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

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. . .

[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.

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?

[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: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: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!