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ATI Releases Five New Radeons
An anonymous reader writes "Eager to retake the performance crown from NVIDIA, ATI has announced five new releases for their Radeon product line. The latest card features 512MB GDDR4 memory running at 1000Mhz, it's currently the fastest single CPU VGA card out there. From the review: 'ATI has proven they are a leader and not a follower with the X1950 XTX. ATI has released the world's first consumer 3D graphics card with GDDR4 memory clocked at the highest ever stock speed that chews through games when it comes to high definition gaming. Memory bandwidth looks to once again be the defining factor in 3D performance. With a re-designed heatsink/fan unit, faster memory, and lowered price, the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX and CrossFire Edition are both serious 3D gaming video cards for the [H]ardcore that offer some value over NVIDIA's more expensive 7950 GX2. ATI's CrossFire dual GPU gaming platform looks to have just grown up.'"
Trying to get ATI drivers to work with xgl/compiz is like pulling teeth. So until ATI releases new drivers with good xgl/compiz support, announcing new hardware is worthless.
What I want to know is where can I get the world's fastest accelerated EGA graphics card? I want to play Kings Quest II.
I just can't help but wonder what their Linux driver support will be like. If it is the same or worse then honestly, it only means that ATI has produced five more cards to ignore. Harsh? Maybe, but there is some truth in that statement.
My humor is probably your flamebait
Pffft. I'll wait for the multicore versions of these cards. Aren't ATI and NVIDIA aware that dualcore is the new buzzword in computing?!?
This guy's the limit!
This does indeed look like a fantastic video card, but I found this comment from TFA a little funny:
ATI has proven they are a leader and not a follower with the X1950 XTX
No, X1950 XTX, ATI's top of the line card, sounds nothing like Nvidia's top model, 7950GTX.
These cards are nice...for windows users.
What the new AMD led ATI can do to help show leadership is to release the information (or even drivers) needed for Linux to take full advantage of their card capabilities.
ATI seemed to not want to do this. I hope this changes under the new AMD administration.
What I've heard in the Linux community is to stay away from anything ATI if you plan to use it with Linux. Too bad really, because they really do make nice cards.
Soccer Goal Plans
They keep releasing new cards and the drivers that support them keep slowing down and mangling the performance of the previous cards (currently had to uninstall 6.8 catalyst to use 6.6 because the FPS rate got cut in half due to a conflict with FSAA/Bloom effects; and 6.7 driver refuses to install because it thinks the card is not an ATI while 6.6 and 6.8 do). This has been their history. I have been buying ATI cards since mid 90s (glutton for punishment I suppose) and every time a new card comes out I install the new drivers and my slightly older card runs slower or drivers crash or effects are blurred. I think they really need to beef up their driver development to keep up with the constant release of new hardware, what good is a new card if you are worried the drivers will be problematic.
While NVIDIA is not perfect, the 2 cards I have from them work perfectly with their drivers. While ATI is releasing better featured cards their drivers leave something to be desired.
I'm waiting for Wii!
It is generally predicted that DirectX 10 cards will be with us in a few months (holiday season or just after).
Are sales declining because of anticipation of this?
Will ATI and Nvidia be able to shift large quantities of cards over the next few months, with people like myself waiting for the next (significant) generation?
Aside: Yes, I am aware that these cards will still pack a punch in DirectX10 games, and will not be obsolete over night, but the unified shader/vertex architecture of DirectX10 seems to be a big shift in card design and will offer a lot of features to game desingers, not efficntly do-able on the odler hardware, so you may be stuck with a less good lookign rendering of a new game.
Please note that the term "Radeon" is not an official definition. The term was recently proposed by the International Videocard Union to define a "Graphics card which costs less than $200 American dollars to purchase and whose shape is more highly inclined and angular than a traditional card".
This definition causes all sorts of problems, such as how to define dual-card setups and what happens when a Radeon is attached to a daughter card rather than a motherboard. Videostronomers are currently divided between those who favour the term "Radeon" and those who argue that we should stick with the current definition favoured by consumers, which is "the weird square-ish blue plug at the back of my Dell".
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
And the war is on, yet again! So who is better this time? ATI? Nvidia? No one will ever know...cause in the next six months they will have a new line of video cards coming out. I'm still on my good 'ol Radeon 9700 non-pro. I shall not conform to these new changes....:)
I don't get how appending more X's, T's and the occasional G to ever increasing numbers help me understand the capabilities of a card... except that it's *Awesome* and I HAVE to buy it!
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=2 87
Here the review talks up the signle X1950 XTX card but finds the CrossFire platfrom from ATI still very under-developed.
Although it was touched on a little above, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to rant about ATI. ATI does not support more than 2-3 generations of cards. Their driver development quickly stops and their Catalyst drivers are ridiculously huge.
On the linux side of things their support is so freaking lame it is ridiculous. Reverse engineered open source drivers are 10X better than drivers developed by ATI. ATI is pathetic and any company that releases such terrible software in their name does not have very high standards and cannot be trusted. I had a radeon 8500 and I will never recommend or waste my money on such pathetic ATI junk again.
Math
I had an ATI EGA Wonder. It was an utterly great 8-bit card which provided excellent graphics for such stellar titles as F-19 Stealth Fighter and the original Empire in a glorious 16 colors. It was really nice for its day.
I have had a dozen or more ATI cards since then. I had one of their 8514 clone cards which had excellent drivers and lots of nifty utilities. I had a VGA wonder, which was a really solid card and came with full programming information. I had an original Radeon. I even got a Radeon 9000.
I will never buy an ATI card again, however. It's not just that the hardware got cheap: I have lost a couple board-mounted fans on ATI boards. It's that the drivers suck. They just don't work well on many games.
I see these hardware announcements about rocket ship ATI cards and I couldn't care less because I will never plunk cash down on an ATI card which won't work right with my games.
And it's sad because I loved their cards and resisted Nvidia for a long time.
Note I didn't mention Linux support because I just accept that they dont' care about that.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Here's HEXUS's review.
Loads more reviews out there too. Anyone feel like making a list?
What I've heard in the Linux community is to stay away from anything ATI if you plan to use it with Linux. Too bad really, because they really do make nice cards.
I've got an Ubuntu (Dapper) laptop running an ATI Radeon X1300. Works great. All I needed was to point EasyUbuntu at it, and it's worked like a charm ever since.
Even plays F.E.A.R. under Cedega very smoothly.
Don't listen to the F/OSS zealots. The binary drivers have worked fine on my new laptop, worked fine on my old laptop, and worked fine on my old desktop before that. I've never seen a machine that has trouble with that. Yeah, I know, blah blah, anecdotal evidence doesn't count--but show me a machine with those problems that can't be diagnosed as installation screwups and I'll eat my hat.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
I can finally play Wolf3d on 200x AA. Took long enough...
you missed it.
the "blurring" effect you're seeing, is just the card rendering so fast you can't keep up...
- http://www.madshrimps.be/gotoartik.php?articID=482 l eid=861&cid=1 i _radeon_x1950_xtx/ x tx/index.x?pg=1 4 ,00.asp d eon_x1950/ 2 020&cid=3&pg=1 9 50_xtx_performance/ w /
& threadid=26526
- http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?artic
- http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=6538
- http://www.mvktech.net/content/view/3357/48/
- http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=287
- http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=33872
- http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/08/23/review_at
- http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ATI/X1950XTX
- http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=954
- http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q3/radeon-x1950
- http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,200732
- http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/08/23/ati_releases_ra
- http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/375/
- http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/131
- http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/view.php?id=
- http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_x1
- http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/X1950XTXrevie
up to date list: http://www.madshrimps.be/forums/showthread.php?s=
Sure it was my fault for not doing more research on products before i bought but i mean as a consummer buying the newest of a certain line of card you shouldn't have to worry about it not being better then 2 lines back.
If you bought a dual core intel or amd you would not expect it to be out preformed by a a cpu with a core that was release 2 releases prior.
just my 2 cents.
Why is this considered front page news for Slashdot?
This will repeat in 3-6 months with NVIDIA and then back to ATI.
This isn't surprising or newsworthy at all. Hell we should just set up a recurring story that reverses the vendors.
It is good that there is some serious competition for the 2% of gamers that can afford the very top end. For the rest of us, it doesn't really matter what you pick unless you do care about vendor support for your OS.
This sig contains a manual self-destruct. Kindly please put your foot through your monitor in 8 seconds.
Yeah, if you're the FIRST ONE, that makes you the LEADER. And yet you typed this ALL BY YOURSELF.
Is there some kind of rule that says we can only use letters like X, N, R, and words like CrossFire, to denote 'cool' products mainly aimed at men?
Just once I'd like to see an ATI Shiny B001 LALA and FluffyPants Edition. Just to shake things up.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
HotHardware looks at other important aspects of the card, like image quality in addition to the benchmark numbers. Not all cards render the same IQ and don't forget about HDR with AA on at the same time, which can't be done in hardware currently for NVIDIA cards.
I mean, come one people. The whole point of benchmarks is to show how well the different cards perform with the same settings!!!! The numbers they post for all the cards have different configurations and settings that generated those results. Show me ALL the cards running the SAME EXACT settings and give me their results. Don't just arbitrarily show what you consider as "playable" speeds and then show the game settings used to produce those speeds. How in the world are these guys staying afloat when making horrendous reviews like this?
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
i'm serious, not trolling. is anyone on here any more than utterly ambivalent to the fact that there is yet another slight incremental advancement in the power of video cards?
i am interested to hear from anyone who is genuinely excited by this news. I'm also interested in hearing from someone who would pay £400 to increase their rendering power by 15%.
(yes i know that only applies to people who already have the current fastest video card, but i'd love to know if anyone is actually rich and bored enough to replace bleeding edge with bleeding edge at every opportunity)
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
'Radea'?
They are leading because they are first to market with a GPU that uses GDDR4 memory and from TFA the card has a memory bandwith of over 61 Gb/s which is over 10 Gb/s faster than an nvidia 7900 GTX.
Now if only the game content would match the eye candy, us gamers would be in heaven.
PGA
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
This has been HardOCPs' style for some time now, and they are doing pretty well if you weren't aware. Their main theory seems to be that they want to compare real world gameplay, not numbers based on settings that no gamer will ever use. There are tons of other sites that can provide you those numbers if that is what you're interested in.
Just play your games at 800x600 and they will all go as fast as you like.
On my laptop, ATi's drivers work fine, using the Ubuntu repositories. On this Compaq, with an ATi Xpress 200, anything which exits X (ie. switch to console, restart X or, God forbid, shut down the computer), crashes the machine. For about a year now, their drivers have been doing this on some configurations. Vesa drivers work, of course, and the 'ati' driver works, but not very well (only 640x480). But it is the closed source, binary only blob that crashes the machine.
If you are on Linux, avoid ATi, if possible. I'm not saying that you will experience this, just that you might and if you do, you are are screwed.
I could not agree more with this comment by Fallen. Though I totally understand the intent HOCP has in this methodology, it is inherently flawed. Agreed we don't want to see some arbitrary resoltion or AA setting chosen that the rest of the world doesn't care about but you always need identical or close to identical test conditions in order to provide a level test environment. Any other way is just poor science and test methodology. So the right way to do it is use common setting that the majority of readers care about. For example: 1280X1024 w/ AA on is a common setting for lots of folks with 19" LCDs but you're probably not going to run that way with a CrossFire X1950 setup, so crank things up to 1280X1024 with 8X or higher AA and mostly show 1600X1200 or higher for high-end dual-GPU setups anyway. But comparing how one card runs at 1600X1200 with 4X on versus how another runs at 1600X1200 with 2X is damn near useless.
1950? they're certainly not a leader in the naming-convention department.
I just built my own system, and got ATi Radeon card... Well, first of all, I tried downloading their updated Catalyst drivers, and it is 100 MB. WTF is that? This is not an operating system, it's a phreaking driver, for pete's sake!
Next... I noticed that text on my LG LCD monitor (20 in widescreen) was of really poor quality. I even installed ClearType from Microsoft, didn't help much. Started thinking it was my monitor, but then hooked it up to my laptop that has NVidia. Wow! WHat a difference! Even without ClearType, the text was so much better.
Ended up returning ATi card, and bought NVidia 7900. Couldn't be happier, and I am much delighted that their drivers are lighter, and their control panel is more intuitive, whereas ATi has some weird control panel user interface.
And did I mention 100 MB drivers?
Just how fast of a video card do we all need to play Warcraft anyway?
I think I'll hold off for the Radeon XX1999X XTXXQ Dual Core Deuce2Duo. Then we'll see some performance!
Seriously, do the Marketing people even look at the names they come up with??
Article Dugg for...oh wait...
Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.--Linus Torvalds
Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Currently using dual-head with a Radeon 7000 but still have to dualboot to Win for Classic Quake! Granted, for gaming, I can't go widescreen with either OS. What is your xorg.conf like and what fps do you get with current games? With Linux though I do get better refresh rates on these old CRT's, so there is something to say about ATI's dev team for n*x. Nice for desktop work though with the Span aka Big Desktop feature
If you're going to post a slashvertisement, could you at least please not post ones that are written so very much like marketing press releases?
You still need ATI and NVIDIA for gaming in Linux with 3D support.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Seriously, as much as I'd love to be able to afford a high-end graphics card, I'm more interested in finding the cheapest card which will support Oblivion reasonably. Any recommendations?
Nvidia started using the "XT" monkier (6800 XT) after ATI used it for years.
ATI started using the "GT" monkier (x800 GT, x1900 GT), and even extended the monkier to "GTO" after the incredible success of Nvidia's 6600 and 6800 GT.
They've been doing this sort of thing for years.
And while ATI looks like they ripped off the "950" name with the x1950 XTX, this one again cuts both ways:
ATI was the first to use "50" increments in their product naming. Witness the Radeon 9250 and 9550, which were released a few years back and still sell today. Later, they released the x850 series, and now they've released the x1650 and the x1950.
Since the release of the GeForce 4 series, all Nvidia product numbers have been divisible by 100. The GeForce 7950 GX2 is the first and only exception to this rule, and is obviously inspired by ATI's recent naming schemes.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
I get a little satisfaction each time I see these announcements because I know I'm locked in to a console that will stay the same for the next five years or so. But at the same time it's killing me that I can't go play FEAR because I know it will translate to a slide show on my computer. In gaming terms is the PS3 really that expensive in comaprisons to newly released video cards that are over $500? I understand it doesn't really offer a good analogy when you consider the targeted volume of sales for each tech. But, even two purchases of $250 video cards over four years puts you in that high dollar console market in my mind..or at least I could convince my wife of such a thing with stunning a PowerPoint!
Do you know how one of these companies could be a "leader"?
They could start by unifying features into a tight and manageable product set, and eliminate some degree of confusion about features and chipsets from the market.
-AND-
They could stop working on the "problem" of pushing more triangles, and work on the real problem with modern video cards: Power. Personally, I don't really need photorealistic graphic quality if it means I have to keep two power supplies in my system, or plug my video card directly into the wall.
Graphic quality is already impressively high, so maybe it's time to step back and improve the underlying technology and give the market time to absorb and upgrade. Like others, I still work on my ATI Radeon Pro 9800 with 256MB of RAM. I'm not upgrading anytime soon, because there are fewer and fewer AGP cards available, and I'm not willing to replace my entire otherwise completely functional system just to get a PCI-E slot. There are a lot of people like me, who are waiting, and I'm no Luddite. I like my gadgets. But keeping up with PC improvements has become a game of diminishing returns, since I run huge graphics and multimedia applications, plus most of the games on the market, very comfortably on my AMD64 3400+ processor with 1GB of RAM. I have yet to find a game I WANT to play that doesn't play quite nicely on my hardware.
--- I'm going sane in a crazy world.
All graphics cards seem to do one or two things really well, then fail at the rest. The only consistency I've noticed between brands is their crappy fans. If you look at it funny it will start making that familiar buzzing noise and will fail (obviously) not long after that. Until video cards develop either better fans or a cheap and reliable liquid cooling system, I shall hate all video cards and consider them a necessary evil.
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
They're keeping that fact quiet, though, as they dont't want to get sued by O'Reilly.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
Sorry ATI - no point listening to you.
I got out of the PC games rat-race years ago. Any game I buy from the PS2 will work on it. It may not be the bestest bling eva! But I don't have to frig around with drivers, directX or Windows. All I need is a nice open graphics card that can handle Xgl and has open driver for my PC and I'm happy. I'll probably go with built in Intel on my next PC. Sorry AMD but a couple of % on my CPU benchmarks don't matter on the machine I use for programing or surfing.
Come back when you're relevant to me.
I can tell you exactly what happens there, because I've put some time into diagnosing the exact same problem on my Acer AL2032W monitor. And it still pisses me off that the problem _still_ isn't fixed, in spite of being known for ages.
The problem starts like this: some cretin at ATI decided that, if it detects a DVI cable, it should automatically trust the highest resolution reported by the monitor, and, here's the idiotic part, never allow the user or the monitor drivers to override it. So if it reads 1600x1200 as the highest supported resolution, any other resolutions you choose will automatically be either scaled to 1600x1200 or centered in an 1600x1200 image. It has no choice that lets me say, basically, "fuck off and just send the image as it is to the monitor."
Why is that an idiotic idea? Well, here's why: because some monitors support resolutions higher than their native one. E.g., there are a ton of 1280x1024 monitors which report that they also support 1600x1200. Or the AL2032W has an 1680x1050 native resolution, but _also_ supports 1600x1200. They just then down-scale that to their native resolution.
So think of the following scenario: let's say your monitor is an 1280x1024, but affected by the abovementioned quirk. And you set your desktop resolution to 1280x1024. It should be crystal clear, right? Well, on an Nvidia card it would be, but for ATI it's wrong.
What ATI will do there is scale your 1280x1024 image to 1600x1200 first, before sending it to the monitor. Which makes it all fuzzy already. But then your monitor has received an image which doesn't fit its native resolution. So it will rescale this 1600x1200 image back to 1280x1024. This doesn't re-create the original crystal-clear image, but adds _more_ fuzziness to it.
Yes, I know what you mean by "really poor quality" there, and even that is mildly put. It's piss-poor quality. It was so fuzzy on my monitor that it gave me headaches in less than an hour.
And the really idiotic and annoying part is that it doesn't even allow you to override that. Once it's decided 1600x1200, that's it. Whoever designed it had the arrogance to decide that surely the user is too stupid to know such technical details, so let's not trust the user with the power to set something else. I find that not only utterly idiotic (since we just saw that it can guess wrong), but outright offensive.
Anyway, there are two solutions to this:
1. Download the Omega drivers. Strangely enough those are smart enough to read the native resolution, not the maximum supported one.
2. Use a VGA cable. On VGA it does allow you to set your maximum resolution and frequency yourself.
(This also goes in case someone wants to jump in with the usual "just set the resolution in the control centre" advice. Trust me, it doesn't work over a DVI cable. Over a VGA cable it works. Through DVI it doesn't.)
Personally I find both solutions pretty annoying. Number 1 involves installing some non-official non-supported driver. (And if you know about how drivers run in kernel mode in Windows, you'll understand what's scary about running non-official drivers just downloaded off some web site.) Number 2 basically involved throwing the whole "digital" part out the window, and using an LCD monitor as a glorified analog CRT with larger pixels.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
For the performance equal or better than a 7950GX2 for $100 cheaper, this actually seems like a reasonable card. Unfortunately, for reasons unclear to me, ATI cards cannot render a 3840x1024 ultra wide screen. I've got a Matrox Triplehead2Go on the way, so these kinds of high end solutions are enticing to me. But without the capability to properly display at this level, TH2G users are forced to all but disregard ATI GPUs.
The lack of decent linux support is just another nail in the coffin.
At the end of the day, the worth of the Radeon X1950 XTX comes down to this: Does the improved memory bandwidth you get from GDDR4 really make a difference if you don't change anything else about the card? Unfortunately, the answer is no. In most games, at high resolutions like 1600x1200 with 4x antialiasing and 8x anisotropic filtering applied, the speed goes up by a modest 5% to 8% over the Radeon X1900 XTX. If that's all you get from an almost 30% increase in memory bandwidth, color us unimpressed.
X1950 XTX review
Did anyone else get the idea that "anonymous reader" is a marketdroid at ATI?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Well, they should have used better controls, but this kind of thing isn't useless. I don't really give a shit about balls tot he wall FPS. I personally find that anything about about 60fps doesn't really look any more smooth to me, and yes I do have a monitor that supports higher refresh rates. From 30-60 is acceptable, but much below 30 starts to annoy me. So my question of hardware is: In the range of 30-60fps, what kind of quality can I get on a given game? Can I crank it to 1600x1200? Can I kick up FSAA? Can I turn on all the shiny options?
That's what's really relevant. I don't care if card X gets 200fps in 1024x768 mode and card Y gets 300fps. Both are way above my "give a shit" boundary. What I want to know is at what level to they start to drop to the point where I'll notice.
they don't work really , really fast!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I've got a dual Quadro NVS 440 setup.
In both Windows, and Linux, I can have 8 monitors. EIGHT MONITORS. In any configuration I want, fully 3d accelerated at 1600x1200 per screen.
I currently am using it for a 6144x768 sized desktop for an AV switching system demo.
There is nothing in the ATI camp that can do this save (possibly) the FireMV line. And do you know what chip they use in that internally? A 9200. A friggin 9200.
That only works in linux using the open source driver! Absolutely ridiculous.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Now, I do use open-source drivers for my video capture card, which I had to buy when my VFW-to-WDM driver wrapper for the ATI card stopped working, preventing me from capturing video anymore. That was annoying. . .
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
...I guess. I've flipped between ATI and Nvidia for years. Currently, I have an ATI part in my primary desktop at home. Plays COD2 pretty well. BUT, it's an older mobo with AGP...no PCI-E. So, if I want more "ohhh....pretty!" from Doom3, FarCry, HL2, etc., I'll be buying an Nvidia 7800GS AGP part. ATI has indeed had driver issues and I've experienced them with the Radeon 9800 Pro I've got now. OTOH, my older Athlon machine is STILL running an old Nvidia Ti4200 and loving it. So, unless ATI offers up some love for those of us who have decent hardware but no PCI-E slots, I'm giving my money to Nvidia for XMAS!
I am my own gestalt.
About half of our credit unions run on servers with about the same amount of RAM and half the clock speed of this card.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Disclaimer: I use Nvidia and have since the TNT2 was out. I'm not a fanboy though.
I have never held a grudge against ATI but these driver issues have been a problem for them for a VERY long time. I remember buying my first TNT2 card and back then, the competing product from ATI (can't remember what it was) was riddled with driver problems. So I avoided ATI like the plague and went with Nvidia. Wash, rinse and repeat for each iteration of cards...
It's very interesting to me that here we are - 10 years later - and the EXACT same issues keep cropping up with ATI drivers.
Save yourself some time and hassel and just buy Nvidia. In my 10 years of using their cards, I have had very few problems. I am not shilling or anything -- I am just astounded that ATI's poor QA is still an issue. You'd think they would have acted by now.
And please -- I am open to refutation. Please post if I am incorrect but judging from the thread here and elsewhere, I am not.
Oh goody!
Now I can play Duke Nukem at 120 frames per second despite the fact that human eyes aren't capable of seeing that much data.
Given the fact that we seem to be reaching laws of diminishing returns on video cards, shouldn't the hardware manufacturers instead start to concentrate on the weakest link by improving the capabilities of the human?
I need eyes than can handle more fps. I need more bandwidth from my eyes to my brain. I definitely need more processing power in my brain.
I won't mention one of my other peripherals that really needs upgrading....
They are floating on free graphic cards.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Then, if you're not reading [H]ardOCP reviews, you should be. What you're describing is exactly the tack they take in their evaluations, trying to look at performance under conditions gamers care about instead of seeing how high they can jack the frame rate at low resolutions. Even when comparing two cards, they don't force a card into conditions that make a game unplayable just to make the tests match, and instead simply tell you what settings didn't make it into the test (i.e., turning down grass detail in Oblivion, lowering the AA level for a card, etc.).
"ATI has released the world's first consumer 3D graphics card with GDDR4 memory clocked at the highest ever stock speed"
I think the sentance should end after "memory", maybe putting "and it's" between "memory" and "clocked". They seem to have badly merged "first graphics card with gddr4" and "graphics card with the highest ever stock speed" into one sentance, and now it sounds like it's the first to have the highest-ever-speed GDDR4, implying that there have been cards with GDDR4 in the past, which AFAIK there haven't. Too be honest, 1000MHz isn't any faster than the older "GDDR3" memory anyway, so what's the difference?
I wish people would write clearly.
Oh, don't feel bad. My old GeForce FX died recently and I attempted to use an ATI card under Windows XP X64 and was greeted with a complete inability to run anything that utilized OpenGL. It's not just Linux that ATI writes crappy drivers for.
;)
Of course, nVidia's no better - their latest release has reintroduced a nasty little bug where you'll lose video (IE, monitor goes dead) randomly.
I see a whole bunch of people whining about lack of Linux drivers. Is ATI worried about losing money from such a small merket segment? Obviously not. Face facts: graphics card manufacturers are never going to give you the level of support for Linux you want until Linux has a *much* bigger share of the market. They are busy enough churning out new hardware every six months; hell, they can't even write good drivers for Windows at the current pace, let alone Linux. You're bright, talented, resourceful guys/gals right? Instead of whining on Slashdot about closed-source drivers for a proprietary GPU architecture, why don't you design, manufacture, and sell "open" GPUs, CPUs, and systems? With complete documentation? So that I can write drivers that will let me take advantage of *all* the features the hardware has to offer? Bonus points if I don't have to sign abusive NDA's or fork over huge sums of money on licenses/royalties for access to the docs. Open-source software is neat and all, but if I don't have complete documentation of every bit of circuitry/firmware/embedded software, etc. in the system, then running an open-source OS just means I won't be able to use all the features of the hardware that I paid for. The software can only be as free (as in speech) as the hardware it runs on.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Ancient video cards (from four years ago) could run Windows beautifully at 1600x1200@85. Even with their 180nm technology, their passive heatsinks barely got warm from it. Now that the circuit density has quadrupled, I would think modern cards could do the same task with even less power consumption, right? Well, obviously not.
So my question is: Are the engineers at ATI just so rude and lazy as to not design a mechanism that turns off all but the necessary parts of the GPU and graphics memory? I'd love to calculate how much coal got burned from people's graphics cards needlessly sucking up power. Really, I'm angry about this! Is it really that hard to design a GPU so that when it's in 2D windows, only the parts necessary for rendering (one 32Meg memory chip and a tiny section of the GPU) get power? Seriously, to have to listen to a GPU fan while writing on Slashdot should be seen by all technically-minded people as a fucking insult.
It's been a long time since a bunch of Canadians made me this mad! But maybe I'm missing something subtle, in which case I'm sure slashtotters will straighten me out.
The last radeon card I had, the fan failed and had to be used with a house fan on it, until it finally died...The same thing is now happeneing to my newer one, in which the fan is still spinning, I have a house fan propped inside the open case set on high when I play a game...Does anyone else have these issues with ATI? I'd love to support them but i simply cant deal w/ that BS any more...I'm gonna give someone else a shot as soon as this one burns out.
HardOCP benchmarks user experience more than raw data. In hardware benchmarks the constant is the PC platform. In HardOCP benchmarks the constant is framerate. If you don't care about how many frames per second you get in Quake 3 at 800x600 you should at least consider HardOCP as a supporting resource.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=sentence
Intel bought up Real3D years ago after fielding the i740 in 1998. They then proceeded to sit on the technology while every other graphics maker developed more impressive improvements and optimizations with each generation.
During this time, Intel has sat on their hands. For example, even though the GMA 900/950 had impressive specs, it was plagued by bad performance decisions (intended to cut costs). The chipset contained 4 hardware pixel shaders, but vertext shaders and T&L were done in hardware. Additionally, Intel declined to offer OpenGL support, instead performing OpenGL acceleration through a Direct3D wrapper (like Windows Vista plans to do).
You must also not forget that, while Intel sat on their laurels, video card manufacturers came up with all soorts of hardware and software optimizations to stay on-top. It was the lack of such optimizations that ultimately killed 'big release' cards like the Savage 2000 and the Matrox Parhelia, both cards with beefy hardware specs. Rewaly, how can you expect anything less from Intel?
While X3000 on G865 looks impressive on-paper, the reality is it performs worse than the GMA 950. How can anyone respect a hardware chipset that performs WORSE than a software solution with half the pipes? While it is true that we won't see the TOP performance of X3000 until DirectX 10 is released, it is pretty telling that in fixed mode the device can't even pull off a win over the GMA 950.
* Do keep im mind that both the ATI and Nvidia's current embedded solutions kick the crap out of GMA 950, and they do so with only two pipelines!
The reality is that Intel sucks at graphics, and they always have. The i740 would have been a mediocre seller, had not Intel sold the chipset for nothing (you could pick up 8MB i740 video boards for 40 bucks back in summer 1998). I wasn't honestly expecting the world, but this is really disappointing.
For the near-term, Intel may improve performance with the G865 once DirectX 10 is released, but I'm not holding my breath. Over the long term, well, that's up to Intel. I hear they recently picked up some old 3dlabs engineers who jumped ship from Creative Labs. So long as Intel doesn't squander them like they did with Real3D, they'll have a future in performance graphics, but that's 3 years down the road at the very least.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
but vertext shaders and T&L were done in software.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
It has took a long time, but the Folding@home will soon have a GPU port:
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-ATI.html
For the time being it will be for ATI 1900 and upward series only.
Btw: Also, there will be a PS3 Folding@home client:
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-PS3.html
FINALLY... I get to add some more filters to my Adblock plugin. Jesus.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
More to reverse-engineer.
Staring at a white background [on a computer screen] while you read is like staring at a light bulb — Maddox
Only a problem if you want to use HDTV/Blueray/HD-DVD.
I think Hollywood can keep its crap, especially considering the hardware costs as they are now. While my next monitor might have a resolution that is HDTV compatible, I don't see myself paying $500 for a Blueray or HD-DVD drive.
C - the footgun of programming languages