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ATI/Half-Life 2 Bundle Confirmed
An anonymous reader writes "The Inquirer has a recent article on the launch of ATI's Radeon 9800 XT and 9600 XT, happening tonight at Alcatraz." In fact, there's now a press release announcing that "...customers purchasing ATI's Radeon 9800 XT and 9600 XT will also get a free copy of Half-Life 2 when the game ships", whenever that is, and confirming the price of the 9800 at $499, and the 9600 at "under $200."
ATI Technologies Inc. today introduced the RADEON(TM) 9800 XT and the RADEON(TM) 9600 XT, delivering killer DirectX(R) 9 performance in leading games like Half-Life(R) 2, which will be bundled with the graphics cards.
Looks like ATI and Valve know where their bread is buttered.
Mmmmmmm, butter. *drools*
My understanding is that at least at the start, you don't get a CD, you get a cupon that let's you download it from Valve's Steam system. In the future will it switch? I somewhat doubt it, but I hope I'm wrong.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
This may be the one thing that gets me to switch to ATI after using Nvidia for so long!
Forget it, the only bundled item I want to see are the hardware specifications for their card, so that someone can build decent free drivers for them. Is it so much to ask that you know how to use what you're buying?
A free copy of Half Life 2 sounds good to me, however I doubt they will be shipping out them out in a timely manner. I don't want to be waiting 6-8 weeks for ATI to get me my free copy of HL2. ...yah know, 6-8 weeks from, uh, whenever it's done.
I heard previuosly that it will not be the full version of HL2 shipping with the ATI 9800XT. I heard it will be a single player only version. WTF is with that, or am I wrong?
...driverheavens 9800 XT review...makes for interesting reading.
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/9800xt
Really, an all 1 one machine doesnt exist.
I found that out too. Had a dual CPU Linux box for almost all things (beside a server running Samba, DNS, DHCP and all this type of server work). Linux was fine, but the machine was too slow for newer games (when dual booting to Windows), many games did not use the second CPU, some ATI and other drivers did not like two CPUs at all...all kind of nasty little problems.
The simple solution was a game-only computer: 1 CPU, fast video card (time to upgrade the old Radeon 8500LE). I can whole heartly recommend such a setup. If you buy the latest-and-greatest hardware, you'll have endless problems with Linux (e.g. nForce2 mainboard: no IOAPIC, no Firewire, just now they start to work, 9 monthes after the boards were available, Linux 2.5 was better but not everyone like to live on the bleeding edge). I don't blame any Linux developers as it's clearly the fault of the hardware vendors who don't supports Linux drivers actively, with very few exceptions. Use old-and-venerable hardware (1+ year) and it's a great Linux box (read: everything works out of the box) but when dual-booting to Windows for games, some hardware is no longer supported, or does not work well any more, or is just too slow for current games. I was not able to find a one-size-size-fits-all, so I bought 2 sizes and I could not be happier.
My next video card will be some updated ATI or nVidia card. With HL2 bundled or not. That will go to the Windows-mostly machine. The current ATI 8500LE will go to the Linux-mostly machine so I can finally connect 2 monitors.
It's not the perfect setup taking more space and needing a KVM switch, but it simplifies the choice of hardware a lot as I don't need to wait for simultanious Windows-and-Linux support. Getting Linux worh with it 1 year later is fine for me.
And for those who'll cry "I cannot afford 2 computers, I want my latest-and-fastest video card to be supported in Linux" I say: those video cards are far too expensive anyway. How can you afford a US$500 video card? Save for a US$200 video card, a US$300 second computer or reused parts, a KVM switch and use the best of both worlds. Seriously.
Who's gonna buy this card just cuz it comes with HL2, especially since the game isn't even out yet. The good thing about this is the fact that the 9800 pro should be going down in price and according tomshardware.com the new ATI card barely surpasses the 9800 Pro in the benchmarks. In two months the 9800 Pro should be within my price range (maybe the all in wonder). One thing someone could shed some light on for me involves the memory. 128 MB vs. 256 MB ? Do I really need 256 MB in the next couple of years because there is quite a difference in price. Thanks.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
If they can afford to put a copy of HL2 in the box, can't they afford the extra $.50 it'd cost them to support TWO DVI monitors? Enough with the VGA connector already...
My next upgrade, sadly, will remain Nvidia. At least one of their partners can support my monitors.
Package it before the game comes out. Now that we've come so close to tasting it
Look it's a joke about my sig IN MY SIG! LOL!
This reminds me of the free Voice over IP offered to students of Dartmouth.
Yes, because we all know there are a lot of current games out that need OpenGL. Doom3 is not coming out until March next year.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
*opens box and sees two copies of original Half-Life*
I knew it had to be a typo...
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This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
The Radeon 9600 XT runs at a whopping 4.77Mhz, and boasts an unbelievable 640kb of onboard ram! It also has state-of-the art, high resolution monochrome graphics(710x480), and is more than enough for all your computing needs. The Radeon 9800 XT takes that same incredible system and adds a gargantuan 5Mb Hard drive and stunning CGA graphics!
Radeon 9600 XT:$5000.00
Radeon 9800 XT:$6800.00
ORDER TODAY!
It's been a long time.
Any All-In-Wonder 9700 Comptability issues? How about Opengl and or DirectX what happened to them?
The Radeon 9600XT and Radeon 9800XT are so advanced, their names stand for "eXtended Technology". Unfortunately, this means that we had to break SOME backwards compatibility with older versions.
OpenGL support? Well, specific applications can choose to support it in MS-DOS, and our video subsystems are so fast, it will only take SEVEN HOURS AND TEN SECONDS to run the "draw wine glass" benchmark popularized by SGI! The 9800XT can even do this in STUNNING CGA COLOUR!
DirectX? You must mean direct framebuffer access. Yes, our systems indeed have full access to the the 0xA000 and 0xB800 segments, and the CGA registers as well, so programmers can have full, lightning fast access to the stunning high resolution graphics!
It's been a long time.
Surprised this hasn't popped up before... Maybe the delay of Half-life 2 is because of ATI? Maybe they cut a deal so that if you want to be the first to own HL2, you have to buy an ATI card?
What would we have to talk about without conspiracy theories?
Despite my P4 1.4 and GF2-GTS card showing it's age, I know now is not the right time to go out and get upgrades..
2004 we should start seeing BTX motherboards with PCI express on them, ATI has already announced support for PCI express.
So why buy anything AGP right now? It's going to be phased out by next year!