Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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
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.
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
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?
I can finally play Wolf3d on 200x AA. Took long enough...
- 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=
because not everyone has Linux
My motto: if it doesn't have Linux, it should!
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.