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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."
...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?
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.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
Sure, we know it runs awesome on Quake3... but will it run awesome on Quack3?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Is your browser retarded?
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.
Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more cowbell!
What chipset?
Via chipsets have been known to have AGP/PCI incompatibilities... I will not buy another Via chipset board ever again!
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.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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...
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.