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ATI R300 and R250V
Chuu writes "The ATI R300 (Radeon 9700) and R250V (Radeon 9000/Radeon
9000 Pro) reviews are out, at all the
usual suspects, but the one you want to
pay attention to is over at anandtech.com, since somehow Anand got permission to publish his benchmark results for the R300
while the other sites were stuck with whitepapers. The results? The R250V is a GF4MX killer, which is not saying much. On the other hand, the R300 absolutely trounces the GeForce4 Ti4600, running
54% faster in
Unreal Tournament 2003 and 37% faster in Quake 3 at 1600x1200x32 on a Pentium4 2.4ghz."
Insert a comment here where I talk about technology which I do not understand and use phrases such as vertex shaders, fog effects and texels per second, and attempt to make it look like any of this is actually of any relevence what so ever. Make a reference to Doom III.
Insert seven comments below this comment which all do the same thing.
That depends on what your definition of drivers is....</voice>
If by "drivers" you mean "closed source drivers for the FireGL card based on this chip that support all the card's rendering features, but none of the video capture or tuner functions of the inevitable AIW version", then I would guess about 8 months.
If you mean "closed source drivers that support all the rendering, video capture, tuner, etc. functions of this card" from ATI, then I suggest you monitor Mr. Andy Krist's credit cards for purchases of cold weather gear - this will happen about the same time the MBA selects Dr. Hawking as a star player.
If you mean "Open source drivers that support some of the rendering, none of the video capture, and none of the tuner", then I would guess about 18 months.
Sad but true. A pity - were there to be good drivers for this card (good = open source, all features supported by the standard APIs (Xv, Video4Linux2, DRI)) then I would pay up to $500 for one.
Now, the question is, what about all the Mac owners?
www.eFax.com are spammers
If I change the name from "QUAKE" to "QUACK", will the performance drop by 20%?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Actually it's more like 151% faster performance.
2.51 is 251% of 1. 1 + 1.51 (which is 151% of 1) = 2.51. Here endeth the lesson.
You could on the other hand say, "2.5 times faster than the nVidia card."