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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."
First they point out a Salon piece mentioning "selling out" and now we get an ATi puff piece for a video card taht has been out for months...
If only I had a brain, I could figure out what this meant!!
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
Being faster means little when you have no modern competition. If the current ATI's remain in the lead performance wise when the next Nvidia chipset is released, that will be a major victory for ATI. On the other hand, ATI does have the crown at the moment, and the longer they are in the lead the more market share they could take from NVidia. Then back to the first hand, a whole lot of people aren't ready to upgrade yet and may not be for a while, so being in the lead when nobody is buying isn't really an advantage after all. On the other hand once again... oh, nevermind.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
is not that this is the second time that ATI has been faster than nVidia, it's that this is only the second time that this has been the case.
Back in The Day, it seemed that 3dfx would come out with their card, and hold the performance crown for a few months, then someone else would release theirs, and hold the performance crown for a few months, then 3dfx would release their next generation of cards, and the cycle would continue that way.
It's been all ATI and nVidia now for a number of years, and ATI has only just now figured out that if they want to sell graphics cards to gamers, they have to be faster every once in a while?
I hope it reverts to the old model. Competition can only yield better graphics cards at lower prices.
Does anyone have links to any recent news (cough, ahem) about ATI's Linux drivers? I know they released binaries not very long ago, but heard rumblings about them not working well (or at all) on some OEM Radeon 9700 cards.
An article comparing the performance of Nvidia's and ATI's drivers would be new info.
Last time I checked, NVidia had an obnoxious policy of not releasing technical info for all the functionality of their cards. Is that still the case?
How is ATI regarding open source support? Can I run a fully powered video card from ATI without having to download special drivers directly from ATI, like I used to have to do with NVidia?
Um, and what do you think GeForce FX is gonna cost? It's also going to be 3-500. Oh and I have news for you as well, there will some other product few months after the release of GeForce FX that will badly outperform it. So if you use your analogy, you might as well just wait forever and not buy anything...
:P
:P
It's the same with processors, or just about any technology equipment. In few months there will be something bigger and better. In some cases smaller and better
I have upgraded from GeForce Ti4200 128MB to the ATI 9700 pro a month ago, and it's been great... I have went from TNT to TNT2, from TNT2 to GeForce 2GTS, from GeForce 2GTS to GeForce 4 Ti4200... before. Normally I try to skip a at least two releases of the latest graphics card, unless there is some great leap in technology, or I have extra money... And neither happens too often
Actually, there is at least one game out today that made the 9700 Pro worthwhile to me. Asheron's Call 2 crushes basically everything out there when set at it's "most pretty" settings. It happens that the 9700 Pro is crushed the least of current cards. As AC2 was designed to look best on cards/systems a year or more from now, I'm sure that it will work great with the Geforce FX, but for the next several months (or more), the 9700 Pro allows me to play with beautiful graphics today.
-- Erv Walter
You young bucks ain't seen nothin'. In my day you had to buy two $300 video cards and connected them up through a special process called "scan-line interlace" if you wanted to be cool.
I don't know about you, but I have been burned by ATI over and over again with regards to driver quality. I sincerely hope they are still not bad about drivers but I'm not going to risk it again.
NVidia has always had top notch driver support, and they continue to support even the oldest TNT cards with driver updates. ATI tends to drop new driver support after a couple years.
I'm waiting for the GeForce FX. I just hope I can get one with dual DVI.
I know I'm going to get blasted for being a Luddite, but try to read more into this than a rehash of "640K is more than anyone will ever need." Please?
First, PC video has gotten very fragmented in terms of capability. Hardware Transform & Lighting (T&L) first appeared in the GeForce 1 several years ago. The follow up, the GeForce 2 became a very popular, almost standard, card. But there are still major PC retailers that ship with motherboard video, such as Intel's extreme-whatsit and so on. These chipsets are not T&L capable. Still, several years after the first T&L cards appeared, there is a huge segment of the market that doesn't have hardware T&L. These are fast machines in every other respect (bottom end these days is 1.8GHz), just not T&L accelerated 3D.
Of course the hot video feature these days is programmable shader logic. But realistically what percentage of very capable PCs support this? 10%?
Second, the bottom has fallen out of 3D gaming on the PC. The sales figures of games that are perceived as Big Hits, like No One Lives Forever 2, are, in reality, abysmal. We're talking under 50,000 copies. There are some 3D games that are doing well, but it's a small, small handful. Just that "Oh yeah, what about Doom 3?" comes up in these discussions shows how weak the market is.
My point is that video cards keep improving, but at the same time, there's no market for these features, nor is there a market for the features of cards two generations back. I don't like this, but that doesn't change anything. Certainly it's fun to write shaders and to be able to buy something for $400 that's significantly better than $100,000 hardware from just a few years ago, but that's looking at the situtation from a "look at what I have in MY computer" perspective, not something I can realistically expect to be in most of the PCs out there.
have a Windows box around "just for gaming." Yet we lambast Microsoft regularly on Slashdot and to our friends? Seriously, if you want people to switch, how about only buying games that run on Linux or other Open Source OSs'? All I play is Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake III, and Unreal Tounament 2003 which run great on Debian Testing (my Redhat 8 laptop is another matter-HELP!). Is gaming that important that you have to run a Windows box and buy Windows-only games? A little monetary support to the manufacturers who help us could go a long way. Gaming could be the "killer app" for a lots of would be Open Source converts.
This guy is way out there
With all due respect to the submitter of this news article, I have to question the statement that the Rage Pro beat the TNT.
As I recall the days when Quake 3 was getting ready to be released, the id guys specifically said that they were trying to really hard to make Q3 work on the ATI Rage Pro, and the way they were going about making it work was allowing the user to turn off enough eye candy (ie remove enough features) so that the game would be compatible with the Rage Pro. The end result was that it looked rather ugly. On the other hand, as far as I know, the TNT1, although probably too slow to play Q3 feasibly, could support full eye candy, including 32-bit color.
I actually played the game on a TNT2 for a while, which, I believe, had the same features as the TNT1 with a speed boost.
Now if you are talking about quake1 benchmarks or something, I don't know which card would've been faster (rage pro or tnt1) but let's face it, there's more to video cards than just high framerates, as 3dfx found out (the hard way).
ATi only ships binary drivers, and they are rather buggy so far.
Bullshit.
The Radeon drivers are as open as ATI could make them -- all the functions they had to keep closed for whatever pointy-haired reason are exported into a static lib, so that all the rest could be open-sourced. Want to compile them against a custom kernel such as Gentoo's? Sure, you can, the drivers are designed so that this is absolutely possible.
As for buggy, I own a 3rd party card built around an ATI chip, the worst-case scenario, and I would sincerely like to know what you mean by 'rather buggy'. Outside pure FUD, of course.
So cut them some slack. You like your nVidia card, it's cool, I'm happy for you. But if you don't reward companies that get out of their way to provide us minority Linux folks with good drivers, like ATI did, then you provide strictly no incentive for those companies to support us. So let's drop the dick^W GPU contest and stop peeing in the soup, hmm? Thank you.
Rant over.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
> There are no new games that demand a card this instant.
Try these games at 1600x1200 @ 32-bit, and then tell me a new video card won't help.
- Battlefield 1942
- UT2K3
- Morrowind
Personally, if you just got a GeForce 3 or 4, then yeah, you won't see that much difference, except you'll be able to crank up the resolution with the newer cards. For people who have a GeForce 2 (and below) (like me), upgrading to a ATI 9700 Pro, or GeForcs FX *is* a big difference.
But you are correct -- Games requiring 64-bit and 128-bit framebuffers won't be out till next year (2004). I think that's the time to pick up the GeForce FX.
To add more fuel to myths/rumors/lies, the story I heard was that they had particularly poor yield in the coprocessor region of the 486 die. It doesn't seem hard to believe that certain aggressive component layouts would be more susceptible to manufacturing faults than others.
Intel would rather than have a part they can sell for less (a 486 minus the coprocessor) rather than a completely "broken" and unmarketable part.
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I've had the opposite experience since September when I replaced the GF4 Ti4600 I had (moved it to the wife's machine at home) with a 9700 Pro. I have found the drivers terrific so far, from the included version on the CD up to the current 3.0 DX9-compliant Catalysts. What's more, I've tested the card with more than 35 3D games in my library--closer to 40--and have yet to find one that wouldn't run, or either ran so poorly the game was unplayable. From my point of view it's simply the best 3D card I've ever owned--especially for 3D gaming.
Also, this is the second motherboard I've used the card with--the first was an MSI KT333 chipset board, my current board is a nVidia-based nForce2 chipset board manufactured by Chaintech, which supports AGP x8 and several other things. The card runs extremely well. I've not even been tempted to swap cards with the wife and go back to the nVidia Ti4600 product--no way...
I would strongly suggest that either you have some underlying system incompatiblity of which you are unaware which prohibits the card from working properly--or else you simply had the bad luck to pick up a defective card (in which case an RMA is order.) Your experience is certainly not representative of that of the reviewer of the article on which this thread is based, none of the other reviews of the product (and there have been dozens of them), or my direct personal experience. Think how you like but I thought you should know your experience is anything but typical.