AnandTech Reviews ATI's Mobility Radeon 9000

Mike Bouma writes "AnandTech has reviewed ATI's latest mobile graphics solution. According to the reviewer this small and energy efficient chip is the new king when it comes to mobile graphic chips for Notebooks. Also John Carmack is apparently very positive about the chip and also stated that Doom 3 will be able to run smoothly with this new Radeon chip."

Comments

Re:stupid

[jchristopher]

Have you ever thought that the problem was a misconfiguration of the machine and OS.

No, I haven't. I took it out of the box, upgraded the RAM to 512, and immediately downloaded all the patches from Apple. It was slow, right away. What else, exactly, do you think the user should have to do?

You cannot BS anyone into believing you are playing any type of 3d games with decent fps or doing anything of a graphical nature on the machine.

As an example, I use Tony Hawk Pro skater 2. The Mac was 500mhz with OS X 10.1.5 and an ATI Rage 128 and 512 MB RAM. The PC is 700mhz with Windows 2000 and 256 MB RAM with a (far inferior) ATI Rage Mobility (Basically, a Rage Pro). The PC runs the game smoothly, the Mac stutters and jerks.

Mozilla would be another good test. Runs fine as my everyday browser on the Windows machine. Under OS X, it lags at window sizing, launching new windows, text entry, and scrolling up and down lengthy web pages.

I have often heard that IE is slow on os X, but that doesn't mean that all browsers are slow and FWIW, browsers can render a webpage in one of two ways.

Every browser I've used on OS X (and I've used them all - Chimera, Mozilla, IE, Omniweb, et al) is slower than what's available on Windows - sometimes significantly slower.

Running around spreading what amounts to FUD does not help improve gaming or browsing on Macs

It's not FUD, it's true. And yes, hopefully complaining will make a difference! What kind of message does it send when OS X is slow, and all the users just go out and buy new Macs? Doesn't give Apple much incentive to fix it.

On the other hand, if the users were up in arms (as they should be), Apple would have to fix OS X in a hurry. The user's blind loyalty hurts them, they get less for their dollar than they would if they exercised their consumer choices.

Re:I've often wondered why Carmack liked ATI ....

[Admiral Burrito]

Carmack has noted in the past that Nvidia's drivers are far better ("gold standard" were the words he used). But you have to keep in mind that as a 3D games guy, it is not in his best interests for a monopoly to emerge in the consumer 3D video card world. Competition keeps the new features coming, which gives Carmack new hardware to write new games for.

Re:Or if you just didnt use their cards....

[woogieoogieboogie]

Reading the manual is worthless if you do not FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS.

I have a Radeon AIW 8500DV, a Rage Fury Pro and a rage 2c card in my three home systems. I have 40 machines with Rage 128 boards in them at the office. Does this qualify me as having enough experience with ATI cards?

If you read the manual and install the drivers properly, you will have almost 0 problems, or at least no more problems than you have with any other card.

The manual explicitely states you MUST remove the older drivers and install a standard vga adapter driver. If an issue is encountered where a file is being copied that is older than one on the machine, you MUST copy the older file. If you follow this procedure every time and do it correctly, you will NOT have problesm with ATI drivers. Removing the drivers from the hardware manager is not acceptable, you must uninstall them from the system.

To say that ATI drivers suck is plain wrong. they may not be as user friendly as nvidia's drivers to install where you can install updated drivers over the old ones, but there is nothing wrong with ATI's drivers themselves. If there was, ATI would NOT have succeded in either the corporate market or with OEM's which is their bread and butter.

If you have ever installed an ATI driver over an existing ATI driver without first uninstalling the older drivers,you will have big problems with the system unless you install another physical video card and clean out all the ATI dll's, registry entries and INF files.

Blaming a product because you did not follow the directions is quite silly.

Re:It's great but. . .

[koreth]

This will sound like a troll, but it's not: if you don't want to have to stay top speed on the hardware treadmill, try playing games that are a couple years old -- not only will they run lightning-fast on your year-old hardware, but they're a lot cheaper, they're more stable (having gone through several revisions of patches) and you'll find tons of thorough FAQs and walkthroughs on the net. In terms of gameplay, a 1999 game is just as likely to be fun as a 2002 game; it just won't look as pretty. Heck, I'm only now getting around to playing the first "Baldur's Gate" (for which I paid under $10 a few weeks ago) and it screams on my lowly 1.4GHz Athlon box.

I think there's no way around needing the latest, greatest hardware to play the latest, greatest games; the two go hand in hand, always have. And I for one love it, since it means games get immersive and realistic a lot faster than they would if nobody was pushing the envelope.

Doom 3 will push lots of people to buy fancy graphics cards now rather than a year from now, which will prompt other developers to release their snazzy eye candy games a year from now rather than two years from now, which will cause enough content to be available that the non-Doom crowd will upgrade sooner rather than later, etc. Not good for people on a budget, but people on a budget are rarely on the cutting edge of any technology, so no reason to expect games to be any different.

Re:I've often wondered why Carmack liked ATI ....

[Billly Gates]

Ati has learned there lesson and their drivers are better and the raedon series proved it. I believe they listened to their customers and noticed the migration towards nvidia and reacted properly. As a side note macintosh drivers have to be very good quality to have apple's seal of approval. Unlike the Windows world where everything goes, you need to have a license to access some of the inner working of the OS and to actually sell hardware on the mac platform.(this is was what it was like in the 80's)

This is one of the few advantages if any of being tied into a single software/hardware platform. Many Unix guru's prefer sun over Lintel boxes for that very reason. Quality and consitancy. It is likely that apple itself could of partially written the drivers if ATI's own drivers didn't meet the requirements bill or if they prefered to pay apple to do it instead.

Also remember that Windows (Windows95 & 98 particularly)have a horribe and I mean horrible driver model and sdk. Infact this is what caused all the those infamouns bsod. Even NT4 has everything running in the kernel which is supposed to be there server line OS. WIndows2000 is improving however.

Oddly enough I am getting the newer cards because of better linux support. Better linux support...from ATi? Well since ATI never releases Linux drivers but rather reveals all its technical secrets to the community, I can just wait for the write drivers to come on in with dri XF86 support. I have to rely on nvidia with opengl under linux which I have observed will not compile properly with certain kernels and is very unstable with certian VIA athlon chipsets. Not to mention nvidia does not use the standard dri architecture. With now improved Windows drivers and supperior opensource linux ones, I will buy an ati. If there is a problem discovered in the linux ati drivers, it will be fixed and I do not have to wait for a corporation to do it. Its rumoured that ATI is even developing a unified driver model which is simuliar to nvidia's that will upgrade all its drivers for all recent cards! Oh, and its almost twice as fast as a gefore4!