ATi Radeon 8500

punkmac writes: "The new ATi Radeon 2 8500 is finally here, with previews at Anandtech and Tom's Hardware. Could ATi finally have the killer card that we've all been hoping for? With promises of a 33% speed increase from the GeForce 3, they might." Gamespot has a piece too, all published simultaneously. I love it when a hardware company decides to lift their embargo and all the "independent" reviewers dutifully follow the herd. Compare the three articles and see if you can determine which images/text came directly from the press kit.

Re:So do they have Linux drivers?

[Pahroza]

According to the FAQ [ati.com] for the FireGL 8800, they list the following operating systems to be supported:

NT 4.0 , W2K, Windows XP, Linux 32, Windows XP 64

Re:Status of Linux Drivers?

[mimbleton]

I have Radeon 64 running on VIA KT - something board with Athlon 1.1 Gz ..
No problems with Windows ( running beta "optimized" drivers")
and no problems with Linux ( running AcceleratedX 6.0 - extrememly fast )
Maybe I am just lucky.

Drivers and ATI.

[malkavian]

Something that seems to be concensus opinion across the sites is that the card was previewed too early.
Like most pre-releases, it's nowhere near it's potential, and, if all it as in the past, ATI will have problems getting the most out of the hardware due to this.
Is it just me, or does it seem like they could get a boost by releasing all the specs and driver details to the open source world?
For starters, this would make for great driver porting and supporting, and as a side, could help ATI come up with better performance as patches and improvements are fed back to them.

Malk

Matrox is Catching Up In The Driver Idiocy Wars

[tomblackwell]

I agree with your ATI driver problems. That's why I ditched my TV Wonder and went to a Matrox TV Tuner with on-board hardware MJPEG compression. Unfortunately, a week later, Matrox announced that they couldn't figure out how to write a driver for it under Win2k, and that they were abandoning driver development for it under all platforms.

This was after months of promising that bug fixes would be addressed in the new version. The bug fix that I needed was for the tuner to bring in any channel other than Channel 6.

Needless to say, there is a strongly miffed group of Matrox owners who shelled out 2 or 3 hundred bucks for a sophisticated video capture and compression card, and ended up (due to driver hell) with a TV tuner card equivalent to one that sells for about $30.

Stay away from Matrox.

Re:Status of Linux Drivers?

[dinivin]

The Linux drivers (2D & 3D) for the Rage 128 and Radeon are, IMHO, exceptional. Benchmarks with the Rage 128 cards have even given higher framerates under Linux than windows.

ATI is good about releasing their specs to the XFree86 development team. Though the DRI developers have the specs to implement the TCL features of the Radeon, ATI won't pay for them to work on it, unfortunately.

There are, however, known issues with using a Radeon on certain VIA motherboards with AMD chips. In many cases, this will cause a complete lockup of your machine... VIA seems to be unwilling to pay the DRI developers to fix this problem, but has hinted that they'll be fixing it themselves.

Dinivin