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ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
ATi is bringing out their new card, the Radeon 9800 Pro, and all of the hardware review sites which depend on ATi's generosity for pre-release hardware have released their necessarily favorable reviews. Here's a few: Hothardware.com, Hexus.net, HardOCP.com, Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, Extremetech, PCWorld.
Enquiring minds want to know (before they blow ${WEEKS_WAGES} on new toys...)
Jon.
As if you didn't have enough - This one is quite good.
The Anandtech's article shows interesting effects when underclocking the 9800 to same values of 9700. Performance is equal without AA or Anisotropic filtering, but with filtering 9800 is 10 to 30% faster.
...and all of the hardware review sites which depend on ATi's generosity for pre-release hardware have released their necessarily favorable reviews.
Err, what were you expecting? If you give a kid a new toy that's faster, shinier and has more bells and whistles than his old one then he's going to be impressed and say that it's faster, shinier and has more bells and whistles than the old one.
I have no doubt that if nVidia, ATi, Matrox or whoever released a card that stank the place right up then these guys would write about it - what do you think they'd do, michael, fake benchmark results?
Do these cards represent good value for money? No, not unless you have money to burn. Are they interesting to gamers? Yes, because what's in a $600 graphics card today is what'll be in a $200 one in a few months time.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I'm an NVidia fan, too. However, we can do without your digs to the reviewers. So much for unbiased journalism.
I hope to bring to the attention of ATI developers, if they are reading, that it would be nice to release official driver support for the R200 models (Radeon, Radeon 7500 etc) and only the latest 8000+ models.
These cards are partly supported by the DRI project on dri.sourceforge.net since they lack important features as texture compression making them useless for games as DoomIII.
Thanks.
ps. Or at least, please help the DRI guys complete the great job.
*throws 500$ video card in garbage*
Je t'aime Stéphanie
Just because your a Nvidiot, doesn't mean you can go bash ATI for making a better card or the websites that review them.
I know I speak for everyone here when I say "michael, JUST SHUT UP!!!!!"
Good thing they gave you a f@#$c#ing receipt. Just take it back. I'd strongly recommend you leave the "f@#$c#ing" out of your reason for the return, however. Unless, of course, you bought it at Fry's. :)
mcp:kaaos
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
seriously though - was it like last week 9700PRO became available? what's up with this break-neck card-releasing? I didn't think it was christmas yet...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Keep it up, ATi. Competition is good. I'm really lovin' what I see in the 9X00 series. Keep hammering on improving those Linux drivers while you're at it, because nVidia still has the edge on non-Windows platforms. The day that you release Linux drivers that are on par with those under Windows (as PowerVR and nVidia have done) is the day that I fork out $400 for your car. Rest assured that I will, as long as you back the product.
Quoting: ATI will call the extended set of DX9 features the DX9++, although we suppose it could add just as many ++++++ as it wanted to. ... ... Nvidia should perhaps call its own DX9 extensions DX9## or DX9.NET.
the sad thing is, though - I would not be surprised if Nvidia did release a DX9# or something stupid like that. I mean, look at Athlons naming themselves AthlonXP. ack
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I'm glad to see Ati released another video card. the more ati competes the less likly NVidia will become a company likly Microsoft.
Tho I won't have the top of the line =(
It beats having the bottom of the line =)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Perhaps they should take a look at 1) the cpu, 2) the memory, 3) the storage, 4) the broadband and any number of other markets and realize making something ridiculously fast and even more ridiculously expensive isn't a very good idea. If you go out and buy their cheap cards twice as often as you'd upgrade to their top of the line cards, you'll spend half as much money and always have a latest generation card capable of playing all the latest games with all the greatest detail levels with a framerate fast enough that you won't know the difference.
Whale
So no ascii version of this card yet? What are they waiting for?
I'm browsing slashdot using Telix and the refresh rate is really bad with the 9500ASC.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
The GeForce FX has some horrible Pixel shader performance using ShaderMark v1.7 as shown by HardOCP:
"In ShaderMark the GeForceFX pretty much terrible when it comes to pixel shader 2.0 performance compared to the 9700Pro and 9800Pro. Performance of the GeForceFX is horrible compared to what these cards are showing us. The 9800 Pro improves up to 50 FPS in some cases compared to the 9700 Pro. There is no doubt that the 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro have very strong pixel shader speed.
This benchmark also does give some credence to the 3DMark03 PS2.0 numbers.[my bold face] More PS2.0 coming next week that will really get you asking questions."
This is what a really wanted to hear:
(from the Register)
"Effectively a 0.13 micron version of the four-pipeline 9500 Pro, the new chip will run both faster and cooler than its predecessor"
Yes cooler... COOLER.
Not so freaking hot you need to strap a briggs&stratton lawn mower engine up to a card to power the fan to cool the f'ing thing. Are you listening Nvidia?!
...of the Radeon 9500 ASC which enhances ASCII gaming for serious nethackers.
1. So can one truly notice the difference between say 45fps and 100fps?
2. How many games will be out within the next six months to take advantage of this cutting edge technology?
I understand this is the business practice of these times. To always wait about 6-8 months before hyping up the next release of something. Why so many changes to squeeze more fps? Is it like trying to add 10 more HP to your Honda? How many people on this place can actually look at a screen shot or video and name what type of graphics card is being used and what options are set like AA and such?
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
All of these sites do decent work, I read them daily, and they all PILE ON when something is released that is a POS. Whatever axe you have to grind, keep it to yourself or back it up please.
I have BOTH bleeding edge cards right now, and unfortunately for NVDA, it's just plain "true" that the Radeon's are top dog at the moment. If you don't believe them, run your own benchmarks.
Slashdot calls itself "News" that simple blip alone is enough to require the editors to keep their opinions constrained somewhat. Sure it is okay to have a slant when calling yourself news, but some editors here, Michael especially, place very strong opinions in almost every link they post. This isn't news, this is treating the site as a personal log.
Thats all well and good if you aren't a paid employee with customers, but this site stopped being that years ago. Unfortunately, we, the slashdot readers let them get away with it time and time again while paying their salaries by adding content and viewing the ads.
--- I do not moderate.
Well, nVidia fans (like myself too) may be severely disappointed that the GeForce FX turned out to be an almost total turkey because of noise, power consumption, and barely adequate basic performance, but it's actually pretty healthy that ATI is now back in the lead.
Hopefully nVidia will recognize that it made a dreadful mistake way back at design and specification time on the FX, and learn from it. If it doesn't then it's commercially dead, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Within the company, this probably requires booting out some managers and pressing some engineers' noses onto red-hot heatsinks.
I agree, there's no need to bash the reviewers. Everyone knows that they try to butter up the hardware suppliers, but they still deliver fairly objective reviews, so there's no real problem.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
From XFree86 4.3.0 release notes:
2.1. Video Driver Enhancements
* ATI Radeon 9x00 2D support added, and 3D support added for the Radeon 8500, 9000, 9100, and M9. The 3D support for the Radeon now includes hardware TCL.
Looks like pretty good support to me... I really prefer that to a binary-only driver such as NVidia's.
There must be a very interesting formula at work for early release reviews. The product suppliers want good press and a wide audience. The reviewers want a larger audience for their web site, and possibly fame or a chance to try out the next big thing --first! The readers want interesting, informative reviews they can believe, use for purchases, and quote with authority. These forces pull early release reviews to a common middle. The product suppliers won't provide their product to a site that reports credible, but consistently unfavorable reviews. Readers won't keep reading reviews that are favorable, but consistently boring, unhelpful, or not credible --then the product supplier drops the review site for lack of audience, anyway. So, the review sites that get the chance to review new products are the ones that produce consistently interesting, informative, and favorable (or at least, not UNfavorable) reviews.
Of course, confounding this formula is PT Barnum's line "I don't care what they write about me as long as they spell my name right." Some suppliers may continue to release early products to unfavorable, but popular reviewers, just to increase the overall level of press coverage. Worse yet, since the early product is provided by the product supplier, it may have been specifically modified from the "retail" version to work better on benchmarks, just for the review. For that matter, the reviewer may be tempted to soften a review for the sake of a site advertiser's new product.
Still, what's a consumer to do? I guess we have to take early reviews with a dose of skepticism. Before we make a purchasing decision, we have to wait for a reviewer to buy an off the shelf unit and test it. That's the best way we can be sure the review is more in our interests than the product supplier's.
Sometimes I worry that I'll develop Alzheimer's disease, but no one will notice.
Here's the text I'm refering to below.
----
Pipelines, pipelines... February 25, 2003
Hello, world.
Just wanted to write a word or two regarding the issue raised couple of days ago. Seems like the whole Internet community wants to crucify nVidia about the controversy of how many rendering pipelines GeForceFX realy has. Is it 8 pipelines with 1 texture unit, or 4 with 2, or ... uh... I don't know anymore. And it really DOESN'T matter that much!
The only thing that matters is how fast and how good it can render pixels. And both GeForceFX and Radeon9700 are great products, the kind of hardware that developers long for. So, personally, I don't care much what's "under the hood".
Don't get me wrong, I am into 3D-graphic hardware, but this pipeline thing really went out of proportion. Number of pipelines is a good hardware information, and that's all there's to it. It really doesn't need to reflect the speed of the hardware directly. Come to think of it... currently, there are no games that utilize even 1/3rd of nifty features these two boards have.
Oh, before I forget... I'm not "nVidiot" (and I'm not "fanATIc", either). I'm just a game developer who wants good and fast technology for the future. And both ATI and nVidia have it now!
Just my two cents.
Dean "3D" Sekulic
(Programmer)
P.S. Yes, I snapped.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
My god that's brilliant we just need a catchy name to call it X is a popular letter right now we could call it something X something the markentoids can market direct to the gamers. And it should be controlled by some one other then the video card makers like a large company located somewhere in north west region on the united states. Yes I think the idea of a OPEN G raphics L ibrary that is a is a cross-platform standard for 3D rendering and 3D hardware acceleration that ships with all Windows, MacOS, Linux and Unix systems is a great idea almost as good as my idea for using a round object rotating on a central axis to help move heavy objects
I've never noticed it before but my thinking cap does sort of resemble a hockey helmet
LOL, if only that were true, we wouldn't have Ziff-Davis anymore...
If you go out and buy their cheap cards twice as often as you'd upgrade to their top of the line cards, you'll spend half as much money and always have a latest generation card capable of playing all the latest games with all the greatest detail levels with a framerate fast enough that you won't know the difference.
Except that's just not true.
Take UT2k3 as an example. Turn up everything on high, set your anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering to max, and go play online... your frame rate is going to suck so badly it doesn't matter how good you are.
And if you're hoping the card will perform better when Doom3 is released, well...
That said, you can back things off very slightly - particularly on the AA and AF fronts - and things will be just fine with a $150 video card. And you can do what you suggest. Which, frankly, is probably fine for most people.
And while by and large I don't stare at the eye candy when playing UT2k3 online, there was a massive improvement in going from a GF2 to a GF4 Ti4200 - upping the visual quality very much improved the experience (and the frame rate boost didn't hurt my play either).
And, yes, you really do want your framerate above 60 fps at all times. Below that you will start seeing stuttering -- video cards don't display motion blur like film or video do, so 24 or 30 fps is not good enough.
> What they need is a standards based API for graphics engines.
Already done -- middleware such as RenderWare, Net Immerse, etc., already provide this, and are starting to be used more and more.
The reason there hasn't been a standard for graphic engines, is because the problem is an old one -- flexibility (abstraction) vs performance (hard-coded). Game engines that are flexible used to suffer a HUGE frame rate hit, which is completely unacceptable on consoles, where they needed 30 fps minimum.
e.g.
BSP Trees vs Sphere Tree. A BSP Tree needs to be processed off-line (meant for static data, not dynamic), but gives perfect sorting, in linear time. Sphere Trees can handle dynamic objects just fine, but can't be used for sorting.
As CPUs have been become faster, and the graphics work has been offloaded to a dedicated GPU, the CPU has more time for the "general" solution, that is "fast enough."
Cheers
quote:
Please implement a VGA BIOS disable switch on your videocards. Some of us are working on computer platforms that can't work with your VGA BIOS, yet their exists graphics drivers that CAN use your proprietary graphics-acceleration architecture chipset on your related products.
For example, disabling the VGA BIOS would allow users of Alpha/Sparc/MIPS/PPC/Power(3/4) platforms to use a wee-little standard VGA graphics card that we know works (like a S3, Permedia2, G200, or RagePro), then throw a hefty ATI Radeon 9800+ Pro XPERTONIA ++plutonia++ 256MB or nVidia GeForce FX 6000++BrownOut/cooker 256MB L24a adaptor into the AGP port or hopefully see a 64bit PCI model from ATI/nVidia and we could use your hardware!
Sincerily,
The Alpha Troll
But I'm sure you already Gnu that.
We're talking about graphics cards that cost as much as entire systems... and not fancy workstation cards, cards designed for games!
We're talking about graphics cards that have more transistors and processing power than most CPUs. Have you looked at the R300 or NV30 GPUs? The shaders are fully programmable... just like CPUs are. Except they're a whole lot faster for the operations they're designed for.
You're also talking about video cards with 128 MB of memory that's 2-3x the speed of the stuff you put on your motherboard. Of course, a few years ago, 128 MB was more than you'd put in anything short of a workstation.
In otherwords, that $150 video card has more horsepower than the an entire workstation did just a few years prior. Oh, and the workstation cards are based off the same chips but only cost about 4x as much now - which is a considerable improvement over how it used to be.
Hell, I still remember seeing one of the first VR systems in the early 90s from GVU at Georgia Tech. It was designed to help reduce acrophobia and consisted of a SGI Onyx with a RealityEngine2. It could usually do 30 fps at 640x480 in 8 bit color with non-textured simple solids. Put more than a dozen or so objects in the FOV though and you started stuttering badly. The system cost roughly $600,000 - without the VR goggles.
About a year or so later you could go out to CompUSA and buy a 3DFx Voodoo card for $200 that could handle 100x the polygons, with texturing, at the same resolution with a higher frame rate.
Heck, companies are now looking at the GeForce FX and ATI Radeon 9700 cards and considering doing movie-quality rendering on them. Because they're getting that good. And you can do it in a tenth the time it would take otherwise. Trading a $10,000 workstation for a $400 video card sounds like one helluva deal to me.
Let's chain down the game developers and make them use $40 SiS305 cards, or better yet, $20 second-hand Matrox G400s and Voodoo3s
Why? Those cards are all cheap for a reason - they're crap. They don't support any of the graphics capabilities desired nowadays (the G400 and SiS305 don't even support the graphics capabilities of their time). You may get UT2k3 running on a G400 or V3, but not at a reasonable frame rate, and in order to get that reasonable frame rate you have to ditch visual quality features. There's simply no way around it.
Doom3 on such a card? Yah, right.
If you're happy with graphics from 5 years ago, then keep playing those games. But whining about cost and "it's not a workstation" just shows how amazingly ignorant you are.
Is ATI going to continue to sell RV300 based boards? And if so at what price points? I _just_ (last weekend) bought a 9700 PRO at Circuit City on sale for $299. I realize now that it was to just get rid of it (Best Buy also is listing theirs for $299 presumably for the same reason.)
The 9800 is only marginally better than the 9700, and the 9700 is far far better than the new 9600. The new 9600 is supposed to be $219 and the new 9800 replaces the 9700 at $399. That leaves a big gap.
What I'm worried about is if ATI is going to continue producing 9700's, will they be under $300? Anything less than $299 and I'll feel ripped off. (Unless I can get a price adjustment from CC.)
Still, I got a good deal I suppose. I never would have spent $399, and if they stop making 9700's then I paid a fair price for it too.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.