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

Will doom 3 run on any other card?

[Peyna]

So, if Doom 3 will run smoothly on this card, how will it run on my lowly Geforce 2?

Re:Will doom 3 run on any other card?

[Raiford]

I guess Carmack has now formally achieved the the status in the computer world that EF Hutton had in the financial world ...

Re:Will doom 3 run on any other card?

[Utopia]

Read somewhere it need a video card pixel shader support.
So GeForce 3 or an ATI 8500 at the minimum.

Re:Will doom 3 run on any other card?

[MisterBlister]

So GeForce 3 or an ATI 8500 at the minimum. That isn't true.

GeForce 1 is the minimum card for Doom 3. Of course, don't expect it to look pretty on anything less than a GeForce 3.

Re:Will doom 3 run on any other card?

[Billly Gates]

I do not know about doom3 but unreal2003 is a little less demanding and will only do 2 or 3 fps on a geforce2 card. I saw the benchmark on the www.firingsquad.com. I believe it uses vertex shaders as well but not to the same extent as doom3. The 2 or 3 fps was done on a pentium4 1.7ghz. A new video card is indeed needed. I believe the cpu has to do the shader calculations in a geforce2 but I could be wrong(correct me if I am).

Anyway could someone tell me what a shader is?

Re:Will doom 3 run on any other card?

[BrookHarty]

I play American Army (unreal2003 engine based) and I get 35fps, with lows at 19 on very heavy battles. But I also like pushing my resolution at 1024x768 with 2x AA on an AMD 1800, GF3/TI500, so a GF2 should be able to do 600x480 with no AA at almost playable speeds.

Re:Will doom 3 run on any other card?

[tshak]

Americas Army is based on a recent build of the Unreal engine, not the unreal2003 engine - trust me, the graphics aren't all that impressive.

Also, Americas Army plays decently on a P3-700 with a GF2 at 800x600 (the lowest the Unreal engine supports anyway).

Re:Will doom 3 run on any other card?

[BrookHarty]

Better check again, it is powered by the unreal2003 engine. And the gfx are suppose to be war based, its not suppose to be robots with glowing lasers and floating power ups.

Re:Will doom 3 run on any other card?

[tshak]

Apparently you are right - then I'm extremely unimpressed. It seems that, aside from small exceptions, that games like MOHAA and RTCW look better then AA. Nevertheless, my orginal contention that the game runs smooth on a GF2 still stants - my roommate was just playing it with such a setup today.

Re:Will doom 3 run on any other card?

[BrookHarty]

Its no MOHAA or RTCW, thats the point, its a SIM that masks as a FPS. Kinda like CS without the cheats. The GFX are extremely good, thou some maps are dull(real life...) It does need a high end card with AA, which the new Radeon will give.

Hopefully we start to see UT2K3 benchmarks in reviews, I'm tired of Q3A, I hope Doom replaces it for benchmarks.

It's great but. . .

[AlaskanUnderachiever]

While it's great that we're getting mobile video that can finally keep up with the processor, it's rather sad that the "fastest" mobile video solution seems to be barely on the "approved" list for this game. New engines are great, but not when 80% of your market can't run them. The impression that I've been getting is that the news sites are telling me I'm going to actually need the New GeForce 5 Ti6660 or perhaps The Radeon 12000 to play this game?

I really feel for everyone that will be playing this thing on their P3 1.2gHz and GeForce3 Ti500.
"Wow John, you got above 15frames a minute? That's incredible!"

Where is my demo! Bring me my demo!

Re:It's great but. . .

[MisterBlister]

id has never really been about hitting the mainstream gamer. All of their engines have been on the very high system requirements side when first released. Since they are a small company they still manage to rake in millions, especially since lots of other companies start to license their engines when the mainstream DOES catch up to their engines.

If nobody pushes the envelope, there will be no reason for consumers to buy new cards and graphics technology will stagnate, so lighten up.

Anyway, what id is doing now has worked out great for them throughout their history -- why would they change it now?

Re:It's great but. . .

[Billly Gates]

Its not as bleak as you say it is. At least compared to when Doom1 was comming out. Unreal2003( the other vertex engine game)can run quite nice on a geforce3 as long as you do not jump up the video settings too high. How many people reading this are using a cheap geforce2 card to play quake3 or UT? Quite alot. Id knows that after the game is out hardware will advance and Carmack himself said the new engine would be standard for most games for the next 5 years!

Sure we can't put our monitors to 1600x 1800 with the latest video cards like we can under quakeIII but do we really need this?

QuakeIII when it first came out had simuliar high requirements. Now even the e-machines desktops can run it fluidly. 800x600 with 32 bit color is fine for me and my new upcomming Radeon 97000 pro.

Re:It's great but. . .

[tshak]

The original Doom3 demo performed very well on GF3 (this is before the Ti500 was even available).

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.

i'll believe it when i see it....

[wuchang]

With the updated drivers, my Thinkpad X22 with an ATI Mobility still can't play Counter-Strike for more than 3 minutes before getting screwed up. ATI is notorious for having crappy drivers.

Re:i'll believe it when i see it....

[drinkypoo]

I have a presario 1692 (K6-2 433) with ati rage mobility m1 and I can play quake1 for hours on end without the laptop choking. Of course, it's hard on the eyes. This is at 800x600, OpenGL. So maybe your problem is IBM and not ATI.

Why?

[ImaLamer]

"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."

Nice, so I can play on my laptop, almost as great as playing a PS2 on a tv from 1950.

It's not really the screen size, some laptops have better sized screens than my desktop, but the angle.

Re:Why?

[MisterBlister]

It's not really the screen size, some laptops have better sized screens than my desktop, but the angle.

IMO the big problem with laptop gaming is the poor refresh rates of your standard LCD. Lots of nasty ghosty artifacts... But its still nice to have the option, I guess...And you can always plug the laptop into a monitor for desktop use (yeah this misses the point of the laptop, but you can still use it on the go for all your office stuff, and then use it at home for games, avoiding the usual practice of having to have a dedicated desktop gaming rig)...

Re:Why?

[be-fan]

He he. I'm sitting here on my Inspiron 8200 with its 1600x1200 resolution, 25ms pixel response (no ghosting, even in Quake3) and thirty degrees of freedom in either direction. Laptop LCDs have come quite aways since 1990. Plus, there's talk that the Inspiron 8200's might be upgradable, video-wise :)

Re:Why?

[tshak]

Eh, but Dell's have exceptional screens when you pay the buco bucks for their higher end "mutlimedia" laptops. Most affordable laptops still have screens that have some level of ghosting, although it has gotten much better of late.

Re:Why?

[Rude Turnip]

I must back up be-fan. I'm using an Inspiron 8200 with a GeForce 440 Go video card and the Dell Ultrasharp display, which gives you super refresh rates and no ghosting. My current online crack addiction is multiplayer Soldier of Fortune.

If you're going to get a laptop and you still want to play the higher end games, then there's really no excuse not to get an Inspiron with the Ultrasharp display. Of course, the biggest advantage with Inspirons is that you can upgrade the graphics card by calling Dell and having the new card shipped out. True, you don't get the wide range of choices like you would with a regular PC, but then there are trade-offs with laptops.

Re:Why?

[Papineau]

Plus, there's talk that the Inspiron 8200's might be upgradable, video-wise :)

So, you own one, and you're still not sure if it's upgradeable or not? Or are you unsure about which videocard you can actually put in it?

Personnally, that's one of the reason I'm not likely to buy a laptop: you're not told up front what you can and cannot change once you bought it. In a normal self-made tower, you know you can easily change or add any part (except what you chose to be integrated on the MB). And I'm still not sold to an LCD, even if some people like their expericence with them.

(Last thing: thirty degrees of freedom in either direction? What is it supposed to mean in the context of a laptop?)

Re:Why?

[be-fan]

Well, what happens is that since the Inspiron 8000, Dell laptops have had the same graphics add-in card). So you could upgrade from a Geforce2 to a GeForce4 MX. We don't know yet if that will hold for the next Inspiron when the NV31-based mobile GPUs come out.

As for the LCD, its magnificent. 1600x1200 on a 15" screen gives 133 dpi, and with ClearType, its like reading a piece of paper.

As for the degrees of freedom, I meant that you can swing about thirty degrees to either side without losing the image on the LCD.

Re: When has this NOT been the case?

[FyRE666]

True, I remember splashing out to upgrade my 486dx33 to a staggering 8MB of RAM (not the video card, the actual main memory) just so I could play Doom without it crawling and thrashing the hard drive (170MB HD, BTW...)

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.

Geforce 4 2GO

[SuperDuG]

Well I'm using a GeForce4 2GO right now on my Satellite 5005, and well it seems to perform just like your average geforce 3 mx. While I'm used to an ATI rage mobility, the drive support for both windows and linux sucks. ATI is known for making really nice cards, but doing really shitty with driver support. nVidia makes chips and when the manufacturer of the card dies out, that's okay nVidia will jump in and give you their drivers. I have YET to see that from ATI. While I think competition is a wonderful thing, after getting a TNT a long while ago and watching the performance of this toshiba laptop (don't get me wrong even though it doesn't benchmark like a Geforce 4 TI, it still holds its own), I think that it will take quite a bit to take me away from nVidia.

Re:Geforce 4 2GO

[SmittyTheBold]

GeForce 3 MX, huh?

As far as I know...they don't exist. Did you manage to get your hands on some super-special one-off engineering sample or something?

Re:Geforce 4 2GO

[SuperDuG]

they do exist .. they were repackaged as GeForce 4 2Go's ...

Re:stupid

[Billly Gates]

IT was fast for me. Well compared to my Windows box running the same ms word and IE which is a pentiumIII 700mhz system. I counted1 second for opening IE and 3 seconds for opening MS word. This was on the low end 1699 model as well.

Everything launched quick and was smooth. I did not run any benchmarks because this was a compusa demo machine but it seemed alot, alot smoother then the g3 powerbook with MacOSX 1.1. Believe me when I say its leaps and bounds quicker thanks to jaguar.

Come to think of it I never even saw the ball moving for anything.

However if I had 1699 I prefer a dual athlon or single p4 box for gentoo linux.

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

[Darren Winsper]

Err..."up to" 25%. 3DMark scores shot up, but pretty much every game benchmarked showed marginal improvements.

Please don't buy the hype before seeing the reviews.

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!

laptop 3d chipsets have suckde for a while now..

[Lumpy]

Why doesnt Nvidia start making Geforce 3's for laptops? how about ATI making HIGH power 3d chipsets for laptops?

I am in the market for a laptop, but the graphics chipsets suck horribly (Radeon mobility? it's crappy and isnt linux friendly... so under linux you get ZERO 3d accelleration) and are not powerful enough to do squat. I would pay a premium of upwards of $200.00 for high end graphics in a laptop, but nobody want's to offer it.

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

[10Ghz]

"Just recently they squeezed another 25% speed increase out of their drivers."

They claim "up to 25% increase in performance", but just about the only place where you see that is the Nature-test in 3DMark. In _games_ (you know, the things we actually use these vid-cards for?) there is exactly _zero_ improvement! And I heard that they changed the default-setting for filtering to one notch worse, so the image-quality suffers. Also, these new drivers have severe stability-problems.

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

[cqnn]

FWIW I agree with your comments that ATI's drivers do not
necessarily suck, IMO it is a matter of how the are installed.

But, the point is the user should not have to jump thru
hoops to that extent to get a peripheral working.

I own three ATI cards (8MB AIW Pro, AIW Radeon, and AIW 8500DV,
with the latter two still in use). I have successfully upgraded
over older drivers, but that is still hit and miss whether
everything the card can do will still work afterward.

I have had other devices (sound card, motherboard) that have
failed or worked adversely after an upgrade, but those are
usually fixed by reinstalling the older driver, in some
cases I've had to uninstall the new driver first, and at
least once I have had to restore the system from a backup
image.

Only with the ATI cards has there consistently been such
an expectation of user interaction. That's the real problem.
If the standard instructions don't work or make sense,
you can check forum threads at sites like www.rage3d.com for
good advice on how and why to install the drivers in a
particular order, and what caveats to watch out for.

The drivers in the past have been adequate, the drivers in
current release are actually quite good, but the install/uninstall
process has serious flaws that force the user to do much of the
decision making that should be automated as part of the process.

ATI still has to improve that process to a point where following
the instructions amounts to running the setup program, and letting
it take care of dependencies and legacy issues. They have to deal
with the idea that a lot of users don't care to follow instructions;
particularly when those instructions have the reputation of an
arcane ritual. When they do that, it will do much to help
the reputation of thier drivers.

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

[Billly Gates]

Nooo!

Thanks for warning me. This pisses me off. I think nvidia has given the video card industry some nasty idea's. I will probably not buy it since I do not even trust nvidia to come out with good drivers for linux let alone ati.

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

[FeeDBaCK]

ATi Radeon 8500 Drivers.

Nvidia's drivers come from the exact same code base as their Windows drivers. This makes them just as fast and stable as their Windows counterparts. They aren't GPL, but the sure are damn good.