the person who submitted the story, not the ./ staffer who posted it... :)

Re:Rock the industry?

[Saurentine]

Those are the words of the person who submitted the story, not the ./ staffer who posted it... :)

Of course you're right, and I was a little harsh, but shouldn't an editor edit the articles being posted?

It seems as though Slashdot "editors" are complete slackers in that department. I think your word, "staffer", is far more appropriate.

If that bothered me, I would go somewhere else, but I like the "oh, screw it" attitude that shows up sometimes.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've an industry to go rock to massive proportions.

Re:Bull

[OrangeSpyderMan]

Yeah ATI drivers blow real hard, but Matrox cards work real nice with XFree86 for 2D work.

why just 2?

[suhit]

Why settle for just 2 GPUs, here is the Lightning-2 - "A High-Performance Display Subsystem for PC Clusters" - http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/lightning2/.

I recently heard one of the researchers give a talk about WireGL and found it very fascinating. If one has a GigE dedicated network, then a graphics cluster like this would be perfect for supporting graphics over the network for multiple PCs.

Gameplay Innovation

[Zabu]

Innovation is worth more than graphics, people don't play games for good graphics alone. I am not saying the quality of the expirience isn't important, but you need the content to lure you into spending your free time *ahem* and all other time *ahem* to fully enjoy the expirience.

Enough with the graphics, and lets get some new ideas.

Re:Gameplay Innovation

[ThrasherTT]

Its unfortunate that the market (that's us) continues to support games that don't innovate. If you really want publishers to let developers spend time and money innovating, stop buying games that are "more of the same, but requires a GF(X)-level video card."

DVI

[NetJunkie]

For LCD panels to talk straight digital.

Didn't 3dfx try this route ...

[Knightfall]

and end up getting nailed hard by nVidia? I've only been playing "hardcore" with computers the last few years, but it seems I remember a card from 3dfx that had something along the lines of 4 processors and still couldn't touch nVidia's performance. If this works and doesn't cost $$$$$$ more, great, but I have a feeling this is a grasp to move ahead in a small margin area, while those in the mainstream are going to just pass it by.

Wow, super-duper framerates!!

[egriebel]

Gee, just what I needed, Q3/UT at 280 fps!

On the other hand, if one could run Distributed.net on the 2 GPUs, I'd be at the top of the OGR list! :-)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Picture -- FAKE

[jest3r]

That picture looks like a photoshop job ..

For one the Heatsink fans are exactly the same - right down to the positioning of the fan fins ..

For two the wires from one of the fans are not casting a shadow ..

In fact if you do a Google image search you can find the original image .. although some of the stuff has been switched around this is a pretty amateur job.

see original here:
http://home.earthlink.net/~doniteli/radeon8 500-64m b.jpg

would have been easier

[lingqi]

It's too hard to write drivers for.

not really -- Voodoo 2 had "dual" setups and pretty much everyone ran without a hitch;

i think it's not the "dual GPU" that's hard to write drivers for -- it's the way that they implemented the hardware that make it dual -- V2 had SLI - simple, effective, real -- you interleave the lines; but ATI with their rage fury decided that it wasn't "good enough" and just *had* to come up with something else (i think they split the screen top-bottom with some details given to load sharing in case the top-bottom had different number of polygons (read: all the games); THAT will screw up any driver-writing process.

if they stick with SLI this time maybe it will get better

It has a lot to do with the drivers.........

[Ride-My-Rocket]

There's been a lot of chatting about ATi vs NVidia over on Shacknews.com recently about this kinda stuff. Especially since the Carmack came out and said that he thought the R300 was gonna be more capable, from a hardware standpoint, even if ATi's drivers didn't do it justice. If ATi decides to hunker down and make their drivers as good as their hardware, I think they'll do just fine. But if not, then Nvidia will retain its crown, since their drivers seem to work better for the masses than ATi's do.

As far as all this power going unused -- I doubt it. I think at some point game companies _will_ have to focus on better gameplay, instead of simply rehashing the same game concepts and upgrading the graphics engines. But I think that graphics will play a large part in that, too.

I doubt it matters.

[The_Shadows]

You know what the best card out there is? It might surprise you. At a low end price tag of ~$800 and up to nearly $6500 the Voodoo 5 6000 is one of the best cards out there. The price tag is that high because it is, unsurprisingly, a collectors item.

I've seen this card work. I runs fast and it looks gorgeous.

You know what the Parhelia tried to do? Fragmented AA? Voodoo could've torn that up years ago. The V5 6000 did 8x Full screen AA. Fast. At 1024. It's amazingly gorgeous.

Think about it. This card is 2-3 years old. The architecture is what matters. Not the amount of GPUs. The GeForce4 4600 can't even consider 8xAA. The V5 6K does, and it does it well. On 128M of SDRAM. I'd still maybe take the 4600 over the V5 6K. But it would be a hard decision. The 4600 with it's DDR memory and GPU can handle some things better. Some. Not all.

This card just proves that it really doesn't matter how much RAM or how many GPUs a card has. It's in the way the card is built. There aren't many cards I'd take over the V5 6K. If I could get one, for myself to keep, I'd pull me Geforce 3 out in a heartbeat. The GPU isn't a factor here. The RAM (DDR over SDR) isn't a factor. The V5 6K is just that well built, even 3 years later.

There. I've said my piece. After seeing the V5 in action, I don't care to get the least bit excited about the "latest greatest" graphics cards ever again.

Re:I doubt it matters.

[DeadBugs]

It is reported that the next generation NVIDIA GPU (NV30) will contain technology that they got when the bought 3DFX. This would include work done on the Voodoo 5 6000 and any prototypes 3DFX had been working on. So maybe you can look forward to that?

Re:I doubt it matters.

[AutumnLeaf]

I have a VooDoo 5500 in my Mac, and it's been running fine. Was the 5500 dual? I thought it was but from your post I'm thinking it must not be. In any case, even the VooDoo 5500 was a great card, and works very well for me in my Mac. I've never had a complaint about performance, but I rather suspect it's because my computer can't drive it fast enough.

Re:I doubt it matters.

[Magila]

Somebody mod this guy down he's full of shit. I've never seen a 6000 in action but it doesn't take a genius to realize it would be at most 2x as fast as the 5500, and given that the 5500 could only get ~15fps at 1024x768x32 with 4xFSAA the 6000 would have gotten about the same with 8xFSAA (double the chips but double the pixels) certainly not fast by today's standards. A Geforce 4600 will stomp a Voodoo 6000 into the ground in any benchmark. Not to mention most of the 128MB of memory is wasted storing four copies of every texture. Clearly a few mods aren't thinking too much about what this guy is spewing cause man does it stink.

Re:I doubt it matters.

[siphoncolder]

The architecture is what matters. Not the amount of GPUs.

Not to mention that the V5 6000 had 4 VSA-100 processers on it. Not to mention that at all. Architecture is irrelevant; the V5 6000 was/is a great card. what brought it down was the fact that it was hell to produce and took too long to come out (never did, in fact - fault of management and such). In all, the V5 6000 could do mad frame rates and mad anti-aliasing, but in terms of features that everyone could take advantage of easily in games, forget it. GLIDE was proprietary; remember sighing with dismay at Unreal when you saw it was GLIDE, or software, and you were left hanging with your DirectX/OpenGL card? GLIDE was great architecture too, but god-damn if developers were gonna code for just GLIDE, for the whole single manufacturer.

Yeah, the V5 6000 was a great card, wonderful architecture. Too bad it would have cost so damn much to produce, sell, PLUS it didn't do anything anyone wanted.

Re:I doubt it matters.

[Quarters]

5 words for you:

Pixel and vertex shaders.

No Voodoo card can do them regardless of how many of those chips you stick on a board. Fixed function pipelines suck once you get used to being able to change all of the lighting and shading code that the graphics board runs.

Re:I doubt it matters.

[The_Shadows]

OMG. Mod parent down as "Idiot." I don't care that I didn't remember that the V5 6K had 4 Processors (Which were not Vertex Pixel Shaders ala nVidias GPUs). That was my bad. I apoloigze. I wasn't the one running the damn card. When my buddy, who practically stole one, said "Come look at this!" I came, saw, and saw it kicked ass.

But you are just a moron. Granted, I should have specified what this was running on, but you're taking the V5 5500's benchmarks based on it's release! Yeah, the V5 6K won't do quite so well on a PII 400. It does a helluva lot better on an Athlon XP. Helllooo? It's not all in the graphics card. Chipset, processor, RAM. You know, I hear those are important components too!

PII 400MHz != 1.4GHz Athlon

And NO the 4600 can't stomp it in any benchmark. 8xFSAA. You moron. The 4600 can't even render in 8xFSAA. Even if the 4600 only got 15fps (it was running smooth, at least 30) 15 0? New math! Hooray for new math! It won't do you a bit of good to review math!

I've seen this thing RUN. You haven't. Once you have, you can tell me what you thought it looked like.

Do what you will. I've got Karma to burn.

Re:I doubt it matters.

[The_Shadows]

Excuse, that should read "15 is less than 0?"

Apologies, and farewell.

Re:I doubt it matters.

[Magila]

Ok lets see where to start. When a grachics card is getting 15fps the GPU is the bottleneck. You could have a Pentuim 5 50GHz and it would be about the same, especialy with FSAA which is purely dependant on the graphics card.

Who gives a flying fuck if the GF4 can't do 8xFSAA when the Voodoo5 6000 couldn't do it at a playable fps, the whole argument is moot and besides 4xFSAA at 1600x1200 is going to look a hell of a lot better than 1024x768 no matter what kind of FSAA you throw at it.

The Voodoo 5 6000 was not the pinnacle of graphics cards you make it out to be. I suspect you may be confusing it with Rampage, 3DFX's true next-gen chip which would have kicked a whole lot of ass.

Re:I doubt it matters.

[forkboy]

5 words for YOU:

You only had four words.

Re:I doubt it matters.

[ealar dlanvuli]

The main power controling transistor has a tendancy to fall off v5 6k's..

Quality building, eh?

Sorry, but I disagree

[Kjella]

If I get the choice of adding $200 dollars for a new gfx card or a new cpu to permanently increase the graphics capabilities or computing capabilities I'd way rather pay that than have to pay programmers to optimize every piece of software using it. I want programmers to be busy making high-quality, stable content and gameplay capabilities (though the actual quality depends on the gfx / sfx / storyline / modelling / texturing / whatever staff), not trying to squeeze out the last 5fps / assembly optimizations to make it playable on a bigger marked (= slower systems).

Which is not an excuse to make *unessecerrily* bloated code. But to me I'd be a lot happier if it's featurerich and stable rather than fast. Usually you only get to pick at most two out of three, at least on a sane budget

Kjella

Re:Picture -- FAKE

[jwilhelm]

It is a fake; that's been discussed ad nauseum in the forum.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Double GPU = Six Months

[eeeeaagh]

Graphics accelerators have been doubling in powers every six months or so. So a dual GPU would be really cool for about that long.

It has been interesting to see all the tricks needed to keep up with the GPU performance growth curve. The growth curve is so much steeper than the CPU growth curve (double every 18 months) because graphics processors can take advantage of more parallelism.

But the parallelism has mostly just happened on chip for consumer GPU's. It will be interesting to see how well it works between chips. This sounds awfully similar to UNC's PixelFlow, which used object-parallelism (GPU-parallelism) and image composition to construct the final image. And between chips parallelism is more feasible than the between-computers solution of WireGL.

Re:Picture -- FAKE

[gwizah]

MOD THIS UP...

After looking at the image and checking it out in photoshop, I too see the obvious photoshoppery. The connectors and slot cover are from another photo but there are glaringly obvious similarities between this one and this (fake) one

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

HW drivers vs HW specs

[KieranElby]

> UntiL ATi makes their own *nix drivers, im stickin to Nvidia.

In ATI's defense, unlike nVidia (who are strictly proprietary), ATI do make the chipset details available so anyone can write open source drivers for whatever esteoric OS they happen to be using - there's more OSs than just Windows and Linux, you know!

Of course, it would be nice if ATI released both specs and drivers, but IMHO, it is better in the long term for open source OSs if the specs are released.

Re:HW drivers vs HW specs

[mark_lybarger]

ATI does release specs, yes, but what is the timelieness of that release? from what i read on the gatos-devel mailing list, the ati driver writers need to ask for the docs then wait months for a reponse. eventually, they might get what they're after, but it's certainly not ideal. closed source drivers that are free (beer) and released with the hardware is much more desired than open source drivers 2 years after the fact since no-one even saw a document until the product has been on the market for 6 months.

its a fake pic

[Bwana]

the picture's been photoshopped. You can see where someone copied and pasted the first fan to the upper right. (theres a little piece of the red wire still in the image) Plus they put fan chips between between two memory chips. No way that pic's real. The card could be coming out, but that pic is definitely fake. (DeJa Vu with Voodoo 5) Read the forums from the original link to find out.

Check it out :)

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Bull

[Anonvmous Coward]

"Errr, install Linux, maybe?

The way to solve a Windows98 problem is to remove Windows98. Problem solved."

Yeah, Linux is pretty damn stable when it has no games to run on it.

AFR

[Toraz Chryx]

ATI's dual proc cards used Alternate Frame Rendering

GPU1: renders a frame
GPU2: renders a frame - GPU1: Displays frame it just rendered
GPU1: Renders a frame - GPU2: Displays frame it just rendered

etc.

Re:AFR

[ThrasherTT]

That seems extremely foolish. Swapping frame buffers doesn't take long, and you end up with a GPU sitting idle the entire time. Why bother?

Re:AFR

[Toraz Chryx]

That's the entire point... You take two relatively low power chips and give them each half the workload.

Well...

[Chasing Amy]

ATI *cannot* do SLI because it's patented, and nVidia bought 3dfx's patents on SLI among other things. This is why ATI used another method--their methos was just as simple and effective; each GPU renders alternate frames. In fact, it has fewer theoretical problems when doing alternate frames, than Voodoos did with rendering alternate scanlines. The scanline approach produced occasional tearing or shimmering effects, though it's very rare.

The problem with the Rage Fury MAXX has to do not with the method of interleaving or the presence of GPUs, but rather the method ATI chose to bridge the two chips, which isn't permitted in the NT AGP code. ATI couldn't find a way around it, so they abandoned the card. Sad, since it was a nice performer under Win9x...

However, many other implementations do 2 graphics chips right with NT support, such as the Voodoo 5 5500 and the high-end multi-chip Quantum3D boards.

So, ATI could easily do a Radeon MAXX part with WinXP support, since they know what mistakes not to make in silicon this time around...

Flamebait? It's a good point!

[Anonvmous Coward]

I'm a little surprise parent post got modded down as 'Flamebait'. His comment was appropriate. There's lots of comments floating around about bad driver support for ATI products. I can personally testify to that. The Radeon 8500 I used to have in my box wouldn't draw the titlebar properly in Windows. Instead, it'd draw it transparently. (Only the text was still there.) That made Windows a BITCH to use.

Nvidia, so far, is the king of drivers. They have a unified driver set. (only one download) They are stable. (I've used 3 different Geforce cards and they work wonderfully.) And they're constantly revised. ATI and every other video card company could learn a lot from Nvidia.

Please mod up parent post. He may not have the most interesting point, but it certainly was not worthy of a 'flamebait -1' moderation.

Great hardware, pitiful software.

[zeno_lee]

ATI is a typical example of how much more mature hardware manufacturing is and how pathetic software "manufacturing" is. Their drivers barely ever work. They create and update drivers when they want to, not when there are problems.

I would venture to say that this new graphics card is technically great. At the same time, I'm practically positive that ATI will not produce working drivers for this card.

Re:Cool

[DeltaSigma]

You're right. I'm also building it sooner rather than later because my current computer is a PII 450 Mhz and a Diamon Viper 770 (TNT2) video card... I'm feeling the upgrade burn more than most gamers these days.

The only thing that's allowed me to last this long on this remarkably slow system is fast hard drive communication with a SCSI controller native to the motherboard. Every other PII 450 I've seen has shit its guts out on the software I run today (photoshop 6, Aliens vs Predator 2, etc.).

I always build in favor of a long lifespan, if I wait for the next generation of video cards (as Carmack suggested) I'll be in a situation where I can't buy the top of the line for that generation of hardware because the top of the line won't exist yet.

Just another case of unique solutions to unique needs you'll find with almost everyone building their own computer...

Why I think this is fake

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.jeffwilhelm.com/files/r250.jpg

I apologize in advance for the AC post, but being as my company has a working relationship with ATI, blah, blah, etc etc.

On to why I think this is fake:

1. Look at the heatsink/fans. From the picture, it looks like they are using different model fans for the different GPU's, looking at the position at which the power wires are coming from. Being that I am a board designer, I can tell you that this would never happen, in order to keep the bill of materials down.

2. On the very bottom right of the card, under the last SRAM chip, there is a small device (regulator?) that looks like its overlapping the edge of the board. This would never pass board layout verification, because there are certain clearances you need to observe when laying out pcb's.

3. It looks like the lower GPU is violating the AGP spec for connector keepouts. I'm not sure on this, as I dont have the AGP design guide handy, but that GPU looks like it's positioned extremely low.

4. Silkscreen for some of the parts further down the board (compare some of the electrolytic can & SRAM silkscreens) seems to be conspicuously absent.

5. Look at the ATI symbol silkscreen. Right above it is a fiducial (these are used during assembly, as a way for the machine doing the assembly to calibrate it's position to the board), and part of a silkscreen that looks exactly like the assembly guide for the SRAMs! This is the thing that to me stands out the most as being doctored.

Mark my words, but...

[13Echo]

"Why would anyone need more than 640k of memory?".

What the Hell?!?

[djohnsto]

Do you even know what a V5 6000 is? It's a 4 GPU version of the V3!!!

Think about it. This card is 2-3 years old. The architecture is what matters. Not the amount of GPUs.

Again, this card had 4 processors!

...The GeForce4 4600 can't even consider 8xAA. The V5 6K does, and it does it well. On 128M of SDRAM.

It sort of had 128M of RAM. It actually has 32MB of RAM per processor. So, all the latest games that use up more than 32MB of RAM in texture / geometry caching will run really slowly on the V5. Also, for those that don't remember, this was the card that you had to plug into the wall separately from the computer.

Don't get me wrong, I've used the V5 5500 (2 GPU version), and it was really cool at the time. But I'll take a GF4 any day of the week over any voodoo you offer me (unless of course I can sell it at the collector's item price :)

Re:What the Hell?!?

[djohnsto]

The 5500 had a HD power connector on it for an internal direct plugin to the power supply. The 6000 has a cord that goes out of the computer, through a power converter brick, and into a wall socket.

I saw the inq's report as well. I don't really have a problem with this approach, but a separate plug into the wall is a bit much...

Re:What the Hell?!?

[djohnsto]

Oops, my bad. I guess technically it was a VSA-100 processor. The VSA-100 was then used in the V4 and V5 video cards.

GPU - graphics processing unit. The VSA-100 processed graphics (triangles). It just didn't do transform and lighting (or vertex/pixel shaders). Just because it isn't as full featured as a GF4 doesn't mean you can't use the generic GPU term for them. That's like saying that the 386 isn't a CPU because it doesn't have a floating point unit. (Yes, I know that Nvidia coined the term with the intro of the GeForce 256, but I still stand by what I said...)

Perspective

[N8F8]

What I find amusing about this discussion is that the same people who slam Microsoft's proprietary cutthroat tactics and support a ,for the most part, inferior product jump on the NVidia bandwagon every chance they get. Or, as the GNU gurus so often put it, you don't like the drivers? Write better ones!

I also happen to think that people get way too hung up over the 2% of the time they are playing games when the other 98% ofthe time they would be better off with a ATI or Matrox card.

Not to mention the times I was hosed by crappy NVidia drivers in Linux until NVidia got their crap working better.

Surely you are kidding?

[pong]

Can you tell the difference between the real world and the simulated virtual world, in terms of visual fidelity? I sure can, and as long as there is a noticable difference, the graphics industry will rocket on.

I predict the curve won't break until realtime computer graphics are far more convincing than the computer graphics we see in movies today.

That will be a short while ...

Re:Picture -- FAKE

[JewFish]

it looks like a gimp job to me

Shafted again?

[zerofoo]

So will ATI actually make this MAXX product work in the Windows NT/2000/XP line of products? Or will they pull that windows 98 only crap that shafted alot of previous MAXX owners when windows 2000 was released?

I've owned a MAXX product that didn't work in NT/2000/XP. I've had a USB ATI TV wonder that wouldn't work in XP for about a year, and i've had drivers on many other ATI products that either sucked or didn't work at all.

ATI has a long way to go to get my confidence back. Getting screwed three times without vaseline makes one a little apprehensive.

-ted

I'd buy it if it didn't have any fans...

[orbital3]

I'm really not into the a-fan-for-everything movement going on. Motherboards, video cards, etc. The only things I really want in my PC with the fan are the CPU and the power supply, and if I could do without those, it would be even better. ATI would have a winner in my eyes if it could use two lower-clocked fanless chips together to deliver performance on-par with the rest of the one chip cards. Driver issues or not (I'm on an All-In-Wonder 128 right now... don't even get me started), it would definitely get a buy consideration from me.

Re:Picture -- FAKE

[coldmist]

Also, if you look at the big silver capacitor on the bottom right, you can see the black fin mark where the GPU's heatsink overlaps the Capacitor in the original picture.

Also, hold a piece a paper up against the top edge of the board itself. You can see where the two pieces don't form a straight line. ;)

AA & memory bandwidth

[EnglishTim]

AA performance basically comes down to memory bandwidth. Yes, the Voodoo 5 6000 did have a stupidly high bandwidth (11-12Gb/s), which still just about beats Nvidia's Ti4600 10.4Gb/s

It has little to do with the number of GPUs you've got. The Voodoo 5 probably had to have several just to keep up with the bandwidth it had.

So what was so great about the Voodoo 5 6000? they put a huge amount of bandwidth into a card when it just wasn't economically viable. I'm sure that nVidia and ATI probably both had internal test setups that could equal it, but they both had the sense not to try and make a commercial product out of it until the cost of fast RAM came down.

As far as I am aware the V5 6000 didn't have any particularly special AA tricks, which nVidia seem to have now (compare Geforce3 AA performance with GeForce4 Ti...) so I'd imagine that the Ti4600 would beat the V5 nowadays, on 4x AA at least. Shame they don't have a higher AA mode, but with the next gen of games coming out, you wouldn't be able to afford it anyway, even with e Ti4600 or a V5 6000.

Of course, the V5 had no pixel or vertex shaders (which is gonna hurt image quality) and no hardware T&L. As the majority of current games are still CPU-bound, that's gonna hurt the Voodoo 5.

So which one?

[CptSkydrop]

Do I wait for the above mentioned cards to come out or buy a top of the line GeForce 4 now?

As happy as I am with my GF4-Ti4400...

[dmouritsendk]

In a nutshell, GPUs are outdated. Remeber back in April 99, when nvidia announced the Geforce256, the first chip shipping with hardware transformation and lighting. They called this a gpu, since then, various chipmanufactors have extended the "GPU" instructionsets to include stufflike AA/Filters/texture comp./etc etc etc.

But, the successor for thiese kinda have already been created. 3Dlabs have introduced the VPU, which is bacially a GPU with a codeable instructionset.

A perfect Example...

[ArcadeNut]

Take a look at Duke Nukem Forever.

They are trying to perfect both, in the mean time, everyone else will have passed them by.

Re:A perfect Example...

[ThrasherTT]

What do you mean "will have"? I think "has already" is more appropriate! Will anyone actually care when/if DNF is released? I'm personally looking for it to go the route of either "Prey" or "Daikatana"...

Spelling

[Praufet]

"Final testings have been done and you should here noise from ATi regarding this offering." Here? Come on guys, you can do better than that.

Colour me stupid

[reformhead]

Damn,

Just bought a Radeon 8500LE 128.

Ah, well. At least I got it cheap. I suspect they won't be giving these things away.

Out.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

i just wanna say

[Cynikal]

YAY.. glad it was a canadian company to do it first

now can they get their ver 3.04b34 rev 9967 drivers out before everyone else does it too and takes over the market?

HardOCP says it's fake

[theBunkinator]

[H]ardOCP says it's a hoax, got a statement from Rubeena Hussein of ATi.
"We have no current intentions of making this or similar boards."

it's a good thing

[Gavitron_zero]

that most game coders are lazy. This thing is running dual GPU, so it probably can't run in AGP mode and take advantage of all the memory bandwidth that no one take advantage of.

HardOCP says this is a definite fake

[merlin_jim]

Check it out here

Smells like a fake...

[Faeton]

As the pic is obviously edited by Photoshop, we're getting conflicting news whether this is legit or not.

HardOCP http://www.hardocp.com/ has

Re:You're an idiot.

[Anonvmous Coward]

"You obviously have not used a dual cpu system."

Hopefully one day the misconceptions (or lack of information) about dual processor machines will be cleared up. I haveta admit, I was pretty ignorant about them myself until one landed on my desk. I always asked the question "how much faster is it?" instead of asking "what's it do differently?"

I'm curious, though, do you think the 'hyperthreading' feature of Pentium 4's will lessen the need for dual processor machines? I can imagine it'll speed up explorer responsiveness quite a bit. If the computer 'appears' faster, will people even consider dual machines?

Re:Dual GPUs?

[lateralus_1024]

I can just see the gullible computer shopper at BestBuy asking the sales associate if this new $500 video card will make his Internet faster. "Yes sir, this revolutionary card was designed for 56k"

Graphics "Solution"

[squidsoup]

Christ on a bicycle.. when I was a young'un we called them thar things Graphics Cards.

Down with Corporate Doublespeak!

Re:Bull

[jrnchimera]

HEY! Get a clue! The issue isn't whether ATi can compete speedwise! The issue is whether or not ATi will ever produce decent drivers. NVidia has a few things going for it. They make great hardware AND they make the industries best drivers.

What about the Voodoo2?

[sprayNwipe]

"a solid dual GPU solution would surely rock the industry to massive proportions"

Agh! Marketing Splooge, attacking from 3 o'clock!

Dual "GPU" configurations have been around since early '98, when the Voodoo2 came out. Sure, 3Dfx called it SLI, but it was essentially two 3D cards working as one - and someone (Quantum3D?) made single cards with dual Voodoo2's on them. Not to mention the Voodoo5 which had 4 GPUs on it.

I remember seeing someone (could have been Quantum3D again) who was promising a 16-GPU version of the Voodoo5 for mass $$$.

Multiple GPU's is nothing new, and it's definitely not going to "shake the gaming industry to it's core only on PAY PER VIEEEEEEEEEW....."

Total Crap

[ahebl]

Go to www.rage3d.com to get this one cleared up. If you actually want to know what is going on within ATI, then go there. This post is somewhat misinformed, to say the least.

Re:bad news for Linux?

[gurensan]

Oh come on - don't go to slashdot to extoll Windows' Greatness (tm). There are plenty of other places. This is New for Nerds... nerds don't use M$ products, and they will tell you good reasons why. But that's not what I wanted to post. I posted intelligently elsewhere!

Re:Bull

[Cynikal]

deul gpu's? dude, they don't fight

Let's go to the numbers (Re:I doubt it matters.)

[nosferatu-man]

Some numbers for you.

Q3A, 1600x1200x32 bit (no FSAA)

GF4 Ti4600 : 160.6 fps
V5 6000 : 58.7 fps

Expect almost a linear scaling for FSAA. Note that at 4x, the GF4 would be pushing out around 40 fps. The 6k? About 13. At 8x? Let's be generous, and call it 8. Yes, the machines being tested are very different (a 1.3ghz Athlon vs. an 800mhz P3), but at those resolutions, you're very close to being 100% CPU bound.

I admire the meaningless iconoclasm that would lead one to tout an evolutionary dead-end like the 6000 as the be-all end-all of video cards, but in the future, you would be better served by appealing to the Voodoo's superior blast capacity, or the "warmth" of its image, rather than trying to make a technical argument without even the slimmests of legs to stand on.

Best,
'jfb

Links:

V5 6k benchmarking: http://www.voodooextreme.com/hw/previews/v5_6000/5 .html

GF4 numbers: All over, but I used these:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=15 83&p =9

If ATi are so close to releasing this product...

[Manaz]

Why is the photo that was supposedly leaked by someone there so obviously photochopped? Where's the official hype (surely they don't plan, officially, on releasing the product onto a totally unsuspecting market? They've officially told various people about their upcoming R300 product, why would they, officially, keep this so secret)? Where in ATi's lineup does this Radeon 8500 MAXX fit? Above the single GPU Radeon 8500, sure. But wouldn't it steal sales from their upcoming R300 based product (reportedly called the Radeon 9700)? Sure, a Radeon 8500 MAXX won't have DirectX 9 compliance, but there's no DirectX 9 games out yet, nor will there be any that *require* it (notice I didn't say can't take advantage of DirectX 9 features) for some time.

Yes, the geek in me thinks "Dual GPU Radeon card. Sweet!". But the realist in me thinks "Well, the ONLY "proof" of it we've seen are unconfirmed leaks, and a badly photochopped photo of a product that ATi already have in full production.

Ahuh. I'll believe it when I see it, in person.

Maybe fake, but not the way you mention.

[Inoshiro]

The heatsink fan stickers are different. The connectors are in a different order. The COPYRIGHT string has a different date (2001 vs. 2002 -- no jpg artifacting suggesting a blur and redo).

The board layouts are very similar, and it's likely that someone did take a stock Radeon picture and mod it a bit, but those are still different boards entirely.

HOAX HOAX HOAX HOAX HOAX HOAX

[Blaede]

This has been determined to be a hoax. Slashdot get's fooled more and more each day.

New Computer Technology..

[seeleung]

The new trend of computer tech is going for dual, then quadrupo, and so forth.. i guess the in like 5 years of time, we need to choose the mother board and as well as a video board.. just insert the GPU into the computer.. (for higher performance, go for the new QuadDR 5Gb RAM 2GB FSB video board.. =P)

Re:Bull

[spauldo]

The rage fury maxx runs on linux using the rage128 drivers. Even the framebuffer driver will work.

DGA, on the other hand, will absolutely not work, so if you need that, you're screwed.

I had one of these cards, and frankly, it was a pain in the ass. To get it working properly you need two monitor settings in your XF86Config file (for the same monitor) and do a few other odd things.

Now I run it on a system without X or framebuffer drivers as a scrap server. Does the job well enough :)

Re:Bull

[dossen]

Please excuse me while I run home and get rid of the stack of linux games that I obviously don't have.

Re:Bull

[Anonvmous Coward]

That should be easy, they're all on your RedHat CD!

Washing machine only 120V

[toofast]

I don't know what country you're in, but in Canada we plug our washing machines in 120V outlets, and our dryers go in 240V.