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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."
Is it even out yet ?
They've beat NVIDIA, at least for now
Also, the red PCB is nice
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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.
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?
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)
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!
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
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.
[H]ardOCP Also has a review and benchmarks. Good stuff from the [H]ard crew.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
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.
If you add 1200 to 8500 you come up with 9700. Will the next radeon model number be 10900?
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?
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
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.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
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.
...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?
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.
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.
Schnapple
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".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
are some SiS 648 boards to hit the market so we can actually use the AGP 8x support.
Lord, bless my users that they may stop being such fucking idiots!!
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Probably because they want some competent people to write some drivers for them. :-)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
There are three things that the Radeon 9700 Pro can offer at this point:
... you had me at "0x1200."
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.
my religion lies somewhere between buddhism and super monkey ball - pamphlet?
"Aye'm!"
"And like that
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...
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor
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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
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?
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?
Either that or the motherboard was the problem.
What chipset?
Via chipsets have been known to have AGP/PCI incompatibilities... I will not buy another Via chipset board ever again!
Oh no?
rooooar
Still got that card? Want to sell it? :)
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
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.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
>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).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
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.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
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
Carmack promised Linux support. Do you dare defy the Almight Carmack?!
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?
...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.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
I own a good old
ATI Rage Fury Pro and I love it.
Works well both under Windows and Linux.
Expert Java EE Consulting
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?
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.
If not now, when?
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.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
Was that out loud?
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.
How sleepless is the egg, knowing that which throws the stone forsees the bone.
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
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
"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.
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).
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...
I'm sure you know this and I'm not really sure why I responded, but there it is.
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?
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?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Dedicated Xserver?
.o files to be loaded automatically based on the config file.
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
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.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
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?
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?
(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).
Get to work, or it's back to default poll option for you!
Best Slashdot Co
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?
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
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.
... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed...
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...
Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.
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)
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)
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.
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.
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