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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."
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?
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.
[H]ardOCP Also has a review and benchmarks. Good stuff from the [H]ard crew.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
...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?
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".
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?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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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?
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."