ATi Radeon 9700 Full Release Review w/ Benchmarks

Chalupa_Man writes: "ATi Technologies has officially released their new Radeon 9700 Pro today. Real benchmark numbers and a full review can be found here. The card is impressive for sure and should have NVIDIA on the ropes for a while, as it beats out a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 handily, especially with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering enabled. Image quality is also top notch for this new high end DX9 compliant product from ATi." sunny_talwar adds these links to more reviews of the new high-end Radeon at AnandTech's and Tom's Hardware. Update: 08/20 03:06 GMT by T : Cp writes "Gamers Depot also has their full review up of the Radeon 9700 Pro, including nice images of the driver tabs and 6x Antialiasing performance."

Comments

Direct X 9 ?

[devnullforU]

Is it even out yet ?

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[Camulus]

Well there are some floating around, but from what I hear it shouldn't be out till the end of August. I got to play on one of these cards at QuakeCon and let me tell you they are SWEET. Wolfenstien in 1280x1024, lightmap, all eye candy was usually 250-330 FPS. When it hit 400 FPS I about dropped a load.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, until nVidia releases their next big Radeon killer. Cat and mouse.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[JPriest]

DX 9 API spec can be found from NeoWin here

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah that's pretty amazing considering anything over about 70FPS is more or less completely pointless to the user.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[bleckywelcky]

Wolfenstien in 1280x1024, lightmap, all eye candy was usually 250-330 FPS. When it hit 400 FPS I about dropped a load.

LMAO!!

Other than being glad that the architecture is advanced enough to achieve such numbers, why would you be astounded at this? I mean, its only another ~100 FPS that you only notice because you can see the actual FPS numbers, not because the quality is any better. See, I was astounded when I dumped my old TNT2 for a Radeon 7500 a month or two ago and I could actually walk through a fire fight (in any game) without the FPS dropping into the single digits (5 FPS TFC is not fun). I was astounded at that, but still not load-droppingly-astounded :P

Having said that, I still can't get extremely high resolutions with all the extras on to work absolutely great on my 7500, although $57 for a 64 MB DDR 7500 back in May was not that bad :) I would love to see some of the newer games runnings at 1600 x 1200 with everything on and going at 80+ FPS.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[octalc0de]

linux support?NO TRUE SLASHDOT READER WOULD BUY AN ATI GRAPHICS CARD. ATI doesn't GIVE a shit about linux. NVidia has pretty nice drivers for linux.

Which means... NVidia 4eva! ;)

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[MsGeek]

The big difference between NVidia and ATI is that ATI releases lots of information about their chips, while NVidia releases binary-only drivers for their cards in Linux and keeps mum about details on their chipsets. What's better, a binary driver that will break with the next version of XFree, or truly free drivers that can be updated as XFree evolves? I'd say ATI is the more supportive of Linux of the two companies.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[jacoberrol]

nah. i have a radeon card and it runs great in linux. debian. xfree86. gnome desktop. all accelerated, it's beautiful. it even supports the multihead.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[Negatyfus]

You're missing the point. It's about the incredible numbers. Imagine what it'd be like if the poly-count tripled or quadrupled.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[GigsVT]

Wolfenstien in 1280x1024

My GeForce2 already runs Wolfenstien at like 800 fps. How did you manage to get it into 1280X1024 mode though? I didn't think there was a VESA mode that high in DOS.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

mode 0x119 is 1280x1024x32k
mode 0x11A is 1280x1024x64k
mode 0x11B is 1280x1024x16m

if you're going to program in those modes, remember that it uses a memory bank type system.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[Fweeky]

Uh, except 3-400FPS in RTCW in a given resolution means you can double the resolution and get.. 1-200FPS. Handy when the next generation of monitors come out that let you use resolutions of 4000x4000 or whatever. It also means you can make more detailed maps, and have busier scenes; instead of being limited to 2-3 characters in view at any one time, you can do a Doom/Serious Sam with the same detail level. Or you can tone up the LOD and have higher resolution textures further away and reduce mipmap artifacts. Or you can seriously concider adding bumpmaps everywhere, or more detailed volumetric self shadowing and *still* not drop below monitor refresh for the most detailed scenes.

And even IF you've still got tonnes of power left, this is what multitasking is for; if my system can push RTCW along at 400FPS, I can leave some expensive background task running and still have perfectly smooth gameplay.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[DrSkwid]

pure lies

*I* can see the difference between 70 & 100 fps

120fps is probably the premium.

more fps = greater reponsiveness fool the desire for more fps is only marginally to do with the visual.

Learn

informative!! idiots

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[X-Guy]

NVIDIA's binary drivers don't break between XFree86 versions. They support all XFree86 versions from 4.0.1 through top of tree XFree86 CVS. And they do have open source versions of the 2D-only drivers. The open source drivers support all NVIDIA cards. I've seen more complaints on XFree86 mailing lists about newer ATI cards not working that there are about new NVIDIA cards not working. I'd take vendor support over specs any day.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just downloaded DX9 Beta2. It is set to expire in October. That may or may not be the actual final release date. Beta1 expires August 22 from what I remember.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[afidel]

Wrong, doubling the resolution quarters the framerate, so 3-400 would become 75-100, still playable though.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[Fweeky]

No, not really. You've got a lot more than just pushing pixels around to worry about for it to be that simple.

4x the pixels doesn't mean 4x the geometry, or 4x the AI, or 4x the bandwidth requirements (ok, the final image is 4x bigger, but the textures and geometry you're pushing aren't also 4x bigger).

Look at the benchmarks for the 9700 for Q3; 1024*768 = 203FPS. 1600*1200 = 180.6FPS. The nearly three times as many pixels of the higher resolution resulted in a loss of just 10% of the framerate.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[timeOday]

And further-furthermore, if you aren't getting 100+fps at some random moment, it's unlikely your framerate will stay above 35 or so when it most matters.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey UberGeek, you cant tell the difference between 100FPS and 400FPS because your monitor only refreshes at 60-80FPS. Duh.

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez, welcome to the 90's. Any card capable of 1280x1024 has a VESA 2.0 implementation, and can do linear framebuffer.

And even if you're stuck with some prehistoric POS card, you can fake a linear frame buffer with the MMU (you change banks in the page fault handler).

Re:Direct X 9 ?

[ChaoticLimbs]

How can you display 400 FPS? Is there any display that refreshes at 400Hz? I mean, that's hella fast but Wolfenstein runs fantastic on my Geforce2 Ti. I think the human eye refreshes slower than that. When can I get a video card that plugs into my skull? At what framerate will I start drooling and murmuring about the lemmings? Unnnnngggggg....

Kudos to ATI

[qurob]

They've beat NVIDIA, at least for now

Also, the red PCB is nice

Re:Kudos to ATI

[Wumpus]

Also, the red PCB is nice

That's funny - I've usually seen red PCB used for prototype boards during development, where the obvious difference in color made it obvious that you shouldn't ship them to customers, or use them for anything important.

Re:Kudos to ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

The old Gravis Ultrasound soundcards (the best sound card of their day) came on red PCB. I've seen a few others too that used red but I can't think of any right now.

Re:Kudos to ATI

[velocipenguin]

Most of MSI's motherboards currently use red PCBs, as do many of Gainward's video cards.

Re:Kudos to ATI

[morgajel]

bullshit- absolute and utter bullshit. I for the longest time, was an ATI supporter. They have by far, the most kickass integrated tv-tuner cards I've seen.
I supported them when everyone else laughed at me. I supported them- until I bought neverwinter nights last weekend. They have NO DRIVER SUPPORT. they're response to 'your card won't work and continues to crash' was 'suck our balls. if you want to play, you have to use the 2-versions-past drivers.' Don't believe me? look up the all-in-wonder-radeon drivers on their site and look at the known issues section. That isn't acceptable to me.
I bought a geforce4 mx440 yesterday, and it works great. First non-ati card I've bought. I hear that each time nvidia releases new detonator drivers, it improves ALL of their cards, including the older ones. so yeah, I felt the need to rant on that.

mod me down if it gives you your jollies, but just keep in mind your supporting a company that doesn't support you.

Re:Kudos to ATI

[RadioTV]

The Comtrol Rocket cards use red PCBs.

Re:Kudos to ATI

[Moonshadow]

Offtopic, but you may want to consider returning the GF4 MX and getting a GF3 TI series card. The MX series of 4's are just the series 2's with more power - meaning they don't have the nifty GF4 features. It's a bit of a marketing deception. For all the nifty next-generation stuff, you'll need a Ti series card. The Ti200 goes for about $90 right now, IIRC, includes all the nifty stuff, and is more powerful.

I got a 440MX and it was barely enough for my needs. I returned it, got a GF3 Ti200, and it's rock solid. Definately worth the extra $20. The Ti500 is also getting down into the bargain-bin range - you may want to check it out.

Re:Kudos to ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

Should do some research before posting. ATI know has a series of drivers that are like the detonator series for nvidia, speciacly drives that are updated often, and aiming for rock solid

Re:Kudos to ATI

[morgajel]

small problem tho- the catalyst drivers are the ones that suck balls. the current ones are version 2.2 ati says on their site "um yeah, they suck balls, and so do the 2.1.... you'll have to use the ones before it" which use a different naming scheme just to add MORE fun to the already bullshit situation

Re:Kudos to ATI

[alue]

ATI released Radeon 8500 drivers yesterday. =)

Re:Kudos to ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the Weather Channel is still working on actual Linux drivers. ATI's binaries are just as insulting as NVIDIA's binaries. What kind of idiot runs Linux and then agrees not to reverse engineer the software they run on their own box?

Re:Kudos to ATI

[morgajel]

took your advice, spent the extra $50, and got a TI4200.
that's all circuit city had. oh well. that's what I get for wanting instant gratification.

Re:Kudos to ATI

[morgajel]

aren't you the clever one. perhaps you missed the message in my post.
*pats parent poster on the head*

the problem is with neverwinter nights, and as of yet, it hasn't been ported to linux. so, while I apreciate your efforts, I'm sorry to inform you that that absolutely does not help the situation.
their hardware/drivers just don't work for what I need.

And why???

[slycer9]

Are we still using QuakeIII as a benchmark? How about a little less worry about the hardware, and a little more renovation on the software. Seriously, what's new in the past couple of years?

Re:And why???

[MP*Birdman]

One part of it is that it's something people are accustomed to seeing, so a score of X is more meaningful to them than one from some game without any sense of reference. People also still play Q3 a fair bit, with baseq3, Urban Terror, Reaction Quake 3, and so on all being played.

As well, when video cards come out every six months, and games like the Quake series every year or more, you're going to see the same game used for a while.

Once Doom 3, Unreal 2k3, eetc. come out. maybe those will be added to benchmarks.. Who knows.

Re:And why???

[YaRness]

no kidding.

we can do 400 fps and a kajillion polynomial vectors per gigaflop or whatever, but there's not a fricking game that makes any real use out of any of it.

Re:And why???

[Schnapple]

Are we still using QuakeIII as a benchmark?

Well, several reasons:

1. Quake 3 has been out for some time so you can follow the progress of this card in reference to other cards, even ones in the distant past (1999).
2. The Quake 3 engine has improved quite a bit, especially in more recent games like Jedi Knight II and Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
3. Quake 3 has proven quite stable and popular and powers a lot of games.
4. ATI just got done with QuakeCon, so they're obviously big fans of id.
5. The 9700 powers DOOM III pretty good (just got done seeing it this weekend at QuakeCon) and so it makes sense to see how well it will do with id's current engine before wondering what it will do with the next one.
6. Most importantly, everyone uses Quake 3 to benchmark.

Re:And why???

[_UnderTow_]

Quake 3 is still being used as a benchmark because there are still games being released that use the Q3 engine.

However, Anandtech's review of the 9700 has some benchmarks that include the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine. There are also some cool CPU scaling charts in there. Epic has been providing Anandtech with build of the UT2003 engine for quite some time. All of their recent reviews include UT2003 numbers.

Re:And why???

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. It's funny how some Q3 retards are downmodding you because you said Q3 is old news.

Re:And why???

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit replying to your own post you mortard. In any case, people use Quake 3 as a benchmark for a few, very good reasons:

• There is a lot of historical benchmark data -> You don't have to pull together 60 video cards every single time you want to benchmark a new card. This is important because people often don't just want to see "How do the top 3 cards do against each other", but also "How does it do versus the card I own...what improvement will I see"?
• Quake 3 is still a very kick ass game ANYWAYS. Play it with Urban Terror and you'll experience a tremendous game. Of course there are tonnes of other, very new games that use the Q3 engine.
• Quake 3 has a trustworthy "engine". It is consistent and reliable, whereas many other games exhibit unexplainable oddities at certain resolution/bit deptch combinations.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

AnandTech Conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

It has definitely been a while since we've been able to say that an ATI card has lived up to its expectations, but the Radeon 9700 Pro does live up to every last one of our expectations. The question truly ends up being, does it meet your expectations?

There are three things that the Radeon 9700 Pro can offer at this point:

1) The highest performance in current and future games.
2) The ability to play at 1600x1200 in just about any game currently available or soon to be made available, and
3) The ability to play virtually any game at 1024x768 with 4X AA and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled at smooth frame rates.

The first point is moot because you should never buy a video card based on the performance it will offer in games that are no where near being released. While it is true that the Radeon 9700 Pro is probably the best card out right now for Doom III, there will be something faster and cheaper closer to the time Doom III is released. But if you're looking to play anything this fall (UT2003, etc...) then the 9700 Pro makes a lot of sense.

The last two points will really determine whether the Radeon 9700 Pro is the card for you; if either of those options appeal to you, then the Radeon 9700 Pro is probably very well suited for your needs.

We would recommend buying a Radeon 9700 Pro over a GeForce4 Ti 4600 if you're buying today, even taking into account the ~$100 price difference between the two cards. What we can't offer a recommendation on however, is what to do when the issue of NV30 comes into the picture. If NVIDIA is able to meet their schedules, NV30 will be out around December and at a price competitive with the Radeon 9700 Pro.

Waiting until later this Fall will also grant you the option of going with the Radeon 9500, a 4 pixel pipeline version of the Radeon 9700 running at lower clock speeds. Or if you're looking for a bit more, the All-in-Wonder Radeon 9xxx cards based on the R300 will be announced later this year as well. Paired with a new video encoder chip, the new All-in-Wonder card should prove to be the biggest hardware upgrade the AIW series has seen in years.

Regardless of what path you choose the Radeon 9700 Pro is a viable option from ATI, and it has been a very long time since we've been able to say that as well.

Way to go slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is old news.. the Radeon 9700 has been out for a few hours already. Why do we have to wait so long for news on this site?

Re:Way to go slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and the correct spelling is also Radoen. Lousy slashdot editors can't even fix simple typos.

Is it time to update my Nvidia drivers again?

[WestieDog]

I can remember the last time the ATI was going for the lead in the market and Nvidia released a new batch of drivers that increased performance enough to keep the top spot. Will it happen again? (I hope so I'm too cheap to buy a new card)

Re:Is it time to update my Nvidia drivers again?

[mczak]

There is no way a driver update will help the GeForce 4 Ti to be able to compete with the R9700.
First, there were already some driver releases since the GeForce 4Ti is out (usually you get only really a performance improvement from a driver upgrade if the card is really new, later on it's mostly bug fixing in drivers which don't help much performance, if at all).
Second, and more importantly, the difference is really too great - drivers might improve things by 10% in general, maybe 20%, but we're speaking about a 200% difference in a lot of situations between a Ti 4600 and a R9700.
That said, the next revision of Nvidia drivers (release 40!) is supposed to offer better anisotropic filtering performance, don't know if it's just a rumor, but even if it isn't it still won't catch up to the R9700.

mczak

the waiting is killing me...

[necrognome]

Too bad the message here hasn't changed. Although a certain thing that goes by the name "927" has been keeping me busy. Demo pls!

HardOCP too...

[Marasmus]

[H]ardOCP Also has a review and benchmarks. Good stuff from the [H]ard crew.

Re:HardOCP too...

[GigsVT]

Wow, what a stupid name, I think it should be {H,T}ard OCP.

Re:HardOCP too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I'm sure Kyle could care less about what some moron named GigsVT (a very stupid name BTW) thinks of his site.

Re:HardOCP too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Least it isn't trying to look all leet like a regular expression.

I gave up ATI.

[Anonymous Coward]

I gave up ATI after the first Radeon. Mine was a Radeon 8500 w/ 64mb (agp). Half of the games I had didn't work on it (Vampires was just a gray screen the entire time). ATI took *months* to release the first updated drivers. I had to rely on unsupported third-party drivers that people put out (but didn't entirely do the job). Eventually, I just threw my $400 ATI card in the closet and went back to my old card until the GeForce 3 (and then GeForce 4) came out.

It would have been enough if they'd said "we are aware of these problems and expect an updated driver next month" but most of the issues they claimed didn't even exist and they never gave any timeline for an updated driver. THey didn't even say IF they ever would give out an updated driver.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Marasmus]

This is the number one reason why I stopped using ATI products once the Mach64 chips came out. Their driver support has always been slow, incomplete, and crippling to their hardware. For many products, downloading even ORIGINAL drivers was impossible, and one would have to order a $4.99 CD of the original, old, buggy, broken drivers. Some products they made (PCI TV Wonder) were left completely unsupported, and never got correct driver support for anything above Windows 98 original release.

Despite their recent excellent showings in hardware, I too refuse to buy ATI because their driver support is, at the very least, a complete insult to the sensibilities of even a modest geek. For that reason I'll continue using my NVIDIA card until it burns out (which will be as soon as the fan stops spinning), and then I'll go and buy their latest and greatest. At least their drivers are generously provided and updated, sometimes on a weekly basis.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[hendridm]

I gaurentee you're using an Athlon system. My last (and I mean last) Athlon system didn't work with any of the ATI boards. I thought ATI was shite, so I bought an nVidia board. When my Athlon decided to cook itself (taking my board with onboard RAID with it, a mistake I will not make again), I decided no more - I bought a P4 system. All of the cards the previously wouldn't work in my computer now worked flawlessly, including:

- ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon
- ATI TV Tuner
- Hauppage TV Tuner

Granted, it might be partly AMD's fault, but I shouldn't have to worry about compatibility, and with Intel I don't have to. I didn't want to use nVidia because they don't have an acceptable alternative to the All-in-Wonder series.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Quasar1999]

For that reason I'll continue using my NVIDIA card until it burns out (which will be as soon as the fan stops spinning), and then I'll go and buy their latest and greatest. At least their drivers are generously provided and updated, sometimes on a weekly basis.

Umm... granted that Nvidia drivers rock... but doesn't it kinda scare you that they have new drivers every week??? Just a little?

Re:I gave up ATI.

[JustDisGuy]

Wrong - I've got an 8500DV running in a PIII 700 that will NOT capture video/audio properly. The audio is always out of sync with the video. Not AMD at fault for that!!

I too have purchased my last ATI product. Too bad - they might've been great...

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Anonymous Coward]

My Athlon XP 1600 has been working perfectly with my Radeon 7500 and all of my other hardware for the past 9 months or so. Maybe you just had a shitty motherboard?

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Trespass]

Either that or the motherboard was the problem.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Anonymous Coward]

What chipset?

Via chipsets have been known to have AGP/PCI incompatibilities... I will not buy another Via chipset board ever again!

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Evro]

I didn't want to use nVidia because they don't have an acceptable alternative to the All-in-Wonder series.

Oh no?

"A third output is a 9-pin s-video-like connector that interfaces with Gainward's VIVO cable. The cable features a set of composite/s-video input and output cables to take advantage of the Philips SAA7108E video encoder chip on the card itself. As we mentioned in our GeForce4 roundup, the Philips encoder chip only allows TV output for resolutions up to 800 x 600 but it makes up for that limitation in its support for both video output and input. Just as is the case with Gainward's more expensive GeForce4s, the Ti 4200 comes with a copy of WinCoder and WinProducer to help take advantage of the VIVO nature of the card. "

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Marx_Mrvelous]

Still got that card? Want to sell it? :)

Re:I gave up ATI.

[D3]

I gave up ATI after my eXpert@play board. I bought the board, installed it and the RAM was bad. Called ATI tech support IN CANADA!!! No 1-800 number! At first they wanted me to spend my own money to send them the bad card and get a new one. I said, "If I have to spend my own money the card goes back to the place I bought it and I buy 3Dfx." So ATI sends me a card and a UPS shipping label. I still spent $20 to call in the first place!

Next, I found out that the benchmarks I had looked at so long were for a tweaked set of drivers that ATI had released to get better scores on Quake and the card sucked for anything else and wasn't as good for Quake as I thought! This was one week after I'd bought the card.

I'll NEVER trust them again.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Anonymous Coward]

Athlon XP 1900
GeForce4 TI4600 (Previously a GF3TI200)
Hauppage WinTV GO
SB128
DVD
CDR
SCSI
Additional ATA100 card
Many hard drives.

ROCK SOLID! My first Athlon system and probably the most stable box I've ever had.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[shepd]

>and never got correct driver support for anything above Windows 98 original release.

Never had an ATI ISA TV card, did you?

They couldn't even get it working well with windows 95 (I know, I tried every windows version I could get my hands on).

Blech. But at least they're stepping into the open source movement, so perhaps this won't be such a problem in the future (at least on Linux).

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Zelet]

That is the same reason why I have never tried any ATI cards. I like to be on the bleeding edge with OSes (XP and RH7.2) and I am affraid ATI wont support thier cards. I usually keep my hardware for a couple of years (or 3 OSes whichever comes first :)). Oh well... I might have to take a chance since it is time for a new card anyway.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Ogerman]

This is the number one reason why I stopped using ATI products once the Mach64 chips came out. Their driver support has always been slow, incomplete, and crippling to their hardware.

ATI products were crap back in the days of Mach64 and the like--both hardware and drivers. This all changed with the introduction of the Radeon series, however. I've had no problem with their latest cards and Windoze drivers. Far more importantly, ATI products have better support in Linux because ATI, unlike NVidia, actually documents their hardware and plays friendly with Open Source developers. And it seems to me Radeon boards still have the GF4 beat hands down in 2D image (ie. analog signal) quality at high resolutions. Somebody with a high bandwidth oscilloscope want to do some S/N analysis?

Re:I gave up ATI.

[dead sun]

Why? If it was constantly for large changes I might be somewhat scared. If their team is constantly making small improvements, maybe fixing a bug here and there, and then releasing the work without delay then I'm all for weekly updates. Mainly because you don't have to do the updates but if you need drivers then you always have the latest greatest from the nVidia team. And they never seem to break anything with the new drivers so I would think that they're decently tested too. Hats off to them.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[hendridm]

It was an ALi Magik, which get great reviews before it was found to be a pile of shit. I bought it because of the initial reviews.

If ALi and VIA make shitty chipsets, what should I have purchased? I'm not sure there were any decent SIS chipsets out at the time. Alternatives?

Re:I gave up ATI.

[hendridm]

Hmmm, I had problems capturing with the All-in-Wonder on Windows 2000 until I did some registry hacking. Then it worked fine.

On Windows XP, however, it worked right away. Perhaps you could try XP? What capture software are you running? I recommend VirtualDub.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[hendridm]

> Either that or the motherboard was the problem.

Perhaps, but in my purchasing experience:

- 3 out of the 5 AMD-based systems I've owned (one K6/100/?, one K6-2/300/VIA, one K6-3/?/VIA, an Athlon/700/VIA and an Athlon/1.2/ALI) were unstable and/or had compatibility issues.
- 0 out of the 4 Intel-based systems I've owned were unstable (a 386/16, a 486/33, a P2/233, and recently a P4/1300, all using Intel chipsets)

I just have bad luck with AMD.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Anonymous Coward]

I see alot of this "ATI drivers suck" stuff, don't know why as I have never had a problem with ANY driver in the ATI line since I started buying ATI with the Rage 128. (never had any problems with any of my nVidia cards either, starting from Riva 128)

I'd bet most of that talk comes from bottom of the bowl websites and people using beta / unofficial drivers.

As for no support for the ATI TV Wonder PCI .... sorry.. but I have that very card and have used it in w98,2000 and now XP. Only problem I have with them is the silly bronze/gold color of the skin.

July 5, 2001 is the last offical driver release (beta drivers there too)

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Anonymous Coward]

The AIW series also has a TV tuner and hardware DVD support. nVidia makes an external box for those features. It comes down to what is "acceptable".

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would instantly suspect the VIA chipsets. I hope to move on to an Athlon system soon and without a doubt I'll stick to AMD chipset motherboards (760MP, 760MPX).

Re:I gave up ATI.

[chez69]

Perhaps it is the VIA chipsets? they seem to be giving people lots of troble.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[pherthyl]

"I gave up ATI after my eXpert@play board."

Umm.. Hello?? That card is ancient. You can't base their current cards on some ancient piece of shit that they made once.
Wah wah! Intel sucks cause the 386SX that i had didn't run Windows 95 worth shit! I'm never buying intel again!

"Next, I found out that the benchmarks I had looked at so long were for a tweaked set of drivers that ATI had released to get better scores on Quake"

I'm willing to bet that the hardware sites did make a note of that when they posted reviews.. Of course if you don't know how to read properly that wont help you.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[TheLastUser]

Doesn't ATI provide specs and support to the OSS community, that allows them to include the OSS DRI for XFree4? I use NVidea now, but I was thinking of switching to ATI so I wouldn't have to mess with the drivers as much (since they come with redhat).

Re:I gave up ATI.

[new_confused_mind]

That shoudn't be no surprise if you have seen how the taiwaneses work.

Check for yourself: A ViA 'lab' and an Intel one.

Open two tabs (or windows) and see then side by side.

Now guess what chipset/cpu combo I'll get next?

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Anonymous Coward]

The alternative for me was to buy Intel. The VIA board I had was so shitty and so wasteful of my time and data, that spending an extra $100 for Intel was a no-brainer.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[BigFootApe]

How many times have I heard this? "I bought an ATI card fifty years ago, and the driver updates were slow, and the drivers were bad, and..."

This is an industry where silicon is updated every 6 months. Drivers are released continually. Most importantly, NVidia was hardly a blip on the map when ATI was producing Mach64s in quantity. Now they're one of the top chip suppliers of the PC graphics industry, cutting into ATI's OEM lifeblood.

The arrival of NVidia forced ATI to reexamine their game. They've made genuine improvements in all aspects of their company -- including a vastly improved driver team, and a product cycle competitive with NVidias.

The reality is that, for the time being, ATIs card IS the latest and greatest, (free) driver updates from ATI produce meaningful improvements in quality and performance and, in general, the company has transformed.

ATI is a contender, and ignoring ATI cards as a possible component in your computer based on an outdated, mostly anecdotal experience serves only to hurt yourself in the long run.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats odd, I have an Athlon system, and have a Radeon SDR and an ATI TV Wonder working in it flawlessly [The Radeon is OCed as well] It was probably your motherboard.

P.S: As long as you have a FAN on that Athlon, it'll be fine!

Re:I gave up ATI.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, ATI kept it a secret. I would still buy an ATI card if they had something in my price/performance range, (same with nVidia) as I have both at the moment (I have an ATI Radeon and an nVidia TNT2 in the same box) but I'll probably end up getting the new Trident card instead.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[hendridm]

> P.S: As long as you have a FAN on that Athlon, it'll be fine!

I had a fan on it. It died and the CPU fried itself. P4's underclock themselves to prevent this from happening.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[woogieoogieboogie]

I have been using ATI cards for many years and have only had one problem. That was using an AIW 128 Pro on an old e-machines. It wasn't the cards fault, it was the Cyrix proc and the 42 mhz pci bus. That e-machines was the only low end machine I ever bought. It came free with the monitor and printer. Right now I have an ATI Rage Fury pro in this machine and a Radeon AIW 8500DV on the other system. I have absolutely no problems with either and they run everything I throw at it. Bottom line is that ATI cards do not work well with crappy systems and crappy bioses. hell, even the p4 Gateways in the office have rage 128 pro cards in them and they all work flawlessley. Call me crazy, but with over 50 machines running ATI cards in the office and half a dozen personal ones, having only one problem with an ATI card on an out of spec PCI bus does not equate to poor drivers or crappy cards. There is more to a video card than just gaming. DVD playback is also important and a combinatioon of a Radeon or better card and the ATI DVD player 5 or better will give you absolutely stunning DVD playback, even when zoomed in 4x. ATI cards also give you a much sharper and clearer desktop out of the box while NVIDIA cards tend to look washed out. Obviously you can tweak the NVIDIA card to achieve the same quality on the desktop, but tweaking 50 machines so (l)users do not complain is a waste of my time, especially when there is a better product available.

Re:I gave up ATI.

[woogieoogieboogie]

The audio is always out of sync with the video

That is because your soundcard is too slow for the format you chose to record at. You can run ATI's compatibility test to find out if the soundcard's up to par. The onboard sound of my msi kt266 is right on the fringe of acceptability. If I leave the downmix option on, the soundcard will not pass ATI's compatibility test, with it off it will.

What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers??

[t0qer]

If you add 1200 to 8500 you come up with 9700. Will the next radeon model number be 10900?

Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers??

[nhavar]

actually there's a 9000 model inbetween. I think the increments are more like 500 depending on the nature of the upgrades to the card 7000, 7500, 8000, 8500, 9000, [[9700]]. Maybe they had a 9500 but decided to tweak it a little more but not to the point where it was a 10000.

Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers??

[Bishop]

The 9000 is actually the sucessor to the 7000 line. The 8500 is faster and more expensive then the 9000. There will be a 9500 as is mentioned on the Anandtech site. The numbering is confussing. Typical. Recall GForce4-MX cards from Nvidia.

Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers??

[Azar]

>Maybe they had a 9500 but decided to tweak it a little more but not to the point where it was a 10000.

The 9500 will be released in a couple of months (as in mentioned in the Tom's Hardware Guide article). It will be a scaled down 9700. It should have a lower clock speed and fewer texture units.

Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers??

[nhavar]

So then they're backfilling the product line. Build out the high end product then go back and fill in blank spots in the market coverage.

Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers??

[UncleFluffy]

Digit 1 - DirectX version
Digit 2 - Performance relative to others in the same series
Digits 3 and 4 - meaningless

Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers??

[k_187]

actually, ATI did a press release. You can search for it on [H]ard OCP, I'm too lazy. But basically the first digit tells the chip's generation relative to each other so:

7xxx first gen radeon
8xxx second gen
9xxx third gen

The Radeon 9000 is not a DX 9 compatible chip, its mroe or less a tweaked 8500. meaning it gives aproxatmetly the same performance as the 8500. Its actually a little less cause the 900 can't do single pass texturing or something.

Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers??

[Anonymous Coward]

Rake in the early adopters now, and when NV30 is out with its three-tier lineup issue new cards to compete against the mid/low end.

Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers??

[UncleFluffy]

Hmm. I got the "first digit = dx version" thing direct from some friends at ATI. I suspect that what happened with the 9000 was the marketing idiots messing things up in a similar way to what happened with the GF4-MX.

Anyway, thanks for the correction/update.

Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers??

[Tony Hoyle]

What's a QD then? I actually have one of these... the vendor (who has since disappeared - don't you just love the net?) claimed it was an 8500 - certainly I've never seen it slow down on any game I've thrown at it - but I'm not so sure.

Not that I'm worried, it's far better than the geforce it replaced (having supported drivers rather than that binary junk that crashes every 20 minutes is a great plus) & the 2D performance is quite good... not as good as a Matrox, but usable.

Accelerated drivers for Linux?

[Urban Garlic]

I've only used nVidia hardware lately, they have good free-as-in-beer drivers that seem to work OK. I gave the ATI site a once-over, but didn't see any obvious link for Linux/XF86 reference drivers -- is ATI good about stuff like that?

Re:Accelerated drivers for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI cannot even make proper drivers for windows let alone any other operating system.

ATI hardware is good, but their software is shit.

Re:Accelerated drivers for Linux?

[Soulfader]

They aren't even good about Win32 drivers--don't hold your breath. =)

Re:Accelerated drivers for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hey, I've got Karma to burn:

AHahhahahahahHAhahahahhaHAhahahahahahHAHahahhHAhHA

AhahhAHhahahHHAHAhh

There ya go.

There's a thread over on Linuxgames.com discussing this on the Doom3 story. The short answer is, no. ATI won't be releasing any respectable drivers for the 9700, so linux users are much better off with nVidia hardware.

Re:Accelerated drivers for Linux?

[alue]

ATI doesn't have a history of releasing the most reliable drivers, but that doesn't mean their cards are no good for XFree86 systems.

Unlike nVidia, ATI has chosen to support open source development for their cards rather than produce their own closed-source drivers. Consequently, nVidia has a set of good drivers for both Windows and Linux, but no one but them knows anything about their implementation or their hardware specs; ATI, on the other hand, produces no XFree86 drivers of their own, but they've given some support to open source efforts, and now we have a set of open source drivers that work pretty well, although they're still in development.

ATI did a good thing by providing developer resources to the whole community, because now we have an open-source software implementation that will last forever and important hardware information that anybody can implement a driver for. The difference between nVidia's and ATI's policies are analogous to offering a man a fish, as opposed to teaching him how.

Re:Accelerated drivers for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

But I thought that the ATI linux drivers sucked,or so I have heard, and come out much later than the card. Is the 8500 even supported yet under linux? Last I heard it wasn't, but I dont pay much attention to ATI anymore.

All kidding aside, I'd rather have the quality drivers nvidia provides than crappy open source drivers 6 months from now. I won't even consider buying an ATI card until they do better linux support than they do now. Nvidia has my business sown up (in spite of all the problems I have under windows with my geforce 4).

I would be interested to see some benchmarks that compare the performance of an ati card on windows vs same ati card on linux (say running tribes2 or something) and the same nvidia card on windows and on linux. It would be an interesting comparison.

Re:Accelerated drivers for Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

The 8500 works just fine under Linux. ATI released binary drivers for Linux for the workstation version sof the R200 gpu cards. That driver also works great for the 8500.

A good thing

[Dirtside]

Competition is a good thing. The last thing I particularly want is for nVidia to get stomped by ATI because they start getting complacent like 3Dfx did. Let's hope they keep each other on their toes.

Re:A good thing

[Anonymous Coward]

nVidia has six month product cycles, ATi has 12 month product cycles. NV30 is just around the corner, and in another six months ATi's product is going to be praying for a large performance-increase via driver improvements, or ATi is only going to get an early-adoption cash flow from their current lead.

Personally I'd be more concerned that ATi hasn't won enough to make their overall marketshare last until their next high-end product line. The low/mid-end product line they'll issue to compete with the bottom two tiers of NV30 will have to do comparatively well for the buck or they'll be the GF2MX of 2003.

MOD parent up...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, someone that is _qualified_ to answer this...please do.

i for one, am quite interested in the answer..

NOT Available yet...

[Anonymous Coward]

nice story...Misleading healine as usual..the CARD IS NOT AVAILBLE yet. No word on when it will be either. I called ATI....

Slashdotted...

[tempfile]

Anyway, having read ATI's pages, I wonder whether they mean OpenGL 2.0 when speaking about "compliance with future OpenGL revisions" in their pixel and vertex shader chips.

This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[pnatural]

...until John Carmack responds with his take on the card.

I'm serious. How many of us base our video card purchases on the recommendations he makes? He knows the cards in detail, knows what features they support and how well, and he sure as hell knows how well they'll perform with the next id game.

So John, is this card worthy?

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[T5]

According to a recent .plan of John's, he's already decided to demo Doom III on the Radeon platform. He decided this a few short weeks after doting on the Nvidia stuff, too.

It sounds to me that ATI has some serious card here. Now if they can overcome their pitiful history of sorry drivers...

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1656

Quote:

When ATI started talking about R300 and hinted that it would be significantly faster than anything NVIDIA had up their sleeves, we were understandably skeptical. The progression from there is best summed up by what our own Matthew Witheiler had to say about the R300: "It all started with Carmack's endorsement of the card; that was huge for them. Now it has erupted into something that I didn't think was possible"

Matthew's final statement sums up the feelings all of us at AnandTech had about the R300; we were impressed that John Carmack provided such a glowing endorsement of the technology back at Quakecon, but we were floored once we actually saw working silicon in action.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Quasar1999]

...until John Carmack responds with his take on the card.

I'm serious. How many of us base our video card purchases on the recommendations he makes? He knows the cards in detail, knows what features they support and how well, and he sure as hell knows how well they'll perform with the next id game.

So John, is this card worthy? What? John said he will port Doom 3 to XBox... Yet he says the 9700 is his new card of choice... I see something horribly wrong here... Either he has gone crazy, or (more likely) is accepting bribes from microsoft. In which case, I wouldn't put it past him to accept bribes from nvidia in the future, which would make his recommendations not hold much water.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Anonymous Cow herd]

From what I remember of an earlier post of his on one of the innumerable Doom ]|[ threads, his opinion was that the Raedon cards are superior to the NVidia cards, and have been for a while... his main beef seemed to be that ATI's drivers were so crappy that NVidia was able to outperform them, even though the Raedon card has better specs. Of course, IANJC, so take with as many grains of salt as appropriate.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[ALoverOfPeace]

It's not a bribe when you sell something, dumbshit.

Id was paid by Microsoft to release an X-Box version of their game. Carmack says the 9700 is his card of choice, and yet, Doom 3 will run on Nvidia and other non ATI graphics cards. He wasn't bribed by Nvidia or Microsoft; the larget his audience, the more money he makes.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Hexact]

What? John said he will port Doom 3 to XBox... Yet he says the 9700 is his new card of choice... I see something horribly wrong here.

What you are seeing is John wanting to port to a lower spec, PC like platform while prefering to work with a high end card. What's wrong with that? He probably won't do the porting himself anyway.

Either he has gone crazy, or (more likely) is accepting bribes from microsoft

Conspiration theory bullsh*t.

Clem.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[mypalmike]

In gamespy's coverage of quakecon, Carmack says Doom3 will be, "believe it or not, based around the technology that became available with GeForce1-level hardware." (That's a quote from the article writer, not Carmack himself.) But if you buy the new ATI card, you'll see its advanced technology put to good use in 2-3 years.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[jeeryg_flashaccess]

It was mentioned...Carmack is the owner of an Aerospace company, has tons of money, and a hot girlfriend he would not have any reason to sell out.

So...
There was a story yesterday about a conference ID held. If you noticed the banner ATI was sponsoring it. Obviously he is going to recommend ATI...but if we can all agree that he is a pure hacker at heart than he will never sell out. John is just using the best hardware, because like all of us geeks he wants speed, and feautres (lots).

Now that we agree he is a pure hacker, the X-Box question is trivial. He likes a good challenge, and wants his baby (new technology) to be in front of every geek face in the world.

To summarize:
1. Carmack has no reason to "sell out"
2. Hackers like the newest best gear
3. Hackers want everybody too see their creations.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Daemonik]

More people buy console games than PC games.
More people buy Windows PC games than Apple Mac games.
More people buy Mac games than Linux games.

Yet oddly, poor 'bribed' Carmack supports all 4 platforms. He almost built Quake3 on a JavaVM.

Hell, there was a Sega Dreamcast version of Quake 3.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Quarters]

I'm serious. How many of us base our video card purchases on the recommendations he makes?

I don't base my decisions on any one data point, especially one from someone wanting to sell me a product. To do so would be stupid.

He knows the cards in detail, knows what features they support and how well,

As do hundreds (if not thousands) of others.

and he sure as hell knows how well they'll perform with the next id game.

As I said above, his views can potentially be seen as one trying to sell you his product. I prefer to get my reviews from more notably un-biased sources. I'm not saying Mr. Carmack's opinions are biased. But, at the same time, I wouldn't necessarily base my Goodyear tire purchase on Ford's recomendations.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[cwebster]

the doom3 demo theater at quakecon was run by a box with a radeon 9700, so that should answer your question.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[topham]

All opinions are biased.

All of them.

The most important thing is to determine how significant the bias is, and how it plays a roll in the decision process.

Mr. Carmack, for instance, may wish to get you to buy his latest game, but his bias is in presenting his game as good as possible with the special effects/speed etc.

This is different from a bias where a reviewer likes a particular company, instead of a product.

Not to say either is better, or worse, but there is always bias.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Anonymous Coward]

Carmack has a reason to "sell out"
It's called money.

Like Carmack first demoing Doom 3 on a Mac. That wasn't selling out, was it? An inferior hardware paltform at a zealot convention? Of course that wasn't selling out!

Carmack has had access to ATi's hardware for a while now. And he's both said that the hardware is good, and that the drivers waste it.

Several months ago Carmack issued a statement implying willingness to port Doom 3 to a console. Obviously this was his hint to Microsoft, yeah, we like money. I predicted this; it just made economic sense. The X-Box is just a fucking computer with a quasi GF2/3.

What he is saying now is that it's the best available now. Duh.

If in the future he parades ATi when it's not catching nVidia at the _very end_ of its six month product cycle, then they can have their day in the sun and talk about him selling out. He's done it before and he'll do it again.

Why? You don't become wealthy by being stupid.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[TotallyUseless]

Carmack's hot wife (Anna Kang) might be interested in knowing about his hot girlfriend

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Anonymous Coward]

She might be.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Jobe_br]

According to this article (did you read it?) the drivers recently released by ATi are anything but pitiful. They're apparently stable and solid, so feast your eyes on a new card if that's what was holding you back!

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[pi radians]

Well, Halo was shown at Macworld on a G4.

I know, different matter entirely, but it was just to prove that assumtions are sometimes wrong. And things can change.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[prator]

Didn't Bungie originally only make games on the Mac? That might explain why they showed it on a G4.

-prator

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't advocate the position that Carmack is accepting bribes because he seems like a pretty decent guy. However, when one is in such a pivotal position, the offers probably fall like rain. One shouldn't base their decisions on any single source.

Now, on to your definition of bribery. From what narrow definition of bribery have you dredged to support your weak little argument?

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[HD Webdev]

Yes, but their history will hold people back.

If they can keep up with good driver releases for a while, I might of switching from NVIDIA

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone who fucks you over for $400 once or twice isn't likely to get another $400 from you ever *ever* again. Case in point, ATI.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? You don't become wealthy by being stupid.

True, poor people are not only stupid, they deserve death as they are inferior to the strong smart rich people!

Your vote is with Bush, right?

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll see it put to use today as it powers through all current 3d apps faster than anything else out there.

Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant...

[Jobe_br]

That's fine, I guess - up to you. Just making the comment that the reviewers (and others) have indicated that ATi has "learned their lesson" and started releasing good drivers.

Play's well with penguins.

[wilburdg]

Compared to some other companies *cough*NVIDIA*cough* ATI has been very helpful to linux developers. While NVIDIA only releases binaries, and only for x86, ATI actually provides developers with technical specs to aid development on other platforms (PowerPC anyone?).

From ATI's website:

While ATI does not develop Linux or XFree86 drivers for its graphics cards in house, we actively support 3rd party developers that provide driver support for the majority of ATI products with development kits and information.

Radeon drivers for Linux are in development. XFree86 and the DRI Open Source Project offer Radeon 2D support with their latest released source code. 3D support is scheduled to be released Q1 2001.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[motorsabbath]

NVIDIA's drivers may be binary-only, but at least they perform well. Is there any such thing as 3D acceleration for Radeon cards in Linux?

I'd rather have binary drivers that rock than lackluster open-source drivers that don't. No offence anybody writing ATI drivers, keep it up!

"3D support is scheduled to be released Q1 2001." Does Linux 3D exist for ATI cards yet?

I'd love it if NVIDIA had some competition but right now in the Linux 3D space (small it may or may not be) they have none.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Eric Smith]

Do they provide full specs, or do they keep details of the fanciest features secret? How does their support of free software compare to Matrox?

I used to buy Nvidia-based cards (mostly from Asus), and technically they're great, but nowdays I try to only buy documented hardware. I've been wondering for a while which video cards I should buy for a desktop system.

My Fujitsu Lifebook (P2040) has an ATI Rage Pro Mobility of some sort, and it seems to work fine. To get the X Video extension working so I could view CDs, I had to download a new driver that isn't yet in the XFree86 distribution, but it works great.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[dinivin]

Is there any such thing as 3D acceleration for Radeon cards in Linux?

Ummm... Yes. There are open source drivers for anything lower than the Radeon 8500... There are open source drivers in development for the Radeon 8500, as well as closed source drivers from ATI for the FireGL cards (which, BTW, work with the Radeon 8500, and are much more stable, for me, than any version of the nVidia linux drivers).

In addition, there are 3rd party commercial drivers for the Radeon cards, too.

Oh, and let's not forget that if you want 3D acceleration for a new nVidia card under FreeBSD (for example), you're screwed. I've had no problems getting the DRI working on my Radeon 7500 under FreeBSD (and will be trying with an 8500 tonight).

Dinivin

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[ALoverOfPeace]

Nvidia doesn't release open source drivers because it would hurt their business. Without a doubt, if their drivers were open source, competitors would be able to derive valuable information about their GPUs and how they work.

There is a place for closed source on an open source platform, and this is one of them.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Clue4All]

And? ATi has dumped partial specs on XFree86 developers and said "here." 3D support for the Radeon series of cards is abysmal and non-existent for the 8500 and higher cards. 2D isn't that impressive either. If you want OpenGL form ATi, you can get it, though, with BINARY-ONLY DRIVERS. You're comparing this to high quality nVidia drivers from the start that get 95-99% of the Windows framerate? Gimme a break.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[wray]

It's easy to complain, but how long will this be out before there are drivers for XFree86? 2,3,4 generations?! (There are still no Radeon 8500 drivers) You can complain about NVIDIA binary drivers for linux all you want, but I for one appreciate being able to use the latest technology when it is released without having to use windows. I would really like to see ATI release drivers (binary or otherwise) for linux.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[motorsabbath]

Cool. That's good news. I didn't know there was 3d support for the ATI cards. Is it any good?

Also, the driver page for nVidia sez they support the 4400's and the 4600's - how much newer can ya get? I have a Geforce2 now, been looking at a Geforce4 and they're all apparently supported.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? I assume you mean the FireGL 8800 driver by the binary driver.

The DRI project already has a working 3d driver for Radeon 8500, I don't know if the driver does TCL yet, but it certainly works.

It's in the trunk however, but in its own r200-0-1-branch.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[motorsabbath]

Sorry - didn't catch the FreeBSD reference. yes, I'm still sort of screwed in FreeBSD with my geforce, but the only games I run in FreeBSD are Kohan and Civ:CTP and several free ones (LGeneral) which don't use 3d anyway.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[shepd]

>but I for one appreciate being able to use the latest technology when it is released without having to use windows.

And I appreciate being able to build a box extra cheap with an old 2D video card.

That's the problem with binary drivers -- you're buying a time limited product.

And yeah, I do still have a machine on an old Trident 8900 video card. It just doesn't need a $500 upgrade (no AGP slot and 486 processor == No NVIDIA for it). Thank God for the longetivity of open source.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't see why this is flamebait, unless WilburDG is falling afoul of some sort of Slashdot pro-NVidia, anti-ATI prejudice. This is correct information. ATI releases information about their chips to developers. NVidia doesn't and only releases closed binaries of their drivers. Who's more supportive of open source? Who? Certainly not NVidia.

Posting anonymously to preserve karma.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Daemonik]

I would really like to see ATI release drivers (binary or otherwise) for linux.

This must be your happy day then, cause XFree86 4.2 comes with Radeon 8500 drivers (has since it was released, I use it with my 8500 every day) and ATI just released some really sweet FireGL drivers for XFree86 4.1 & 4.2 that also work with the Radeon 8500's.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Spirilis]

I can second that, I bought an AIW Radeon 7500 recently (for the realtime MPEG1/MPEG2 encoding in Windows), and in Linux using the "ati.2" drivers from the GATOS project (gatos.sf.net) with XF86 4.2.0 it works beautifully. I haven't pushed 3D too much, just played XMMS's OpenGL plugin but it works smoothly and well. TV is good except the sound chip doesn't work so I have to patch audio into the soundcard directly (no RF support either, though that might have changed recently, just Composite and SVideo work but that's all I use--I don't have TV out where I live)
3D performance in Windows is definitely good enough for me, but I don't do much gaming so my requirements aren't too high.

Overall I'm very impressed with the card, and it's definitely a worthy successor to my old ATI AIW Pro (Mach64). It even comes with a remote control, and the "ati_remote" CVS drivers work well, though I had to tweak it a bit so it doesn't repeat buttons nonstop when I quickly press them.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[cwebster]

>Also, the driver page for nVidia sez they support the 4400's and the 4600's - how much newer can ya get? I have a Geforce2 now, been looking at a Geforce4 and they're all apparently supported.

the linux nvidia drivers come from the same codebase as the windows versions, so any card supported by windows will be supported in linux.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[desau]

I believe he was referring to hardware-accelerated drivers (DRI/OpenGL). And -- XFree4.2 does not contain them.

However, there are drivers in the works for the r200 chipset (what the Radeon 8500 uses) at the DRI site. I believe the development is being funded by the weather channel.

At any rate, I've used these alpha drivers on my 8500, they work pretty well -- not as fast as the windows drivers, but they did seem quite stable, and they ran Unreal Tournament very well.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I've never wanted nvidia drivers for FreeBSD so I guess you're screwed but I am not.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[mbourgon]

You're fscking kidding, right? Their support appears to be a "we're going to toss bones at some open source developers and see if _they_ can get our sh!t to work".

I bought an ATI All-in-Wonder to use to do some video capture, VCD some TV shows, etc. On the windows side, the box wouldn't work (it needs to be the ONLY video card in the system, or it either doesn't work or locks up your system in 90 seconds - I timed it.). So with my top-of-the-line 3D card, I need to physically remove it when I want to record video - even telling the AGP card to be secondary doesn't work... it STILL locks up. Their vaunted tech support answer? "um, just use our card for 3d, or remove the other one each time". Um, pass.

So I decided to use it for a PVR in Linux. Good luck getting that to work. There's this thing called GATOS, which works on SOME of the ATI Video Capture cards (and not necessarily all of the same model), but is apparently too complicated for me... (okay, I need to install this Kernel Module, recompile the kernel, make sure the headers are where it thinks they should be, download from a CVS tree the latest source, install that, install this other thing, then a program to watch TV and another to record!)

ATI - NEVER AGAIN.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares? Linux isn't a gaming OS anyhow.

Go ahead and flame me, but it's true.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[ljaguar]

Well, just to reply quickly, until just recently, I have been using pentium 3 450Mhz with original Radeon 64MB DDR. (Just got a new CPU)

I played quake 3 and RtCW; rock solid on the computer on linux. Quake 3 performance was most times slightly better than windows version. RtCW didn't run to well (in both OSes) but with new CPU, RtCW is working great. Though sound in Linux leaves something to be desired.

I don't know about the new fangled Radeons.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Anonymous Coward]

When are you zealots going to realize that Nvidia doesn't owe you anything. They want to keep their code private and that's their RIGHT to do so. Drivers are what gives them an edge over ATI (maybe this has changed with the new ATI drivers) so of course they want to keep it closed. BE RESONABLE.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[FyRE666]

It's pretty good; I was very pleased when I managed to get the 3D acceleration working on my Vaio with its Radeon card!

If you're a gamer and using Linux though (if that's not a contradiction in terms) then NVidea is the way to go at the moment. It's true their drivers are closed source, but they are very very fast! Even the old Geforce2MX I have in one of my headless servers (dual 800MHZ P3) managed to run RTCW beautifully last time it had a monitor!

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[matusa]

what?

I never understood this anti-NVIDIA fud.

Look, they write drivers for us, which these days outperform the windows ones sometimes.

what the fuck are you complaining for?

and this crap you say about binary only, they ARE released in source, I have it right here. Ok sorry their openGL libraries I don't have the code to. But you can download the driver code off their website

here are other things about them. Each release has a rather substantial ChangeLog. They support cool things like Xrender. They give us support for that mouse cursor-shadow hack that you see in windows. They even let Brian Paul implement some of their proprietary openGL extensions in Mesa.

so, troll, tell me again why NVIDIA sucks. last I checked, running an NVIDIA card under linux you have a MUCH MUCH MUCH better chance of having fast 3D than with an ATI card. when I mean much better, I mean like 10 to 1.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[be-fan]

Umm, your comments make no sense. There is no AGP slot on your computer, so it can't accept an NVIDIA card. Open Source drivers would help you how? If you're talking about NVIDIA dumping support for older cards in newer releases of the binary drivers which (presumably) support newer kernel versions or whatnot

A) A RivaTNT2 (minimum reqs to get into NVIDIA driver land) is $20. How poor are you?

B) The kernel wrapper is Open Source. You can modify it to run on whatever kernel you want. A bunch of people hacked it to make it run on FreeBSD, and NVIDIA techs even provided support!

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[vandan]

Not really.
They docs they gave were sparse and contradictory. They only gave docs under a strict NDA agreement with a chicken-and-egg test for who gets access to them which filters most people out.
They are not allowing people to develop support for TV-out or Hyper-Z or a lot of other features. Hyper-Z I can understand, but TV-out? Come on... Don't tell me I have to go back to nVidia just for TV-out.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[wray]

There is support for NVDIA's cards in XFree86 for 2D work already also, you don't need the binary drivers for that.

I therefore assumed that it was understood we were talking about 3D. I want 3D support. The 8500 does _not_ have 3D support in XFree86 4.2.

Lastly, the other advantage to having company supported drivers is that the LATEST is available, this has been crucial for the work we are doing in our lab -- I hope ATI follows suit.

Why not do both? (Release specs to XFree86 developers AND release binary drivers -- this would give the best of both worlds)

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[cozziewozzie]

A) A RivaTNT2 (minimum reqs to get into NVIDIA driver land) is $20. How poor are you?

He said he didn't have AGP. Tried finding a TNT2 PCI card lately for $20? It's not funny.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[brsmith4]

Tried finding a TNT2 PCI card lately for $20? It's not funny.

Ever heard of ebay?

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Heretik]

Source/link for your claim that Nvidia releases code to their drivers?

I was under the impression it's common knowledge that Nvidia doesn't release specs or drivers. (Which, to answer your question, is why "NVIDIA sucks").

And yes, I do care. If you don't, fine - buy your black box of a video card. But spare me the rant.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes no sense.

I reverse engineer software quite often at work, its part of my job (yay IDAPro!). I don't reverse engineer stuff as a hobby (few do, there is a reason they call it work, and not happy-fun-place).

If the secret to Nvidia's technology was in their drivers (other than simply "we write good code, and tune it") ATI would already have it. Open source hackers aren't getting paid for reverse engineering, so they do stuff that is fun instead.

But its not a giant Nvidia conspiracy to fuck Linux. They just don't see a real short term gain to them in releasing source, so why take the risk (no matter how astronomically small)?

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Jacek Poplawski]

3D support for the Radeon series of cards is abysmal and non-existent for the 8500 and higher cards.

Please check DRI website and stop writting this.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for you, fucktwit.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[dinivin]

I believe he was referring to hardware-accelerated drivers (DRI/OpenGL). And -- XFree4.2 does not contain them.

Nor does XFree86 4.2 contain 3D drivers for nVidia cards.

There are, in fact, open source 3D drivers available for the Mach64 line of cards (under Utah-GLX, and a branch of the DRI). There are also open source 3D drivers for every newer ATI video card, from the Rage 128 to the Radeon 8500. In addition, there are binary only drivers (much like nVidia's, only more stable) for the "Built by ATI" Radeon 8500s.

Dinivin

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[dinivin]

What idiot modded this idiot up for posting such a blatant lie?

and this crap you say about binary only, they ARE released in source, I have it right here. Ok sorry their openGL libraries I don't have the code to. But you can download the driver code off their website

For the last fucking time, nVidia does not release source code to their OpenGL libraries or GLX extension.

Dinivin

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[rweir]

what the fuck are you complaining for?

and this crap you say about binary only, they ARE released in source, I have it right here. Ok sorry their openGL libraries I don't have the code to. But you can download the driver code off their website

Slow down cowboy, and have a look at the 'source' you have. You'll find that it's just a wrapper around the proprietary kernel module. No actual portable code in there at all.

They even let Brian Paul implement some of their proprietary openGL extensions in Mesa.
I've never heard that, but I have heard that they ignored the special changes that were made to the DRI interface, specifically for them. to allow proprietary modules.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, if only it weren't true. Where are the ATI drivers that give me 99% of the Windows framerate?

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[dinivin]

Hey moron... The post said that 3D support for Radeon cards is abysmal and non-existant for the 8500.. Both of these are completely untrue. Support is not abysmal for the first gen Radeons, and there is support for the 8500.

Dinivin

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[dinivin]

The 8500 does _not_ have 3D support in XFree86 4.2.

Neither to any nVidia cards. Having said that, ATI does provide binary linux drivers that work with the Radeon 8500.

Why not do both? (Release specs to XFree86 developers AND release binary drivers -- this would give the best of both worlds)

ATI has done this for the 8500. nVidia, on the other hand, refuses to.

Dinivin

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[dinivin]

B) The kernel wrapper is Open Source. You can modify it to run on whatever kernel you want. A bunch of people hacked it to make it run on FreeBSD,

Yeah, but only if you don't want 3D support, which doesn't work yet but should be "forthcoming" (and the last update was in December of 2001). Thankfully, the open source radeon drivers work very well under FreeBSD, and should hopefully soon be working just fine under NetBSD.

Dinivin

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[be-fan]

How is it the fault of closed source drivers that he can't ugprade to an AGP card? Even if the drivers were open, he still couldn't upgrade to a TNT2. Do you see my point? He blames closed source drivers for being a limited time use thing. Presumably, NVIDIA might abandon support for certain products (although, as of yet, they still support even the TNT-1, which is the oldest card using the same programming interface) which might necessitate him upgrading. My point was that he still had the older drivers, so he didn't need to upgrade unless he wanted newer drivers. Given that it is rare that devices that old get any updates in newer driver releases, its pointless for him to want newer drivers. In fact, newer drivers tend to be worse for extremely old cards like the TNT. Now, the only valid point he makes is that, on Linux, closed drivers tie him to particular kernels. However, the kernel wrapper is Open Source, so this problem is mitigated.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[be-fan]

When was it that you last checked? The last update was two weeks ago.

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[Jacek Poplawski]

Hey moron... The post said that 3D support for Radeon cards is abysmal and non-existant for the 8500.. Both of these are completely untrue. Support is not abysmal for the first gen Radeons, and there is support for the 8500.

That's why I point him to DRI website, R200 drivers are there.

BTW thanks for calling me moron, I hope you feel much better now

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[dinivin]

And if you look at the download page you'll see that it hasn't been updated since December of last year. Maybe development is continuing, but 3D support is still not available (as compared to 3D support for Radeon cards under FreeBSD).

Dinivin

Re:Play's well with penguins.

[dinivin]

Maybe you should pay a little more attention to the threading of this conversation. I was responding to the AC that had responded to you.

He was a moron, not you.

Dinivin

NVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

QUOTE should have NVIDIA on the ropes for a while /ENDQUOTE

Come on.. we all know how the story goes. NVidia comes out with their NV30 in a couple months and then they have the fastest cards. Then ATI releases a better version of this card and NVidia slaps them down again. Do we need a slashdot post to report on every piece of new hardware that is released?

Re:NVidia

[suffocate]

Yes. We also need one for every tiny Mozilla point release. Because, you know, we all really care.

Re:NVidia

[Anonymous Coward]

My life would also be incomplete without the constant reports on the new releases of the *development* version of the Linux kernel. Heck, they should at least cater to their (largely Windows-based) audience and announce each new nightly build of the next Microsoft OS. On slow news days they could also report on new service packs and hotfixes.

no.

[ph0rk]

>>The card is impressive for sure and should have NVIDIA on the ropes for a while, as it beats out a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 handily, especially with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering enabled.

What you meant was it is more or less a tie, unless you turn on AA, but thanks for the unbiased summary!

Re:no.

[KirkH]

No, it's not more or less a tie. Check the benchmarks again. It's more or less a tie in those apps that are already CPU bound. In those that aren't (including games with AA turned on), the 9700 clearly wins. No bias here.

NV30 *should* smoke these scores

[fudgefactor7]

From what I have been able to piece together the NV30 will be 20% faster than the 9700. That is as long as VisionTek's death doesn't hurt nVidia too badly.

Re:NV30 *should* smoke these scores

[Anonymous Coward]

You have absolutely no solid information on which to base this opinion. There is no working silicon for the NV30 yet; it's memory interface bandwidth is unknown, as well as it's target clock speed.

While it is safe to say the NV30 will be faster than a GeForce 4600, there is no reason to assue it will be faster then a Radeon 9700, which is up to 3x as fast a 4600.

Re:NV30 *should* smoke these scores

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard it is going to be about 30% slower.

Seriously, how the heck do you have any clue how fast it is gonna be? Have you seen one?

IF YOU DON'T KNOW ABOUT SOMETHING, DON'T POST NONSENSE.

Re:NV30 *should* smoke these scores

[cioxx]

That's pure speculation. Your comment should be taken with a grain of salt.

Try again.

Re:NV30 *should* smoke these scores

[Anonymous Coward]

Bzzt! Wrong! NV30 will destroy this ATi joke of a card.

Thank you,
-The English Troll

Re:NV30 *should* smoke these scores

[fudgefactor7]

Here's my prediction, and like I said, based off of what I have gleaned, this *should* hold true.

On this: AMD Athlon XP 2000+ on an ASUS A7V266-E Motherboard, with a 133FSB, 256MB PC-266 RAM (CL2), DirectX 8.1, Windows XP Professional, Quake 3, Demo001, v1.17, at 1024x768x32 @85Hz.

I predict 363.9 FPS. (with none of the "goodies," like AA, turned on--significantly less with them on...although the rumor is 4xAA will be "free," but I'm not going to hold my breath on free 4xAA).

NVidia will not ship a product out, at the related price hike, that is less of a performer than the 9700. That would be "a bad idea." But we'll see soon enough.

Re:NV30 *should* smoke these scores

[Anonymous Coward]

his speculation about the other guy's speculation is pure speculation :\

until i hear that ATI's driver support is as good as nvidia's i will not buy one.

why have something fast that gets 2 driver revisions during it's useful lifetime? when i have something that gets FASTER with each driver revision, of which there are many.

Got to find my ATI script..

[Anonymous Coward]

#!/bin/sh
#
if grep -i "ati technologies">/dev/null; then echo 'ATI drivers always sux!';

Re:Got to find my ATI script..

[Anonymous Coward]

w0w. U know loonix. KE KE KE KE ^__^

So lemme get this straight...

[Anonymous Coward]

nVidia is now the GPU equivalent of Intel, and ATI is the equivalent of AMD?!?! Why is everyone so juiced about a new ATI card?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Laughing my ass off...

[Anonymous Coward]

sunny_talwar!!! hahahaha... too bad most of slashot and its editors can't decrypt languages other than english. that name is phat... i'm sure there are others that got it and laughed their asses off.

Quack Benches

[yeoua]

Sure, we know it runs awesome on Quake3... but will it run awesome on Quack3?

ATI has been around for days

[t0qer]

It doesn't surprise me one bit that ATI can push the envelope of 3D graphics.

They've been in business since the dawn of the x86 age. They always made solid cards.

Around the time of the stealth64 ATI lost its edge because they didn't see the potential for the consumer gaming market. (Stealth64 was the hot gaming card back in the doom days, ask thresh) Despite companies like 3dfx releasing the voodoo1 and Creative releasing the VLB 3D blaster, it was years before ATI came out with a graphics chip with even rudimentary 3D support.

Nvidia, a new company only took couple of chip revisions before they were able to match 3dfx's performance. It's no surprise that a company like ATI with years of 2D behind them would be able to quickly beat out the new top dog Nvidia.

Kudo's and good job ATI. Now if you could only price these new cards in a reasonable range, let's say less than $200, you could definetly become the new king.

Re:ATI has been around for days

[gid]

From anandtech's review:

As the Radeon 9700 Pro begins its journey into the hands of the fortunate few that are spending $399 on a video card, we're here to bring you a final review of the card based on shipping hardware.

Re:ATI has been around for days

[Anonymous Coward]

/flame on

How did this post get a "3"?

There are so many things wrong with it.

First I'd like to ask the author how he defines a "long time". Is it a year? Two years? and how does it he see it relating to chip revisions?

First Point:
(Short Version: Bad Drivers=Bad Cards, not "solid cards")

(Long Version:
ATI has made good hardware, in the past, and I can't dispute that. But their driver support has been consistently poor for most of the past 5 years.

They have started to turn it around recently, within the last 6 months or so.

So, no - they haven't always made "solid cards". What good are whiz-bang hardware features if the drivers crash your game/computer?)

Second Point:
(Short Version: Your perception of time is altered, much the way a dreamer's or gamer's is.)

(Long Version: In one paragraph, you discuss how long it took ATI to develop basic 3d support, and in the following, you claim that it's not surprising that ATI could unseat nVidia so quickly.

Can you rectify these thoughts for me? Has it taken ATI a LONG TIME, or a SHORT TIME to catch up?

How am I supposed to argue with you if you aren't clear at all?

Third Point:
(Short Version: Go Buy a Geforce4 ti 4200 or a Radeon 8500)

(Long Version:
Please learn how the 3d card industry works:

#1 - Manufacturer's >$300 card gets sold to fanboys and early adopters who promote the brand online and grassroots.

#2 - Manufacturer's $300 high - end Geforce3 ti 500.)

I'm sure I'll get moderated down for my tone, but I can't stand to see posts like the one above moderated so highly; especially when they contain conflicting, erroneous and even ludicrous statements. /flame off

Al B. Chu

Re:ATI has been around for days

[Anonymous Coward]

*oops*

Should read

Third Point:

#1 - Manufacturer's >$300 card gets sold to fanboys and early adopters who promote the brand online and grassroots.

#2 - Manufacturer's $150 card sells like hotcakes because of brand recognition and press.

Al B. Chu

Now all we need...

[looseBits]

are some SiS 648 boards to hit the market so we can actually use the AGP 8x support.

comparing to a geforce4 is useless

[zaqattack911]

I don't think anyone should purchase the ATI 9700 until the Geforce5 (or nv30) comes out.

Honestly anyone could have told you months ago the 9700 would beat the gf4... it's a new generation card.

And whats the use in getting it this month, since most games out now are still based on 5year old GFX engines that run decently on a geforce2.

and please spare me the tears of 60fps vs 200fps :)

--me

Re:comparing to a geforce4 is useless

[KirkH]

Thanks for telling everyone what to do, where would we be without you? :)

Yes, the NV30 will probably beat the 9700. But when it is arriving? Some estimates I've heard don't have it showing up until Feb '03. Six months.

Anytime you're ready to buy a new vid card (or CPU, or mobo) you can wait six months to get something better. But sooner or later, you have to buy something. Putting off a purchase because something better is coming down the road is never a good choice, because there will always be something better down the road. If you need a machine right now, but it now and get the best components for your needs.

And in six months or whenever the NV30 arrives, you know what? Most games will still be based on 5 year old GFX engines that run decently on a GF2. :)

Re:comparing to a geforce4 is useless

[Daemonik]

It's always a coin toss:

Heads - wait 3 years for games to be developed that can actually take advantage of the features of a new card (good luck finding a 9700 or GeForce5 in 3 years)
- or -
Tails - buy that card now and know that it'll be good for at least 3 years

Decisions, decisions.....

Re:comparing to a geforce4 is useless

[ergo98]

Comparing to the GF4 is useless? Oh, so when I go to the store I have the choice of getting a GF5? Oh, right, they barely even have silicon test samples of the GF5, much less being within months from having a board on the market. At that time there'll very likely be a Radon 9800 Super Pro (the 9700 is on a .15 micron process, so they have a huge opening to create a .13 or small micron die and correspondingly up the frequency, just in time for nvidia's response).

In any case, there is absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that the NV30 will beat the 9700 : In case you haven't noticed, nvidia's cards have been hitting the wall, and the gap from generation to generation is getting closer and closer together: That's what makes the 9700 so remarkably -> It isn't the traditional "20% better than our mid-season `pro'" model, but rather it is a considerable jump in performance. I'm neither a nvidia or ATI fan (I have a GF3 card in my machine, though I was eyeballing a bargain Radeon 8500 today for it's dual-headed feature), but instead I'm a fan of the best bang for my dollar, and let the loser be damned.

The 200fps thing is just dumb. Play a game like Operation Flashpoint (I'm not going to even mention that people who don't get that Quake 3 benchmarks are simplified synthentic numbers for relative analysis only are morons...whoops, already did) and you'll know why the 9700 is just the beginning.

Re:comparing to a geforce4 is useless

[Anonymous Coward]

"but it now"

Why I never! Anal sex with a machine? You... you... sicko!

Re:comparing to a geforce4 is useless

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to strongly recommend you hold off on any purchase of an ATI video card until you have verifiable proof their video drivers are any bloody good.

See, the one thing ATI keeps screwing up is drivers. I hear there latest are pretty good. Me, I'm glad I recently bought an nVidia card. All my video problems ceased. System is far more reliable now, no odd/unusual crashing, etc. No upgrading video drivers every bloody week or two to fix some other crash or lockup.

Re:comparing to a geforce4 is useless

[larien]

Yup, and when the GF5/NV30 comes out ATI will have another card out "I don't think anyone should purchase the GF5 until the (new ATI modle) comes out".

Buying PC components is like this; your computer is off the leading edge within weeks, if not days or hours.

However, you're pretty much right in that most games don't require the 3D power of a new card unless you're running at 1600x1200x32, and even a GF2/3 should handle that OK. However, there will be those that absolutely must have the latest & (presumably) greatest.

Re:comparing to a geforce4 is useless

[Anonymous Coward]

NV30 won't be a "GeForce" anymore. "Omen" and "Eclipse" have been tossed around.

Get the Radeon anyway (if you want something this year). NV30 is not necessarily any faster, it's more "Quadro" oriented than anything from Nvidia before, which may come to surprise some drooling gammers.

Re:linux driver

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, who cares where the Linux driver is. The Win32 drivers are garbage. Why would you want that on linux? Also, don't hold your breath for any of the next gen FPS games to even be available for linux. No DOOM3, no UT2003, etc. Quake and UT are about as good as it is likely to get on linux, thus you will be just fine with a GeForce2 era card.

I already have a 9700

[Critical_]

Its a demo/test model that I was using in the lab to verify compatibility with our applications. Yes, that is corporate speak for "I played quake for a couple hours on company time". I am payed to do that. Anyway, here it goes...

* 2D: WOW! I have been a diehard Matrox fan because of the awesome 2D on their boards. However, I think Matrox might have a challenger on their hands. Even at dizzyingly high resolutions, the fonts were crisp and clean.

* 3D: Very nice. It has been image quality than the Geforce Ti's with FSAA enabled. However, it cannot compete with the Matrox Parhelia here. The Parhelia, though it has slower framerates, has better color saturation and 16x FSAA w/o a massive performance hit.

* Drivers: so far it was worked fine under WinXP. I got the SVGA xserver running on it after mucking around with Redhat for a couple hours. I am hoping a dedicated XServer is coming out for this card since it needs one badly.

Anyone else have any luck under Linux?

Re:I already have a 9700

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a demo/test model that I was using in the lab to verify compatibility with our applications. Yes, that is corporate speak for "I played quake for a couple hours on company time". I am payed to do that. Anyway, here it goes...

I assume that you are not paid (payed?[sic]) for your spelling talents either.

Re:I already have a 9700

[DavidYaw]

However, it cannot compete with the Matrox Parhelia here. The Parhelia, though it has slower framerates, has better color saturation and 16x FSAA w/o a massive performance hit.

Huh? Slower framerates isn't a performance hit? Sounds like you're a little biased.

Re:I already have a 9700

[Anonymous Coward]

... in image quality it can not compete.

Re:I already have a 9700

[rakarnik]

Huh? Slower framerates isn't a performance hit? Sounds like you're a little biased.

Ah my friend you misunderstand.

Overall, the Parhelia is slower than the 9700. However, the relative performance drop when 16xFSAA is enabled is less for the Parhelia than for the 9700, i.e. the 9700 may lose 50% of its framerates when 16xFSAA is enabled, while the Parhelia may lose only 20%.

Note that these numbers are merely to illustrate the point and do not refer to actual performance.

-Rahul

Re:I already have a 9700

[hitchhacker]

> I am hoping a dedicated XServer is coming out for this card since it needs one badly.

mee too! Maybe The Weather Channel will $$support$$ the development of open source XFree86 drivers.
I'm still waiting for the 8500 drivers due out in Q4.

-metric

Re:I already have a 9700

[10Ghz]

"Overall, the Parhelia is slower than the 9700. However, the relative performance drop when 16xFSAA is enabled is less for the Parhelia than for the 9700, i.e. the 9700 may lose 50% of its framerates when 16xFSAA is enabled, while the Parhelia may lose only 20%."

I don't care even if enabling FAA on Parhelia increases FPS. I don't care if Parhelia takes 5% performance-hit and R300 takes 50% hit. All I care that is it playable. In case of Parhelia, it's (sadly) often not. Luckily, R300 has performance to spare, so in the end, it has better performance.

And Parhelia might have slightly better image-quality. Sadly, the performance is lacking, so that image-quality doesn't help much.

Re:Play's well with penguins (for a good reason)

[gosand]

Compared to some other companies *cough*NVIDIA*cough* ATI has been very helpful to linux developers. While NVIDIA only releases binaries, and only for x86, ATI actually provides developers with technical specs to aid development on other platforms

Probably because they want some competent people to write some drivers for them. :-)

Stop...

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

There are three things that the Radeon 9700 Pro can offer at this point:
1) The highest performance in current and future games.
2) The ability to play at 1600x1200 in just about any game currently available or soon to be made available, and
3) The ability to play virtually any game at 1024x768 with 4X AA and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled at smooth frame rates.

... you had me at "0x1200."

Allow me to speak for John on this one...

[tswinzig]

"Aye'm!"

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

PCI TV Wonder

[muerte24]

I have an ATI PCI TV Wonder, and the card has worked great for me. It worked on Win98, and now works on Win2K, under two difference Athlon processors.

I have had some hardware issues, and always suspected the TV Wonder, but in the end that was never the case.

Updated TV Wonder drivers are indeed available from ATI, and if you can manage to follow the needlessly complex driver install instructions, the card works without even rebooting!

The image quality is great, and the capture works just fine. Cyberlink PowerVCR 3 is much better than the crap MultiMediaCenter that comes with the card, but at least the drivers are fine.

So if your card is sitting unused in a drawer somewhere, and you're running Win2K, fire up the new drivers and give it a try.

muerte

Re:PCI TV Wonder

[woogieoogieboogie]

and if you can manage to follow the needlessly complex driver install instructions, the card works without even rebooting!

I think this is the number one reason people have problems with ATI cards, they do not FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS. Installing the updated drivers on win 98 over old ones will cause headaches beyond belief and which can only be fully fixed by deleting all references to the ATI dll's and starting over. Obviously a little bit of RTFM goes a long way.

it's shipping

[Anonymous Coward]

It'll be available when the trucks arrive.

IMPORTANT NOTICE FOR SLASHDOT TROLLS

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the Slashdot Revenue Denial HOWTO version 0.02. It aims to be the beginning of a new offensive against the Slashdot hypocrisy. Please read through it, save it, and "contribute" it far and wide in the name of Free as in Worthless.

Slashdot Revenue Denial HOWTO version 0.02

Slashdot provides information. Information has value protected under intellectual property laws. Since Slashdot does not believe in intellectual property, as demonstrated by its support of an organisation which does not believe an author should have any rights on the products of his mind, its editors are implying that Slashdot itself has no value. As such, it should not claim compensation for its services.

So much for the philosophy. How can you fulfil Slashdot's own wishes? The basic aim is to stop views of Slashdot's advertisements, so its sponsors no longer perceive Slashdot as providing worthwhile exposure, and stop sponsoring it.

• If you are using Mozilla, simply right-click the advert at the top of the page, and select "Block images from this server". Do this whenever you see a new advert appear on a Slashdot browser window.
• Or you can add an entry to /etc/hosts under a Unix-based system or C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ETC\HOSTS under an NT-based system:

  127.0.0.1 images.slashdot.org
  127.0.0.1 images2.slashdot.org
  127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
  127.0.0.1 ln.doubleclick.net
  127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net
  127.0.0.1 m2.doubleclick.net

• Looking for a ready-built revenue denial product? On Windows or Unix, you could try AdBuster, AdKiller or Internet Junkbuster. And WWWoffle is a comprehensive caching solution.

In addition, you may wish to block cookies from *.slashdot.org. Edit/Preferences/Privacy and Security/Manage Stored Cookies/Cookie Sites provides an interface in Netscape or Mozilla to prevent Slashdot from tracking your visits, denying further information to sponsors and potential sponsors.

Please distribute this HOWTO widely and add to it if you have further useful advice.

How well do they compete?

[ironstorm]

The last ATI card that I owned was a Rage 128 with 16 MB of Video RAM. For what it was, it preformed great. I'm now looking at purchasing a Radeon 9000 to replace my somewhat outdated and slow GeForce2 MX. I really havnt seen many of the new radeons in action, and was wondering how well they compare to the new GeForce4 cards. Any opinions?

Re:How well do they compete?

[tRoll with Butter]

Don't get a Radeon 9000, it's a misleading name just like Nvidia's Geforce4 MX400. It's slower than the 8500. Get a Radeon 9700 for the fastest performence NOW, or get a Nvidia Geforce4 Titanium, the 2nd fastest card at the moment. The Radeon 8500 is only about as fast as a Geforce 3, and the lesser ATI offerings are MUCH SLOWER.

Re:3D API's

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to go with secret option (f): Sex with a 10-year-old boy.

The Truth

[Anonymous Coward]

A Native American Indian, a White American and a Black American are walking on a beach, and stumble upon an empty whisky bottle. When they brush the sand off the label, a spirit appears from the flask.

'You have released me from my captivity, and each of you will have a wish granted', the spirit promises. After some discussion, it is agreed that the Native American goes first:

The Native American says, 'I wish all people, Blacks, Whites, and Indians were united in their homelands, and that they could live there in peace.'

'Done', the spirit thunders, and the Black American and the White American disappear.

X server

[wowbagger]

It is unlikely you will see an effective Xserver for this card any time soon. While nVidia may only provide closed-source drivers (save for the barest minimum source-level shim to allow their drivers to work with a few different kernels), at least nVidia pays programmers to support their cards under !MSWindows.

ATI will provide some documentation to selected members of the XFree development team, but they do not release all the programming information to the world, nor do they pay anybody to support their cards.

Perhaps that might change if enough people make it clear to ATI that Free Software drivers for XFree, source on the CD that comes with the card and pre-compiled binary modules for the current releases of XFree will sell more cards.

Of course, the odds of this happening any time soon are roughly 2-to-the-9421 power, and falling...

Re:X server

[NetGuruFL]

Huh? ATI regularly submits patches to XFree86 and it's ati driver.

Sure they distributed their own optimized drivers for their professional FireGL line, but they are far from being "hands off" to the XFree86 project.

Re:linux driver

[Negatyfus]

Carmack promised Linux support. Do you dare defy the Almight Carmack?!

ATI's history

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI's history with 2D graphics cards actually doesn't have much to do with what they're up to now. Every 3D card since the Radeon has actually been designed by the former SGI employees who worked on the N64. They left SGI to form ArtX, which then was bought out by (or merged?) with ATI.

That's interesting, cause nVidia is pretty well staffed with ex-SGI engineers too. It reminds me of how the early US and Russian space programs were actually developed by former German rocket scientists. ("Our Germans are better than their Germans")

So are ATI's ex-SGIers are better than nVidia's ex-SGIers?

Good point

[Subcarrier]

...but if you want decent Linux support buy a Matrox. Matrox may not be the fastest in 3D but it's no dog either, and you get unbeatable image quality. They also give you full programming manuals and source code for the Linux drivers.

For what it's worth

[heffel]

I own a good old
ATI Rage Fury Pro and I love it.

Works well both under Windows and Linux.

That is so true!

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you forgot to mention that the whisky bottle was empty because the American Indian had just spent his last BIA check on it at the "Firewater Store" and drank it on the junk-strewn front lawn in front of his trailer on the Rez, and that he probably cursed a little while speaking his line because he was drunk (as always).

valuable information about GPUs

[dpilot]

Doesn't wash.

I would presume that if nVidia is that worried about their GPUs, then they're patented as well as closed source. Hardware can be reverse-engineered, but it can be a pain in the neck crawling around SEMs and trying to turn it back into a schematic, and then trying to turn that back into functional blocks so you can walk up the hierarchy and comprehend the whole. I know, I've done it. Supplying Open Source-style documentation would make it easier to reverse-engineer the hardware.

On The Other Hand...

IMHO a big part of the reason for closed source drivers is that it can take a lot of work to release proper documentation. Closed source drivers can be done by poor documentation plus the fact that the programmers may well sit down the aisle from the hardware guys. They talk daily, and that fills the gaps in the documents. Painful for both, but frequently cheaper and less painful than doing a good job of documentation.

On The Gripping Hand...

One of the harder aspects of patenting something can be detection of violation. If nVidia were to release their documentation and let this stuff work its way into the Open Source community, then they could watch the software concepts flow, and know where to start looking for hardware infringement. Presumably the nVidia driver model is most useful for nVidia hardware. If the nVidia driver model began being used against upstart JoeVideo cards, then they'd have good reason to take an SEM to JoeVideo chips, the the Open Source drivers would have pointed the way for them.

Whether Open Source wants to be in a position of assisting with patent prosecution is a different question.

Stop it already

[D_Fresh]

The card is impressive for sure and should have NVIDIA on the ropes for a while, as it beats out a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 handily, especially with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering enabled.

Holy polygons, would you just quit the hype already? I *just* ordered a dual-867 Power Mac with GF4 Ti, and I spent a pretty penny for that upgrade - can't a guy bask in hardware glory without some bithead like you going and raining on his GPU parade? Sheesh.

Re:Stop it already

[PatJensen]

I just made my return to Mac-land. Bought a G4/800 with 768 megs of RAM and a 40 gig HD with Radeon 7500 over the weekend. It runs OS X 10.1.5 freaking sweet! Can't wait to get 10.2 on it.

Got a sweet deal on it for $1399, CompUSA was making room for all the dual processor G4's. Hope you enjoy it.

-Pat

Re:Stop it already

[D_Fresh]

Hey thanks, and congrats on returning to the fold! I pondered buying an "older" G4, but I couldn't resist the lure of shiny new hardware. I'm like a crow that way. :)

-Doug

The real question

[Anonymous Coward]

Is when will there be a better mobile chip to replace the Gf4 440 Go?

Who Cares About Lame MS Centric Reviews

[Anonymous Coward]

Wake me when there are real reviews of the board. We need to see what its like on more the ONE operating system. BTW, Tom's reviews are normaly a joke and always irrelevent.

Mandrake Support

[cnmill]

Wonder if mandrake will ever support Radeon. I upgraded to a Radeon 7500 a month ago and have spent a good 72+ hours trying to get Mandrake (8.2 & 9B) to work with it. (I saw a good test screen only once.)

Suse and Redhat support it with no ?'s asked.

Bye Bye Mandrake.

Re:How well do they compete? Radeon 8500

[puto]

I just picked up an 8500LE, which though although claimed to be a lower end part came with same specs and s+-video out. 87 bucks at newegg.com. I flashed it to retail bios and I got a regualr 8500. Noi biggie. And it is an awsome card, 2d and 3d. For 109 dollars you can get the 128 meg version, makes sure it says le.

I should of spent the money and got the 128 meg version.

But for 87 bucks I got something that kicks ass.

Go ATI.

Puto

Hardware Mouse Acceleration & FireGL X1

[Erik_]

I'm using currently a ATI Fury 32mb and a Radeaon 7500 64mb. What I wish is that ATI releases drivers that support Hardware Mouse Acceleration for games like Asheron's Call 2. Having a gfx card that runs at 150fps, is USELESS if you can't drag your mouse quickly around the screen to pickup objects or load new weapons on your char.

Rather than having all the sites compare the 9700 Pro with the GeForce4 series, could some show me a comparison between the 9700Pro and the FireGL X1 ? What would an additional 128mb do for performance... ? and how does the newer support for OpenGL 2.0 make a difference on Rendering/Engineering programs...

Re:Hardware Mouse Acceleration & FireGL X1

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be no comparison between the 9700 and the fireGL!

The fire GL is a card for non gamers, It wa snever suppsoe to be a gaming card, what it is (was always) desgined for it a acceraltor for cad/3d programs, which is far differnt then it pushing such a high freamrate for games.

pricing

[Derkec]

True, if they could offer the top card at $200 bucks, noone would buy the top card of their competitor. I don't think the economics justify that. Also, doing that would kill any further revenues from their former high end cards (now the mid-range). The very high end is always very expensive. It allows the companies to make some good money at the expense of the richest / most demanding. The rest of us reap the benifits 6-12 months down the road when the technology those with cash paid dearly to develop trickles down into affordable price ranges.

I'm sure you know this and I'm not really sure why I responded, but there it is.

How hot does it get?

[Anonymous Coward]

Arrgh, next time I buy a video card, I don't want to have to buy an extra set of fans to keep my computer case from melting. Maybe the benchmarks should include video card temperatures for the resolutions/frame rates that are tested.

Me and my "smoking" Nvidia card

And until I can buy Doom 3

[Inoshiro]

I will not buy any new 3D video card. Regardless of what's demoing it now, it won't be the top choice when Doom 3 comes out.

Was a Voodoo1 the top choice for Quake 2 when it came out?

SVGA Xserver?

[Inoshiro]

Dedicated Xserver?

I'd really like to hear your information if it pertained to the XFree86 4.x tree. XFree86 3.x and its separate Xserver binaries for each card disapeared a long time ago. XFree86 4.x has an ABI which allows driver .o files to be loaded automatically based on the config file.

Now, if there was a way that per-user accounts could have an XFree86 override and there were easy tools for both CLI and GUI configuration, and these were all the default settings in distributions, and the changes made in a session were stateful (IE: if I changed the res down a notch and restarted X, it'd be at that res, even if I had many modes defined), we'd finally be close to where Windows / MacOS is in terms of easy-GUI configuration.

Setting up X is still too much black magic.

Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI also has a 6 month product cycle. There's always something new coming along. Dumbshit.

3dfx wasn't complacent.

[Anonymous Coward]

3dfx became incompetent, on the management side of things, for a couple of years. By the time they turned around it was too late.

Until I can by Doom4...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I'm gonna beat you because I'll wait for Doom 4! Then the gfx cards will be saweeeet! Just you wait and see who laughs then. Meanwhile I'll keep playing Wolf3D on my 386.

Re:Until I can by Doom4...

[Anonymous Coward]

We're all friends here, Carmack. No need to post anonymously.

Is it just a fast Rage 128?

[Wolfier]

It was the last time I saw Linux Radeon drivers.

Apparently if you have a really fast Rage 128 games like Q3 will run fast. But who needs a fast Rage 128...we need drivers that treat an N-generation card as such, not an (N-1) generation card.

So my true questions are: do the _current_ drivers support

1. hardware T&L?
2. vertex shaders?
3. pixel shaders?
4. FSAA / SmoothVision?

and last but not least,
5. TV-out / Multiple monitor / Video-in?

HDTV Compatability! (?)

[Yavi]

I noticed that one of the listed features is a component video out for resolutions up to 1024x768. Does anybody know if this automatically adjusts the format to HDTV specifications or does it just output at 1024x768?

BS

[dusanv]

(and will be trying with an 8500 tonight)

You won't get very far. No 3D support at *all*. Even support for 7500 and earlier is incomplete. Unlike the *complete* support for anything since TNT in the NVidia driver. I am not saying the guys who do the XFree/DRI drivers are lazy or anything. They are undermanned and writing a video driver these days is not easy and ATI is not really supporting them in any way other than releasing the specs (that's a goos start indeed but not much more).

Re:BS

[dinivin]

No 3D support at *all*.

You're the one full of crap.

From the DRI on BSD page:

However, in the good news, a couple of users have reported success with r200-0-1-branch of DRI CVS with Radeon 8500s on FreeBSD.

Maybe you should do a little research before posting blatant lies.

Dinivin

Re:BS

[dusanv]

I had one of these (traded it just this weekend). I tried last week (~Aug 17) with the latest DRI sources I could find on the DRI site and it didn't work. There was no support (read: X said *no DRI*). I am not a liar!

What're you doing here?!?!

[wiredog]

Shouldn't you be helping Rusty with the non-profit stuff? And the search engine? And, ummm, other stuff?

Get to work, or it's back to default poll option for you!

Where's TruForm?

[Mitchell Mebane]

I've been reading quite a bit about ATi's TruForm technology, which is supposed to dramatically enhance the number of polygons in a 3D game, with minimal performance impact. HotHardware mentioned TruForm in the Radeon 9700 specs, but they don't have any screenshots. I'm rather surprised, as this is supposed to be ground-breaking technology.

What gives?

Re:Where's TruForm?

[Anonymous Coward]

TruForm has been around since the 7/8xxx series. It's not all that groundbreaking. In fact it usually makes games look quite silly, making models look bulbous and cartoony. I don't know of anyone that seriously uses it.

Re:Where's TruForm?

[Anonymous Coward]

Becasue almost nothing new is EVER supported in graphics cards for quite some time. Especialy something card spefic! TAke some time, you'll see something support it

Here is what John sais

[toofast]

From ati's website:

John Carmack

"The R300 is an ideal rendering target for the DOOM engine, it can do both our highly complex pixel shaders for light surface interactions and can very rapidly render all the stencil shadow volumes which deal with all our dynamic masking of way light operations"

"3D accelerators are all about performance, quality and flexibility and the R300 breaks new ground over anything thats come before it in all three areas."

Re:Here is what John sais

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure how much weight I'd put in Carmack's comments... he also said that the XBOX version of Doom III will be released with the same visual quality of the PC version - and we all know the 9700 Pro and NV30 will be out by the time Doom 3 ships, so how can he make that claim?

Re:I hate to feed a troll

[Anonymous Coward]

paid is correct. paid is misspelled. satisfied now?

Right on

[Anonymous Coward]

You are totally on the money with this one.

I was a die-hard ATI supporter from ISA Mach32 on to a TV card about a year ago. About 2.5 years ago I noticed that their cards seem to be prone to odd driver problems. Every time I called ATI I got a big "go to hell" from them. Not even the usual "we don't support whatever" line, the tech support was actually pissed-off at me for asking a stupid question.

The first few times I figured that I'd just gotten a few bad eggs. After talking with the 7th asshole I decided that I'd had enough.

The issues I had were all separate and I was (I thought) totally reasonable with them. I think they have cards to read responses from: "Response to initial question: It's a driver issue, no soup for you." and "Response to 'is there any sort of work around that you can suggest': Listen, filth, we've got plenty of happy customers who don't call us up with their petty problems. Why don't you run into traffic so I don't have to listen to you anymore, idiot?".

I don't care if ATI makes cards that can wash the dishes for me when I'm not playing games, I don't spend my money on items by companies that tell me to go fuck myself.

Re:Hauppage TV Tuner

[alexdw]

Nah... the Hauppage WinTV cards are just shite. If my computer locks up, resets, won't boot, or whatever, the problem is usually solved by pulling the card / disabling the drivers / not using it / etc. Ahh well...

know way, Nvidia still smokes them

[Anonymous Coward]

no thre not good about it. It has taken forever to get my dell inspiron 8000 w/ ati rage 128 mobility to do simple things like support for s-video out, etc. XF86 4.2 helps but Nvidia still has them left in the dust

What?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

You paid $20 to call Canada?!? Where do you live, in Nepal or something?

Calling Canada is dirt cheap from the US. (Unless, of course, you have an absolutely insane rip-off calling plan. But, you'd almost have to try to get a plan that bad.)

Useless to me

[RichiP]

As much as the hardware's a technological wonder, the card is useless to me since I only have Linux on my machine. I would spend $399 this very minute if I were sure there'd be decent Linux/XFree86 drivers. As it is, it looks like I'll have to wait for the NV3x cards,

(I wouldn't even mind spending $600 for the 3DLabs VP 870 if it had accelerated XFree86 drivers)

ATI Support for Linux

[RichiP]

I keep hearing people mention that ATI releases information needed to develop drivers to the public, and sometimes I hear the contrary. Is the information they're releasing (specifically with regards to the Radeon 9700 Pro) sufficient to produce drivers that compete with the windoze version? (3D as well as 2D)

(This is addressed more to the XFree86 developers)

Look.

[bcaulf]

nvidia's cards have been hitting the wall, and the gap from generation to generation is getting closer and closer together...

What are you talking about? TNT: huge card. Dual pipes, massive fill. TNT2: mostly a speed bump. Geforce256: huge card. Hardware T&L, massive throughput. Geoforce2: mostly a speed bump. Geforce3: huge card. Programmability, greatest rendering flexibility ever. XBox: huge. Far more power than the competition. Geforce4: mostly a speed bump. Geforce4MX: marketing speak. ATI R300: huge card. NV30: ???

NVidia's small gap is the one between the new card and the speed bumped version. They have created a large gap in every new product generation for years, with an enormous marketplace win every time. What happened here is that ATI stole a march by skipping the R8500 speed bump and executing beautifully on their next full generation. No reason to think, though, that NVidia won't deliver another killer leading product on their next iteration.

NWN Benchmarks?

[Dr. Spork]

I know this is a bit off topic, but I think it's pretty crappy how there seems to be a benchmarkers conspiracy going on. I don't know about you, but by the time I read my fourth description of the Commanche benchmarks and then the Jedi Knight 2 benchmarks, I wanted to scream. I mean, I understand benchmarkers can't be relevant to everyone, but this extreme. It's not merely that I don't care about either of these games. I mean, it's true. I couldn't give a shit. But my complaint is that there are some games that I and many people do care about, games that would stress these 3D cards, games that sell much better than the apparently obligatory Commanche. The parent post mentioned NWN and it makes a good example. Kudos to Tom for at least benchmarking Dungeon Siege. There, was that so hard?

The rest of you benchmarkers: fuck off. If I have to read another masturbatory "analysis" of how one card's Quake3 framerate is 4 times the refresh rate of the best available monitors, while an inferior card can only do 3 times, I will have to write you email to see whether you also spend a lot of time wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Meanwhile, I'm seriously starting to wonder whether there is some payola behind the scenes of these uncannily similar choices of games to benchmark.

Re:NWN Benchmarks?

[Overloadplanetunreal]

Well the reason they can't bench NWN is because Neverwinter Nights does not have an FPS display mode. You can type "fps" in the console, and it will give you a one time instant reading, but that is not enough to go on for a benchmark. But other than that, I agree, they should benchmark more programs than just the typical FPS's.

What I want to know

[Anonymous Coward]

Is where the hell do I buy one? Even though they said cards were at retail today, I haven't been able to find 1 place that had them.

Recommended Review

[N Monkey]

Can I recommend the review at Beyond3D? The reviews there generally dig a bit deeper into the technology than most of the run-of-the-mill sites.

Simon

Athalon's AGP and ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this new ATI card suffer from the same 4x AGP problems when hooked up with an Athalon processor as the older Radeons?? And if so is their fix going to be "set your AGP port to 2x"??