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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."
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.
What will they do for my 9800?
Not to lesser operating systems, nor to open source of course.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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
In comparison, PureVideo has never been free. It starts off at $20 for the "bronze" edition with basic SPDIF out support or 2 channel audio, $30 for the gold version with 5.1 analog out, and $50 for the platinum version with DTS support. When price shopping for a new GPU, if you're going with NVIDIA you need to factor in the extra $20 that you wouldn't have to with a built-by-ATI card.
Here's a link to nVidia's PureVideo that seems to confirm that it
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.
I am offended that you are saying my two-year old cannot hold her liquor.
sig here
Err, the equivalent nVidia software is $20 to $50, if you had read the article or other comments here. The base drivers are free, yes. The extra features are free on ATI's side, but not free on nVidia's side. Expect nVidia to fight back within a couple of months with better algorithms and free/cheaper software.
The same site gave nVidia the lead just earlier in the month, prior to these new drivers. Doesn't sound like they're paid off to me. The benchmark scores are how the benchmark defines them, and the site didn't make the benchmark. Your post is just a typical hysterical (and probably fanboy) overreaction that slanders a website that has put a lot of effort into showing what the latest drivers can provide for a user. Pretty sad, really.
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.
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.
Not really.
Ati's naming scheme is this: major version number is the last years number (2004=4, 2005=5, 2006=6 etc) and the minor version number is the month. On special occasions the realese special versions, like this 5.13 at the end of the year.
So, no, the version number says absolutely nothing about the amount of changes. The driver also have a 'real' version number displayed deep down somehwere in the control panel for real version number diehards.
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...)
if you search one of the above companies say that there products are already powerful enough not to need ush things, which given some of the physics I've seen in some of the more recent games is quite true, although I still wonder how much the CPU plays part, not the GPU.
Maybe if M$ was to update DirectX and require more physics related hardware accelerated physics then it might well hold and the whole PPU thing would pretty much sink, atleast as a seperate card, it would be just an additional unit inside the GPU.
/. is good for you.
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."
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?)