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ATI Video Processing Upgrade
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad has a hands-on look at ATI Catalyst 5.13 drivers for the Radeon X1800XL, with a focus on video quality. They say it's the greatest leap in video quality technology for ATI since the original Mach64-VT. They triple their HQV Benchmark DVD scores by adding diagonal filtering, unusual cadence detection, and even noise reduction. On top of the video quality improvements, the new drivers enable ATI's hardware H.264 support as well as hardware transcoding. Best of all, Catalyst 5.13 will be a free upgrade scheduled to be released to the public next week."
Is actually a fairly minor change... the next version should be a FULL update.
LINUX ONLINE POKER: Linux Poker
whenever i have used ATI on either windows or linux, something usually made the 3D display prone to being buggy as hell. maybe it's hardware, maybe it's thje driver, but nvidia have always been rock solid for me. maybe this improvement will fix ATI's problems
...is that a hardware vendor is releasing drivers for free?
Welcome to 2005, I realize things must be strange for you considering you've been frozen since 1930...
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Who woulda thought!
.uh . . . you know, those other evil video card vendors.
Free video driver updates!
Will wonders never cease.
Much better than those pay for drivers you get from . .
This isn't really free, we don't get the source or even the freedom to distribute it. When will these changes make it into fglrx btw?
What will they do for my 9800?
I used to do be one of those people first on the block for all newest video cards, but that trend is over for me. When the next gen consoles are ready, I plan to do all my gaming there. The unstable drivers, overheating $5 fans and eyecandy PC games left me with a sour taste.
I seriously would have no problem paying $400 a card if it worked flawlessly for every game and the performance rivals tomshardware benchmarks.
Since when are drivers charged for? Man, my tab must be a hell of a lot from NVidia then.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Not to lesser operating systems, nor to open source of course.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Do they do all that nice stuff in the Linux version of their drivers, too? X11 has a standard extension for hardware accelerated motion compensation (Xvmc), but to date it seems to be only supported by VIA, of all possible vendors.
FTFA: The Radeon X800 XL with Catalyst 5.12 failed miserably on both of these tests. The Radeon X1800 XL with Catalyst 5.13 flies through these tests with flying colors. Both XGI and ATI require a little bit of extra time to detect the 3:2 cadence in comparison to NVIDIA, but it's still fast enough to score a perfect score.
Their verdict from this:
Score
Tied 3rd place: ATI, NVIDIA, XGI (10 points)
So apparently their scoring system favors ATI from the get-go (read the article and you will see they knock Nvidia and XGI back if they take longer than the other, but as shown above they ignore the same discrepancy when it applies to ATI). Also, why are they tied for third!? Wouldn't that be tied for first?
I think this article is poorly written and i'm not going to trust the results until I see something from some other sites once a final release driver is out.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Instead of a graphics card, you buy an XBox 360 which costs just as much, crashes, and burns down your house. Great.
Good thing the XBox 360 is as stable as a drunk two-year-old on stilts.
nVidia's PureVideo costs between $20 and $50. Admittedly it includes a DVD player application, but ATI's drivers will be used by any standard DVD application anyway.
This rare '13th month of the year, the month of strange sorrows, the month of Grimuary' release includes the standard free drivers, and free stuff to activate what you pay a reasonable amount for with PureVideo.
A link to the non-castrated version of the article with images, for the lazy among us. Lots of nice ads to look at too! http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_catalyst_5 .13_video_quality/
So, an anonymous reader submitted this overly glowing "review?"
After reading the blurb and the article, it looks like the reader is a P.R. person for ATI and the writer of the article a paid shill of ATI. I'm so glad I don't have to pay for this driver update like I do with all of my other hardware... such a relief. Now console gamers have one less thing to knock us PC gamers for. The author says ATI did worse on certain test but still gave them a perfect score to tie with the two who beat them. The rest of the review isn't much better.
I'm a proud owner of an ATI video card... I paid $180 for it 2 years ago, and it still plays current gen games well enough for me. This review and post are just worthless, though.
IANAL, but I play one on
What I'm really curious about is the "AVIVO Video Converter", or transcoding abilities. I remember the demo of it on a site a few months ago, and actually gave me a reason to upgrade to the latest generation of cards. But the article said nothing other then a brief mentioning of it in the features.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Where's the fscking Linux support?
only 5.12 drivers listed for download here:? deptID=894&task=knowledge&folderID=27
https://support.ati.com/ics/support/default.asp
On the laptop I run the ATI drivers, all up to the newest, remind me of the nightmarish win9x days with older ATI cards. In windows my previous experience with ATI cards has been frightening as well. What good are features and clarity if you're getting bluescreens or freezing?
Now to be fair the NVidia cards have had some bugs, but generally not anything that seriously impacted usability, and the fix-time was usually much quicker for turnover.
I remember there was an article on slashDot earlier regarding the PPU or Physics Processing Unit. Anyone know if they're being used for games? Are ATI or NVIDA planning on having on on their cards?
"Best of all, Catalyst 5.13 will be a free upgrade" That's the BEST of the whole deal? Move along, nothing to see here.
Will it make a whole lot of difference if a 7800GT was used or not? I don't know for sure, but at least it would be fresh apples vs fresh oranges comparison, not fresh apples vs moldy oranges... The 7800GT's have hardware H.264 and more hardware help for de-interlacing then the 6600 does. Do a fair comparison is all I can say.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
The reason it is pointed out that this upgrade is free is that nVidia charges for its Pure Video codec packs. nVidia does not charge for normal driver upgrades. Frankly, I agree with the article, if you shell out for one of nVidia's high end cards, this should be given as a free pack-in. It is just gouging otherwise.
That said, the ATI cards are generally more versatile out of the box (in my opinion) than nVidia, which tends to make pure gaming cards.
Oh well I can wait a bit. Apart from Sony MMO games most games still play well enough.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...it's been two generations of card since it was released. i've got a 9600 and finding driver updates for it since the X series came out is like pulling teeth. yes, it's still a radeon chip, yes, it still works fine, but as far as ATI's concerned, the 9x00 series is legacy.
these driver updates are mainly just ironing out the bugs in bleeding edge cards before they stop being bleeding edge. i seem to remember the big hoopla over the 5.11 and 5.12 catalysts was mainly to do with crossfire bugs in the x_00 and x1_00 series. regardless of how ridiculous ignoring relatively recent cards like the 9x00 series is, grandparent's point is still valid: info on the status of older cards with these drivers is basically nill.
imho, the big reason for not paying attention to older radeons is the shift to PCIe--hardware nuts see AGP as a performance bottleneck, so hardware companies like ATI are concentrating on the new standard, working out the bugs and so on. [shrug] since they make most of their money on bleeding-edge enthusiasts, focusing on PCIe seems like a smart business move to me. those "stuck with AGP" will just have to deal until it's really obsolete.
/. is what happens when geeks talk. get used to it.
Sounds to me like a broken videocard.
Working ATI videocards work fine with latest ATI drivers. I've seen a lot of broken ones (9600, 9600XT, 9800pro series all common) that exhibit very odd problems with certain driver versions.
Swap in another copy of the card and the drivers all work flawlessly.
Stop blaming drivers when your hardware fails. Warranty is there for a reason. Naturally do check first if your windows is b0rked, but it's fairly common to see failing vidcards. People never clean their fans, dust builds up, heat does it's job and then we have truly bizzarre effects - which sometimes only show with specific driver versions.
(I work at PC repairs. I see these 'ati drivers stopped working' computers every week. 90% of the time if the usual 'reinstall windows + latest drivers' doesn't work, its a faulty videocard, and the other 10% of time time it's a faulty motherboard...)
Not best of all at all. Best of all is sending me the card free, sending out a technican to install it along with the drivers for free, and then paying me to use it all afterwards. A couple games, btw, would also be nice.
This is just the next best thing.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"Admittedly it includes a DVD player application"
If you buy built by ATI cards (i wish they had never allowed others to build them) you also get a DVD player it is in the media center that is on the cd.
the knock offs don't bother putting this in the package unless it is retail, ATI does it even on the OEM's
nVidia doesn't do it at all
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
Just ask my friends how many Radeon 9600xt cards I've been through. So far my old GF4200ti has had to be a fall back for me a half-dozen times.
this baffles me, as i have noticed no difference between my nvidia and ati cards, except for the greater clarity and image quality on ati.
Do they fix the dreaded VPU crashes in Nefarions room while playing WoW? After one of those VPU crashes, I can't have more than 5 mobs on the screen without my framerate dropping to 5. It's very difficult to play the game when I have to stare at the floor the whole time to avoid crashing.
It really depends on when you buy the card and how long the drivers come out. My experience has been that the initial drivers are really unpleasant, but later fixes do come out that make them much improved - but of course by that time there are newer cards available.
If hardware companies didnt release their new drivers for free, its likely nobody would buy their hardware, since you wouldnt be able keep the product drivers up to date (you get artifacts from your card, so your mobo manufacturer tells you to upgrade your drivers, and you tell them, ya, but I went broke buying the card, how am I supposed to afford the drivers?)
Didn't have time to RT(whole)FA, does this mean any real advantage for anyone with older (say, 9700-generation) ATI cards, or is it only with the newer hardware that it's so wonderful?
-Styopa
"Ten days ago, ATI had the worst video quality on the PC. With this new driver, ATI has jumped to the top of the class and then built a nice lead." With "research" like this, this article sure is trustworthy! ATI chipsets have had consistently superior video playback to ANYTHING ELSE on the market, not just 10 days ago, but 10 years ago, all the way up until and including now. In fact superior video playback has always been their trademark feature.
I just bought a Sony notebook a few weeks ago (it got stolen a couple of days ago, but that's another story). They don't even give you CDs with it. They preinstall a utility on their computers that will use the optical drive to burn you recovery CDs. You actually have to produce the backup media yourself.
ATI Tries hard, but Nvidia is better.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Don't bother posting any other features about ATI until their drivers are opensource. At the moment there 'support' is as useful as tits on a bull.
Sounds to me like a broken videocard.
I would agree. I've had 2 ATI video cards fail (even a modern X800 pro 256 MB), and I swear I will never buy an ATI card again.
You know what's wierd? Ever since I bought an Nvidia card, I just installed the latest drivers and magically all of my 3d glitchiness went away. My games all play smooth as butter now and I never have wierd crashes like I've always had on ATI cards. Not really crashes so much as graphical glitches and such.
Anyway, I just want to say that Nvidia has always had trouble-free drivers, where ATI advertises that "Hey, our drivers are FINALLY halfway decent... y'all can come back now, y'hear!"
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Let me know when they're going to rewrite their drivers so that every machine I put their crap into doesn't crash and burn 15 - 60 minutes into game play (no matter what game I play).
I stick with NVIDIA. I don't care who's technology is bigger or faster. I know NVIDIA's stuff works.