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Radeon 9700 Pro: ATI Ahead
Keefe writes "The epic battle between ATI and Nvidia wages on. While Nvidia awaits arrival of their near-fabled NV30 for redemption, ATI conquers all by introducing the fastest and most advanced graphics card to date. The next-generation ATI Radeon 9700 Pro marks the second time Nvidia cedes the performance crown to ATI (the first time being the brief glory when the ATI Rage Fury beat the Nvidia TNT). See how the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro stacks up at Techware Labs."
fp.
Fuck unlimited mod points for moderators!!
PC Gamer reviewed the 9700 four months ago.
???
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I wonder how much extra circuitry this chip has in order to be backwards compatible. I rember reading that the Geforce 3 had to have some legacy circuitry that wasn't used in Direct Draw 8 games in order to run Direct Draw 7 games. Now that we're into DD8.1 and DD9.0, how much more legacy circuitry is in there?
Wasn't this card released a few months ago? About two days after I bought my GeForce 4 Ti4600 :-(
But having seen the videos for the Nvidea Fx card I can't see ATI holding the crown for long.
The Radeon 8500 outperformed the Geforce3 Ti500 and came out months before the Geforce4 Ti series. They're continually trading the performance lead. The only instance of nVidia ever keeping the performance crown continuously from one product generation to another was Geforce2-->Geforce3.
From the time the Geforce2 came out until the Radeon 8500 came out 17 months ago, ATI had the unquestionable performance crown, but since then it has been juggling back and forth, which is to be expected since each new product release is about 6 months after the competitor's last release and the technology improves as time goes on. nVidia has a habit of shooting for a holiday release but not actually shipping until the new year, and ATI has made their last two releases in August. So when either one of them makes a new release they have a 6-month lead over the other company's product, so you should expect them to always trade performance crowns unless one of them is more than 6 months begind the other in R&D, which would be saying quite a lot.
Repeal the DMCA!
do a search...yes this problem was fixed by ati.
grab the latest drivers...it was just a glitch in the first release.
or you could always flash the bios of your OEM card with the firmware from a retail card..
The only difference is 1/2 the memory bandwidth. While that may seem like a lot, the 9500 pro actually gives @ 70% of the performance of the 9700 Pro.
and....
The 9700 Pro, 9700, and the 9500 Pro use the exact same GPU. So download a new bios at www.3dchipset.com/temp/warp11.zip and you can overclock the GPU to get almost 90% of the performance of a 9700 Pro.
Read all about it here Firingsquad.com
Also make sure to get DirectX 9
and New Catalyst 3.0 Drivers
And the 9500 Pro is a cheap at $180 delivered.
www.pricewatch.com
Actually the only GeForce models that are aprox 100 are the MX model which is just a suped up geforce 2. Just about everyone says to avoid the MX model like it was typhoid Mary.
Nvidia has missed an entire product cycle, Most of ATI's offerings are smoking NVidia's at the same price point. Not to mention being more technologically advanced.
Asheron's Call 2 isn't a DX9 game but it uses the vertex and pixel shader pipeline, and represents at least one game that could probably use the extra horse power of the 9700.
Source? All the source that nVidia provides is a small wrapper that links a binary kernel module into the kernel you're using on your system. This gets built every time you install the kernel module (though you're talking about linux and we were talking about FreeBSD, the same is true under either operating system).
Dinivin
Yeah, the best performing card using open source drivers only is the Radeon 8500.
See, ATI *does* release enough specifications for their cards for developers to create functional open-source 3D drivers. In addition, they release very stable, nearly 100% feature complete, binary only drivers for Linux.
As compared to nVidia which only does the latter, screwing you over if you only want to use open source 3D drivers.
Dinivin
ATI is in REALLY good shape right now. As far as their drivers go, they're really getting much better. ATI will have had the performance crown for 6 months or so by the time the FX comes out, by that time they'll have a card based on the R350 core that should at least equal the FX, and come June or July the completely new R400 core based cards should be around, more than likely beating Nvidia's next big thing by a long time. Nvidia is a hype machine, but they're not delivering, they dropped the ball big time by not getting the FX out at least by Christmas. And I bet if you took the dustbuster off the top of the FX and ran in at clock speeds that normal cooling can facilitate it would be on par with the 9700. And top performance means nothing anyway, it's what, like less that 5% of the market? ATI currently has the fastest mobile chipset, pocket chipset, value chipset, and their mainboard chipset is for the P4, not the Athlon like Nvidia, who do you think is in a better market position? They've basically got Nividia beat everywhere right now (as far as stuff already on the market goes) they seem pretty serious about being the one to beat themselves.
I've had 3 ati cards in my life, and 3 of them had drivers and software as stable as a tau lepton.
BoD
Also, while the NV30/GeForceFX may beat the R300/Radeon 9700, I'd be surprised if ATI doesn't release a R350 based card (Radeon 9900?) close to the launch of the GeForceFX. ATI's lower end cards (such as the 9500 PRO) will continue to beat the GF4TI series in price and performance.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Nvidia releases binary drivers. ATI releases specs. If you think about it, which is better?
Don't be suckered just because Nvidia has thrown you a bone. If you read some of the developer mailing lists for say, Mplayer, the Nvidia binary drivers leave a lot to be desired.
If you're talking about current games that use DirectX 8.1 the GeForce Ti4200 (sorry, the Ti4400 is out of production) is still a reasonable choice.
However, you are going to see games that use the full DirectX 9.0 functionality over the next 12 months. That unfortunately means the GeForce4 Ti4xxx series cards are going to start bogging down on highly-complex backgrounds and 3-D effects from these new games. You'll want a card that support DX9 functionality in hardware like the ones that use the ATI R300 chipset (Radeon 9500 and above) and the ones that use the new nVidia GeForce FX chipset.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
I purchased this video adapter 2 weeks ago, and while i did have one minor driver duke out between catalyst and detonator :), all was well. every game i own plays fantastically as well as some older legacy games which the GF 3's and later would chop up, such as Xwing Alliance. i do get minor shadow corruption out of "Mafia" but that game hasnt been very fun anyways so just as well. I must concur with the slashdotters who feel you have some other underlying hardware incompatibility and/or driver issue. Ive had bad experience with ATI products in the passed in relation to driver support and poor game functionality, and i can assure you, dear fellow gamer, that the Radeon 9700 pro is a different animal entirely... :)