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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.'"
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.
Why don't you rig all of them up in one massive SLI configuration? Pointless, no doubt, but cool...
Recently, I got a laptop with ATI video. The 8.25 drivers worked perfectly, but all the drivers since have died with:
fglrx(0) PreInitDAL failed
fglrx(0) R200PreInit failed
The total failure of ATI quality control to regression test even on recent cards like in my laptop is astounding. I'll never make the mistake of buying ATI products again.
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.
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.
The grass isn't quite so green on the Nvidia side of the fence either. I might not be doing you a favour by telling you this, but Nvidia cards have issues with anisotropic filtering. At a certain distance on slanted planes (like the ground) textures kind of "shimmer" if your perspective moves. ATI has far superior AF that looks sharper for a farther distance, and doesn't shimmer while moving. Most people don't notice this until I tell them. :)
p.s., I don't suppose you use a KVM switch, do you? My friend uses one with a VGA to DVI coupler and he noticed that ghosting around text as well (he has a new widescreen LCD and an ATI X850XL Deluxe or something). He removed the KVM and plugged the DVI right into the video card and everything suddenly looked great!