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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.'"
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.
Here's HEXUS's review.
Loads more reviews out there too. Anyone feel like making a list?
- 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=
They model numbers. The requirement is that they be different between different cards, so customers can see that different products are different. Beyond that, marketting can do whatever they want with them - it doesn't really matter.
Suprisingly, the marketting departments at ATI and Nvidia have settled on a highly structured and informative system for model numbers (for something generated by marketting departments).
Here's how it works: Take the "X1950 XTX". That splits into 4 segments: "X1" is the generation, "9" is the class, "50" is the revision, and "XTX" is the specific model. Nvidia uses exactly the same system. For the 7950 GX2, we have generation 7, class 9, specific model GX2.
Generation usually changes yearly. Class splits into (generally): 0-3 is low-end, 5-7 is mid-range, and 8-9 is high end. The revision number allows more recent products to have higher numbers than older products. Generally for ATI "Pro" Now - that still doesn't let you determine which card is "better" based on the model number, but model numbers never do that. Which is better, An "AMD Opteron 165" or an "AMD Athlon64 FX-50"?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Well, Nvidia might not release their drivers as Free Software, but at least their drivers, unlike ati's, work.
and had never heard of "Unichrome" -- that has got to be the most uniniviting name for a GPU ever.
They're very low-end, (used in cheap laptops, via's embedded line, etc) so if your a windows-gamer-fanboy, you're not going to have heard of them. (and if you judge a card by its name, you have bigger problems than that).
Anyway, if you have political issues with Nvidia that's one thing, but otherwise they've run fine under Linux for years.
No they don't. They run better than ATI's offering. There's a number of things that don't work correctly. (TwinView doesn't support multiple monitors with different resolutions, framebuffer/x switching support is poor, you can't report (linux) bugs to the kernel team, you're allowing an unaudited binary blob to run in kernelland, I can go on and on).
If Nvidia & ATI were the only choices, then fine, I'd reccommend Nvidia's buggy binary blob over ATIs buggier binary blob. But they're not. Two companies have offered the specs & a reference GPLd driver - I reccommend them and I think other supporters of FOSS should do likewise.
Saying a reccommendation of a driver that actually supports linux over one that doesn't is 'political' is.... well - let's say I suspect you have a political agenda of your own.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
ATI's Linux Driver Page.
They just released their 8.28.8 drivers a couple of days ago, and they had just released the previous version about 3 weeks before that. So, there are some changes being made at least. Also, with the AMD merge, they are considering opening up the source code to at least portions of the driver, so I personally expect ATI to become a serious player in Linux space in the not-too-distant future.
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?
Having source makes the device useful for something _other_ than Linux. Like NetBSD.
ATI have historically been easier to work with than Nvidia in this regard. One can get source for some ATI products. And they are willing to work under NDA. I've even produced a radeonfb for NetBSD using information that was under NDA (and had never been released outside ATI before), and ATI let me release the drivers back to the community under a BSD license.
Compared this to Nvidia, where you can't even get docs under NDA.
Nearly all the information needed to produce good 2D accelerated radeon drivers (including multiple monitor/desktop support, etc.) is out there. I should know -- I'VE DONE IT!
What isn't there is any information relevant to 3D acceleration. ATI is being very, very tightlipped about their 3D features. In the past docs were available under NDA, but I'm not sure this is even true anymore.
Even so, there are some 3D OpenGL support for radeon in OSS, you just have to hunt around for it.
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.
Both statements are wrong, though the correct answer will not change anything in the Nvidia vs. ATI naming race:
Nvidia 5900XT and 5600XT are approx. ½ year older than Nvidia 6800XT.
Nvidia 5950 is approx. 2½ year older than Nvidia 7950.
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