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ATI Radeon Released 171

Posted by emmett from the swimmy-swimmy-like-a-boy-chased-by-sharky-sharky dept.
Dwayne Mulford writes: "ATI has released their new RADEON with 64MB of DDR memory. It's clocked at 183MHz and really gives the NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS a run for its money. ATI has their product info here and Sharky Extreme did a review of it here."
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ATI Radeon Released More

ATI Radeon Released

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  • Sounds like it's made of some radioactive element, like Radon. I'm sure the gamma rays are traveling at the 183MHz range quite easily...

    Boy, and I thought my SPARC ELC had some nasty EMI.
  • Here's the (driver) scoop:

    Currently, ATI is in a "we provide the specs, you write the drivers" mode. What this means is that we have to write any drivers we want for this card above and beyond the Windows drivers. Same goes for BeOS support - if we want it, Be, Inc. needs to write it on their own, because ATI ain't helping anyone with drivers.

    Kudos to them for providing specs, but shouldn't you at least be helping to write XFree drivers?

  • Tom's Hardware review (Score:4)

    by _J_ ( 30559 ) <jasonlives AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @09:16AM (#924041) Journal
    Here's what Tom [tomshardware.com] had to say...

    J:)
  • The current Rage 128 Pro boards that apple uses are very slow. With luck, Apple will announce new, radeon enhanced models tomorrow at MWNY.

    http://www.iateeism.com [iateeism.com] --It's more than just a religion.
  • "The RADEONTM CHARISMA ENGINETM supports full transformation, clipping and lighting (T&L) at 30 million/second processing capability for a 10 fold improvement in 3D details"

    30 million what? 30 millions points/second, or 30 million triangles a second?

    I am impressed with the range on 2D and 3D at the same time. What it really needs to identify is if it is OpenGL 1.1 compliant, though? (ie can the pixels scale so you can walk into particle effects like smoke and fire without it looking like crap)

    kick some CAD [cadfu.com]
  • Agreed. I would be *extremely* happy to see Apple upgrade the video card performance.

    I'm also happy about this news just cuz I cheer for ATI (a Canadian company IIRC, hence my loyalty).

    Woo, this is as close to first post as I've come yet...

  • Re:Here's the (driver) scoop: (Score:5)

    by Jinker ( 133372 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @09:21AM (#924045) Homepage
    "shouldn't you at least be helping to write XFree drivers?"

    Hey, if they want to shoot themselves in the foot, they're allowed.

    On the other hand, one wonders exactly how many of these cards they would actually sell simply due to a full suite of Linux drivers.

    Just how big is the hardcore gamer/linuxgeek crossover? Obviously they're the most VOCAL ones on the internet, and so it seems like there's bunches of them. But I'd be willing to bet that a WAY disproportionate amount of them have web pages and are active on discussion boards etc.

    The high end gaming card market is being driven by people running Windows. If ATI loses all of their potential Linux clients, how many would that add up to? Hundreds? Let's be honest here.

    Writing and supporting a driver well is not all that cheap for them. Publishing the specs is.

    I'd rather have a well written community based driver than a poorly written ATI one.

    Greg

  • So I guess if it's radon then my computer really will cause cancer. Oh well, I'm not giving up SlashDot for anything, even my health.
    Kate

  • ah yeah ? Where do you get the register level docs ?
  • So whats a charisma engine? And intergrated TLC? And Pixel Tapestrectomy? And why do we need dotproduction?

  • ATI Goes Performance? (Score:3)

    by photon317 ( 208409 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @09:25AM (#924049)
    Seems to me with this card ATI is finally starting to cater to the "I need high performance graphics at any price NOW" crowd that 3Dfx and then NVidia have dominated in the past... as opposed to their (ATI's) earlier catering to the large volume OEM market for an affordable card that supported the right buzzwords, but which no serious gamer would want.

    With ATI's financial resources, they could possibly change the high-end 3d graphics landscape if they continue moving in this direction over the next generation or two of cards.

  • I think you missed the key word: helping. ATI is unwilling to provide any assistance from their engineers in terms of testing, writing snippets of code, etc. No help whatsoever, which to me sounds like we're going to end up getting a poorly written community driver.
  • I've been using the ATI PCI All-in-wonder series card for sometime now. It's not perfect, and I don't think it's supported in Linux but if you're going to use all of it's features it sure is a great card. My version is lacking in the 3d arena. I used to have a Voodoo2 backing it up but the voodoo2 just wasn't quick enough.

    I finally replaced it with an AGP GeForce but I'd really like to see if I can get them both working together. Has anyone tried this combo?
  • Why? Because, if I remember correctly, the drivers are the same used in the GeForce (please correct me if I'm wrong). That alone will make for a better product in the long run. The more well-tested your drivers are, the better off you are. I've never had any luck with ATI cards. Last time I tested one out, Quake(1) wouldn't even show the textures properly. Oh well - and I've heard such good things too...

    Adam

    ChainSaw Linux [chainsawlinux.com]


  • I was under the impression, from reading the dri-devel mailing list, that Precision Insight is under contract to write 2D/3D X Windows drivers for the card (although I could be wrong).

    Adam

  • here's [anandtech.com] the anandtech review of the board
    Goes into quite alot of detail.

    metalgeek
  • Here's your info:

    Graphics controller: Radeon GPU
    RAMDAC: 350MHz
    1.1GTexel/s - 366MPixel/s Theoretical Fill Rate
    30 Million triangles/s
    64MB DDR SDRAM
    Optional VIVO
    Optional DVI

  • ATI releases the Radeon just before MacWorld New York. Could it be because the Radeon will be used in the new G4 systems announced tomorrow?

  • Something to remember about video cards... (Score:5)

    by mwalker ( 66677 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @09:30AM (#924057) Homepage
    Something to remember about video cards...

    640k should be enough for anybody!

    oh, wait...

    GRAPHICS CARDS WITH 64 MEGABYTES OF RAM AND COOLING FANS.

    try to sell THAT to someone 10 years ago. -i- wouldn't have believed it.
  • I wonder why he keeps mentionning that it's a Canadian company.

  • My life is complete. (Score:5)

    by 11223 ( 201561 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @09:33AM (#924059)
    On a side note, the Radeon is the only card on the market to support a hardware alpha cursor (the arrow with a shadow) in Windows 2000.

    My life is complete. It's the feature I've always wanted!

  • Apple is going to use them. ATI let the cat out of the bag. Apple hasn't mentioned this yet but it looks like this is going in the high end G4.

  • You combine it with (Score:4)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @09:35AM (#924061) Homepage
    SGI's Reality Engine, Sony's Emotion Engine, throw in a printer personality cart and you have a really intelligent bot w/ feelings that's a pleasure to have around.

  • Re:Here's the (driver) scoop: (Score:3)

    by FascDot Killed My Pr ( 24021 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @09:36AM (#924062)
    "But I'd be willing to bet that a WAY disproportionate amount of them have web pages and are active on discussion boards etc."

    Which is exactly why they should be catered to. Not all customers are equal, think of reviewers. Each positive review is more than just a happy customer--it is hundreds, thousands even MILLIONS of potential customers. Each of those "hardcore gamers" in a newsgroup/website is a reviewer. Make them happy and the world will beat a path to your door. Make them angry....
    --

  • Fear ovecomes me. (Score:3)

    by doogles ( 103478 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @09:37AM (#924063)
    When my video card has as much memory as my computer, you know it's time to be worried.
  • It's quite obvious. A charisma engine is any large marketing department, anywhere. Integrated TLC means it comes with a free CD or R&B music. Pixel Tapestrectomy is a type of surgery. And dotproduction is the latest byproduct of the e-wave of @ttaching "dot" to dotanything. Dot's @all, e-folks!

  • I Truly Am Amazed By It... (Score:4)

    by Sir_Winston ( 107378 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @09:39AM (#924065)
    This is the first time that ATI has been on par with performance leaders since...well...probably since before 3D performance was being stressed much at all. I myself have an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 which I'm fond of, but I have reservations about this new chip.

    First of all, ATI's track record for supporting non-Intel chipsets is pretty sketchy at best, abysmal at worst. Currently the Athlon chipsets out now are well provided for in ATI's drivers, but when you consider that new Athlon chipsets are going to be coming out within the next six months which feature many new advancements and changes, from DDR SDRAM to SMP and more subtle changes, I can't say that I'd buy one with performance in mind unless I'd definitely be running an older Athlon mobo or an Intel setup. These ATI boards will definitely be great for their multimedia features, and the All-in-Wonder version especially promises to be interesting, but I doubt performance will be up to snuff on the VIA and ALi next-gen Athlon chipsets because they poorly supported the VIA MVP3 and similar Socket 7 chipsets and to this day their own webpages tout only Intel processors; last time I was there, not a single benchmark was done on an Athlon, and they "recommended" Intel processor boards. With the new Willamette chipsets coming out, it's likely that ATI will make compatability with those their first priority, and compatibility with next-gen Athlon mobos an afterthought. ATI has also had many odd driver issues, like the Fury MAXX not supporting Windows 2000. Just remember that this might not perform well if you upgrade your Athlon mobo...
  • This message [geocrawler.com] pretty much sums it up, I think.
  • You'd think it'd be worth their time to write Linux drivers, just to be buzzword compliant. I wouldn't imagine it'd be too hard for them to write a driver for their own product...

    An advantage in their favour is that they could write a functional but slow driver then let the community optimize it... they're not trying to hide the register level details so they have no reason to not open-source the code.

    Just a basic, feature complete, unoptimized driver would allow them to claim full Linux support and would be the basis for better community drivers later on. It'd cost them one programmer, for maybe two weeks or so, a drop in the bucket.

    There may not be many Linux gamers, compared to Windows gamers, but they're a louder more vocal crowd, and are likely to turn a bunch of people onto a product if they like it.

    For me, even though I use Windows 85% of the time, Linux drivers are a major concern. I'd hate to buy a $250 graphics card and find out it only works in VESA mode in Linux and BeOS. Besides, the better the Linux drivers, imho, the better the Windows drivers, simply because it's a company to whom drivers are a concern.

    btw 11223: I completely agree with the moderation comment. Any moderator browsing at more than 0 is missing out on any AC posts, and the whole point of moderation is to bring the good messages up from the bottom, not to raise mediocre posts that started at karma 2 even higher.

    Any moderator who doesn't moderate as you suggest is abusing the system and wasting their points on already moderated articles.
  • there is a news.com article right now talking about just that.

    click/a> [cnet.com]

    --
    blue

  • All these numbers and features are great, but who actually has the cash to buy one of these new generation boards?

    I just upgraded to a TNT card in my Dual p2 400 machine about 6 months ago, and put my old ATI 8mb Rage in my Linux box. Just curious, who actually intends on buying or has bought a new-gen card?

    Evan

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I'll moderate however I damn well please, smartypants.

    love,
    br4dh4x0r

  • Yes, Apple is using the Radeon cards (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    InsideMacGames broke the story yesterday. Of course now Jobs will probably *not* use them, just cause his surprise was spoiled. ;) They also have a story on the FSAA on the Radeon, which was 3dfx's biggest feature for the Voodoo5. Should be a fun MacWorld...

    Link to ATI Surprise Announcement [insidemacgames.com]
    Link to FSAA Story [insidemacgames.com]

  • Yet another review is available from gamesdepot [gamersdepot.com]. You can find it here [gamersdepot.com].

  • I wonder if that's rearing its ugly head again? I think that could be the reason for those performance drops on the GForce cards.
    For those of you who don't know, it seems like the Windoze drivers for nVidia drop off performance at 1280x1024, while the Linux ones do not. Most of the benchmarks show it very well.

  • My Rage 128 has drivers for X-Windows, written by Precision Insight under contract with ATI. The drivers are quite stable and even have decent 3D support.

    Ranessin
  • This is the first time that ATI has been on par with performance leaders since

    I hear that the new Voodoos support full-screen hardware anti-aliasing. Given that, then it doesn't matter if ATI/RIVA are ahead triangle/sec or pixel/sec wise, since good anti-aliasing gives a much better looking picture, even at lower resolutions. I mean, anti-aliased 1024/786 @ 60FPS. Who needs more?

    The Tom's hardware review makes a reference to the anti-aliasing setting in the driver options, but doesn't appear to say if the card does it in hardware or not. Anybody know for sure one way or the other?

  • .
    First of all, ATI's track record for supporting non-Intel chipsets is pretty sketchy at best, abysmal at worst.

    I may be wrong, but don't Apple Macs, the Dreamcast, and many embedded products use ATI?

    --
    Evan

  • Re:Here's the (driver) scoop: (Score:4)

    by ranessin ( 205172 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @09:56AM (#924078)

    Again, Gareth Hughes, from Precision Insight, has already begun work on the Radeon drivers. PI is under contract from ATI to write those drivers. It doesn't sound like they aren't getting any help and it *certainly* doesn't sound like we'll be stuck with a poorly written community driver.

    Ranessin

  • My life is complete. It's the feature I've always wanted!

    Not yet, there is still the fact that it will take approximately 6 months for them to get the product to market, and 6 months to get working drivers. And once they get the working drivers all bets are off in case you have a hardware failure as there is a two+ week waiting period on support (Phone, email, ...). Oh yeah, and once you get support they just tell you to read non-existant information on their site.

    Sorry I got a ATI Rage Fury MAXX and I'm rather pissed that the card works in Win 9x/NT and Linux/*BSD with XFree86 3.3.6+ but doesn't work under Windows 2000 because they cannot get windows to activate the second chip? WTF?


    --
  • Interesting. I'd always thought that was mainly fill rate limitations. Where are these benchmarks?
  • Back when the mach64 was a new chip ATI owned the 2D performance segment of the market. Imagine my surprise, then, to open up a computer like 7 years after I bought my first mach64-equipped card (which was top of the line, at the time), and find a graphics card powered by ... another mach64. ATI built this baby into everything right on up through the 3D Rage II+ AFAIK. You are right, though, their 3D chipsets have historically been met with a collective yawn (Rage Fury MAXX, anyone?). Interestingly only Nvidia was able to pull itself out of the "home user" 3D thicket and become a tier-1 manufacturer along with 3DFx (spelled the _old_ way) :)

    --
  • While we're sort of on this subject, could anyone suggest a good video card for Linux use?

    I have a Compaq Pentium III/700 system whose video performance lags under Linux as compared to Windows. It's blazingly, even awesomely, fast under Windows but doesn't seem to be performing up to potential under Linux/Mandrake/Enlightenment.

    The video setup that came with it is an Intel I810 or 815 chipset. My suspicion is that the driver wasn't that well optimized for Linux.

    All I really want is screaming fast 1280x1024 @ 32 bit colour. I'm not fond of shooting up stuff, so I don't need awesome 3D performance or anything, just the ultimate possible regular graphics.

    I don't use Windows at all on the machine, but would like to be able to use BeOS. I may eventually use the machine for video editing (MiniDV/FireWire) under BeOS or Linux, so anything that would make that work better would be good.

    Any recommendations?

    Many thanks.

    D

    ----
  • I didn't know they made memory in the former East Germany! [t-online.de]

    sulli

  • When I initally got my all-in-wonder Pro, I raved about it. I knew it wasn't the fastest 3d card around, but I don't game a LOT. I loved all the multimedia stuff. BUT, ATI has really let me down with their Win2K support. They STILL don't have a driver that supports all the stuff. I have an old beta driver for the all-in-wonder 128 that at least lets me watch TV. I'm really peeved. I mean, this OS came out WAY back. SUPPORT IT already. I despise booting up into 98 just to watch a DVD. Actually, I despise booting into 98 period. 98 is to 2K as my Atari ST was to my first Mac.
    ---

  • $$ Cost to much!! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think that these graphic chip companys like nvidia, 3dfx, etc. should concentrate more on the value/performence of their cards instead of just brute force at any cost. Maybe its just me, but I really don't think many people can afford these $300 cards every 6 months. I remember when I bought my Riva TNT and thought that $130 was stretching the limits. Anyways, just my $0.02.
  • Not yet, there is still the fact that it will take approximately 6 months for them to get the product to market

    Ummmm - not quite - they are shipping today - that's what they're announcing - many online sellers have had them in their catalogs since last week ....

  • Well, it's not as general or widespread as I made it sound, but, if you search for 'benchmark' on LinuxGames, and pick the first one (Evil-something-or-other) you can see it occuring at the high quality 32 bit setting, which is shown on the very last graph in the whole article.

  • Re:ATI Goes Performance? (Score:3)

    by barleyguy ( 64202 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @10:05AM (#924088)
    Actually, both the Rage II and Rage 128 were intended to have leading edge performance, but each of them came out six months or so later than they planned, which put them in the "slightly below average" category.

    One good thing about ATI - their business performance and 2D quality have always been very good. For Desktop Publishing applications, audio recording apps, and similar uses, I've always recommended ATI. Well, that or Matrox. (Also Canadian, which Tom would find very relavent)

    Another point - this card seems to scale well to higher resolutions and bit levels. Because of that, I'd say it is a better card than the GeForce 2. Who needs 120 frames a second at low resolution, when your monitor only works well at about 85 frames anyway? If you can do 85 frames per second, and do it at any resolution and bit level you choose, I think that should be the goal of a fast video card.
  • Read Tom's take on it here:
    http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/00q3/000717/ index.html

    He seems to think that this is not a brute force solution. Of course the development of a more elegant solution would cost more than just chucking another 16 megs on a card.

    Let's see where this card takes us, and don't worry, the way things are going it'll be cheap enough soon. (ATI has a really cool video card trade in program by the way. Check out their website for details.)
  • That's not true. There are plenty of good drivers for X, and the reason there haven't been great drivers is that ATI was never taken seriously before. There cards are the cheap alternative, but it appears that they will be getting much more interest in the months to come when this card hits the market.

    ATI has also released the specs and it should not be hard to build a nice, stable driver. With Apple bringing BSD to their OS, I'm sure an easy port of the ATI drivers won't be all that hard after the beta of OS X is released.

  • Re:My life is complete. (Score:3)

    by barleyguy ( 64202 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @10:13AM (#924091)
    Not yet, there is still the fact that it will take approximately 6 months for them to get the product to market, and 6 months to get working drivers.

    This particular card is the exception to that rule. The card is shipping, and from the reviews I've read, the drivers seem pretty good.

    Sorry I got a ATI Rage Fury MAXX and I'm rather pissed that the card works in Win 9x/NT and Linux/*BSD with XFree86 3.3.6+ but doesn't work under Windows 2000 because they cannot get windows to activate the second chip? WTF?

    As far as I know, NO manufacturer has gotten mutiple graphics chips to work under Windows 2000. The Voodoo 5 might work by now.

    It has something to do with the driver architecture of Windows 2000. So you should be bitching at Microsoft, not ATI. Anyway, bitching at Microsoft might gain you Slashdot karma points.

  • The problem with ATI. (Score:3)

    by Matt2000 ( 29624 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @10:13AM (#924092) Homepage
    No matter what the performance results of new ATI products, you can pretty much guarantee that it will be at least 2 driver releases after the actual release of the card when you will be able to play any games with stability, and you will also be pretty much guaranteed that the card will NEVER get it's drivers to the state where everything works satisfactorily.

    ATI has burned me too many times by abandoning my card before the drivers get mature enough to be stable and consequently I won't be buying any of their stuff again.

    Hotnutz.com [hotnutz.com] - Funny

  • Re:Linux video card recommendations? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Matrox G400 (dual head/tv out ad lib)
  • Soon we'll get the Cyrix Angst Engine and the 3DFx Delusion Engine and we can get Marvin the Paranoid Android working swell.

  • Yes. Two new Power Mac systems will be introduced, one will use the Rage 128 Pro chipset (as currently featured in Power Mac G4s); the other will use the Radeon. Additionally, an iMac utilizing the Rage 4XL chipset (dunno what this is) will be announced. The press info is here:

    http://www.businesswire.com/webbox/bw.071700/20199 0394.htm [businesswire.com]

  • The only problem with Tom's hardware review, is that their server implements referrer filtering.

    Basically, if you're like me, and use a proxy [waldherr.org] which blanks the referrer, you get that hammer image for every gif, and get the front page of every story. Not fun.
    ---
  • I have a AIW-128 card and I'm more than satisfied with the performance I get in OpenGL and D3D games, plus I can watch TV with it.

    My next card will likely be an AIW-Radeon if ATI can get the driver situation normalized. Their Win98 drivers left a lot to be desired.

  • Try XFree86 4.0 - if you're on the latest mandrake (7.1), it comes with the distro. XFree86 4.0 has had 810 support from the beginning.

    However, Enlightenment itself just plain lags. Wait until they move the core to imlib2 if you want performance on that front.

    I don't think BeOS has a 810 driver - if you're looking for a new card and are interested in true cross-platform support, buy a 3dfx. (That and FSAA is just plain cool).

  • What the hell is with these posts? Is there html imbedded or what?
  • I despise booting up into 98. . .98 is to 2K as my Atari ST was to my first Mac.

    Wait - if 98 is way way cooler than 2k, why do you despise booting into it?

    ----------------

  • Apple is going to announce high-end G4's tomorrow with RADEON in them. The article is right --> there. [cnet.com]

  • Re:ATI's poor drivers (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Win9x drivers aren't very good either, and ATI has a history of dropping support for older products as soon as new ones are released. For example, the 3D Rage II/II+ drivers [atitech.ca] have not been updated since July 1998, even though they have several known bugs (corrupt fonts, disappearing mouse pointers, etc.). But I switched to Linux in June 1999, and I've had no problems with the card. Even my TV tuner works better than in Windows. The Windows tuner program is huge, and takes about 45 seconds to load, the Linux program (GATOS) takes 1 or 2 seconds. And when the Windows program crashed, Windows needed to be restarted before the tuner could be used again. Actually, it seems ironic that a group of people with no documentation (GATOS was originally designed with reverse-engineering, I'm not sure about the X drivers) could support the card better than ATI.
  • My next video card for Linux will be a Matrox
  • Yes the Geforce 2 (GTS), voodoo5, and ati raedon all support antialias full screen. Infact that is where ati's chip shines the most. It spanks the gts, and voodoo5 like a little kid at 1600x1200 full screen antialias. Lower resolutions are where its not so hot.

  • Knowing the i810 chipset somewhat, if it has the intel integrated graphics chipset the reason it probably has more trouble in linux is the way the video chip accesses video memory.

    Instead of having a separate memory for the video it uses the system's main memory dynamically for video functions. So when in 2d mode it only uses maybe 4MB of system memory and then jumps to 11MB when using 3D. I'm not sure how this would be handled in Linux. I'm not the dynamic allocation is supported at all and whether it just ends up being a static value.

    However, as far as videocards go. I've heard a couple of things, 3dfx seem to have a good following and nvidida cards have some drivers, but the releases from nvidia seem to be in binary only form. As far as other manufacturer's go, I can't say.

    "A man whose circumstances went beyond his control" -- STYX

  • Crunch time for 3D? (Score:5)

    by Hortensia Patel ( 101296 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @10:34AM (#924106)

    I'll be interested to see how this one does.

    Consumer 3D acceleration has advanced at a phenomenal rate in the past few years, for two main reasons.

    Firstly, until now everyone has been chasing SGI's taillights. SGI and OpenGL pretty much defined how to do fast 3D, so hardware and API designs have evolved toward that goal in a fairly consistent manner. (Except for a few unsuccessful oddballs like the NV-1 and D3D-RM.)

    Secondly, it started off as a wide-open market with no entrenched leader. Lots of competition, leading to low prices and very fast product cycles.

    This picture is starting to change, which is why I wonder whether the rate of progress is going to slow down. Firstly, consumer hardware has now caught up with SGI. SGI's "high bandwidth throughout the box" systems still win for some workstation apps, but there's no gaping chasm in speed or features any more. We're in uncharted territory now, and there's much less agreement about what the next goals should be. If every vendor starts innovating along radically different paths, apps will have a harder time using them all, and without app support the upgrade cycle is broken.

    At the same time, the competition is thinning out drastically. ATI is now just about the only significant competitor to NVidia; 3Dfx is just about hanging in there but is suffering from repeated slippages and is going to have a very hard time catching up. These days NVidia is very, VERY influential in defining the direction of Direct3D, and will become more so now that they've been selected for X-Box. Remember that D3D (unlike OpenGL) has no extension mechanism, so a D3D version written to favour one vendor is a huge competitive advantage - if other vendors can't get their features exposed then they've effectively wasted a generation.

    I'm a big fan of NVidia. Their hardware is superb, their drivers are excellent, they have a serious commitment to OpenGL and cross-platform support, and they contribute a lot to the graphics community in terms of research. But I'm not sure I'd like to see a total NVidia monopoly on consumer graphics. For that reason, if no other, I hope Radeon does well.

  • Re:My life is complete. (Score:3)

    by Upsilon ( 21920 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @10:37AM (#924108)
    As far as I know, NO manufacturer has gotten mutiple graphics chips to work under Windows 2000. The Voodoo 5 might work by now.

    It's an AGP issue. The AGP bus is designed to support one and only one device. The Voodoo 5 gets around this by basically pretending to be a PCI card even though it's on the AGP bus. Unfortunately, this means that it can't take advantage of any of AGP's advanced features. Not that that's a big loss or anything. In case anyone out there still hasn't noticed, AGP is pure hype and really doesn't offer any measurable performance increase.

    Anyway, the Rage Fury MAXX does things a bit differently. The way it's supposed to work is that one chip is recognized as an AGP device and the other is recognized as a PCI device. For whatever reason they're having a hell of a time getting this to work in Win2000. The bottom line is if you intend to use that OS, don't get a Rage Fury MAXX.

  • I remember the "good old days" when:
    • I upgraded my Atari 400 to 32K of RAM, and had a hard time imagining how to use it all.
    • My Atari 400 had 32K of RAM, and a 120K disk drive

      I now have more cache on my "obsolete" Pentium Pro CPU than that.

    Anyone that suggests that X is bloated! when they're using a video card with 64MB of memory needs to be thrashed severely with a clue stick, as the wastage of 10-15MB of RAM, which is about all the bloat that is likely to be plausible with X, just disappears in the variances here...

  • I looked around the site, but couldn't find the magical PDF files. I don't suppose they'd link those in from the brochureware pages.

    Just how much in the way of specs are they releasing? Does it go above and beyond the 2D core? Will people actually be able to write full OpenGL drivers for this thing without an NDA?

    Because, if ATI really is being that open with the specs, the beauty of it is that everyone who's been burned by NVidia not releasing theirs will finally have the chance to hit them where it counts: by moving to a competitor's product.

    The Radeon looks awesome, and if a level of support for it similar to that of the G400 can come around, Linux and a whole host of non-x86 systems will finally have an open path to cutting-edge 3D support!
  • There are Mac versions of some ATI products, although you naturally have to get a card specifically designed for Macs, you can't just plug your PC card into a Mac. The Dreamcast definately does not use an ATI card. Its graphics processor is based on Videologic's PowerVR technology. I really don't know about emdedded stuff.

  • Consumer hardware has gotten REALLY fast. (Score:4)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @10:47AM (#924115)
    For those of you who haven't been on the scene lately, I'll clue you in. With the arrival of the GeForce, consumer 3D hardware has gotten REALLY fast. Right now, the GeForce 2 GTS is nearly the fastest 3D card availabe on PCs for workstation tasks. If you head over to Intergraphs's website, you'll see their comparisons between the Elsa's NVIDIA Quadro-based card and Intergraphs Wildcat 4210, which is currently the fastest workstation card availabe (more than twice as fast as the SGI Visual Workstation series in awedvs tests.) However, the Quadro-based card is nearly 50-70% the speed of the intergraph machine. Considering that the Quadro is only 135MHz compared to the GeForce2 GTS's 200MHz, plus the fact that the GeForce2 has twice as many pipes, it means that a GeForce2 is probably close to the performance of a Wildcat 4210. Thus, you can get nearly all of the $2000+Wildcat's performance in Hercules's $400 64MB GeForce2 card (which can be run at 235MHz core and 200+ MHz RAM). That sound you just heard was a collective orgasm from all the 3D Studio users who just realized that a $5000 PC can take the place of their $10,000 intergraph.
  • BeOS does support the i810 (and i740) for R5. Still, I too recomend a 3dfx chipset for it's cross-platform support. My Voodoo3 works like a champ on BeOS, OpenBSD, Mandrake Linux, and Windows.

  • NO HARDWARE SPECS, NO GIVVA MY $$$A (Score:5)

    by maynard ( 3337 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @10:54AM (#924120) Journal
    On the other hand, one wonders exactly how many of these cards they would actually sell simply due to a full suite of Linux drivers.

    Just how big is the hardcore gamer/linuxgeek crossover? Obviously they're the most VOCAL ones on the internet, and so it seems like there's bunches of them. But I'd be willing to bet that a WAY disproportionate amount of them have web pages and are active on discussion boards etc.
    I can't speak for any other Linux users, but I'll sure buy the ATI Radeon if it's significantly better than the 3dfx Voodoo 5. I've got a Voodoo 3 right now, and very much wanted to purchase a GeForce 2 until I found out NVIDEA wasn't releasing hardware specs for their product. I'm not going to spend $300+ for closed hardware for which I can't get opensource drivers. Period.

    Never mind the ethical dilema of supporting hardware manufacturers who "do the right thing" for us free software proponents, even if it means giving up a few features every now and then. Frankly, I'm not about to shell out that kind of cash to anyone unless I know I'll be able to support the hardware years from now when it becomes outdated. When's the last time you saw a modern driver under Windows for the GD5380, or S3/968? Telling me to buy new hardware is NOT why I run Linux/BSD.
  • Not to mention that I have the distinct impression Tom and crew are on crack.

    They use 20% more transistors than the GeForce 2. They are therefore faster. But elegant? The Kyro PowerVR3 is elegant. The Radeon seems like a big ol' hack job to me.

    It's a brute force solution, with everything except the kitchen sink to boot (if there's anything to love about ATi, it's that).

    OK, I think I've whined about Tom enough for today. :)
  • If typical video RAM in 1980 was about ~4K, then the 8MB used now (not one tweaked for games) is right in line for what would be expected;

    Well, that 4kb was before the video cards became little video computers on their own. Their job has changed from one of just displaying text on a monitor to generating polygons, anti-aliasing, hidden surface removal, etc. etc. etc. What the military calls 'mission creep'. That would be one justification for their straying outside of the normal Moore's Law envelope. Or maybe it's like the hard disk drives lately. They've really accelerated beyond the confines of Mooore's Law.
  • I like the G400 because it drives my Multiscan W900 @1920x1200x24 very well w/32MB, but as the newer 3Dfx cards support that amount of RAM (and 24-bit 3D) I would consider them for any upgraded unit..

    Your Working Boy,
  • 2010: Graphics Cards with liquid helium baths.
  • 3.THey get disant drivers that are stable for more than 3 secs

    Dude, Linux 2.4.0test4 + XFree4.0.1 + the kernel module from the DRM X distro + Matrox G400Max 32 dualhead = 20-30+ minutes stable Quake3 on my BP6.. ROCK!

    Your Working Boy,
  • There's a story at MacCentral.com [maccentral.com] talking about an upcoming Mac release, as well.
  • GRAPHICS CARDS WITH 64 MEGABYTES OF RAM AND COOLING FANS.

    try to sell THAT to someone 10 years ago. -i- wouldn't have believed it.

    Dude, there were cards (or rather, multiple slot boards and/or external processing units) like that back then for SGIs, RS6ks (for CATIA and other CA(D|M|E) tools) etc.. If you had $30-100k+ to spare.

    I never figured we'd be here now.. The Metaverse is essentially here, for at least 2 senses... COOL.

    Your Working Boy,

  • Drivers for Radeon (Score:4)

    by HeUnique ( 187 ) <hetz-home&cobol2java,com> on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @11:41AM (#924144) Homepage
    Well, Precision Insight (Hi Gareth!), are already working on the drivers for the Radeon graphics chip, so drivers for Linux should be vailable soon..

    Also, Intense 3D will release soon a driver for XFree 4.0.x RSN (the driver for their WildCat series is written by Intense 3D, so expect some kick-ass performance!)
  • Look my, ST was cool, but --face it-- it was the poor man's mac. Yes, on a $/power factor it killed everything out there, but the mac was lots better (not that I didn't like my ST.)
    ---

  • I work for ATI... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @11:52AM (#924147)
    and do you know how many driver writers there are here? I'd say less than 50. We have 2D, D3D, DVD, OpenGL, and other drivers to write for 4-5 products in the pipeline. We're actively paying DI to develop open-source 3D drivers, and XFree developpers have access to most of our 2D register specs. And finally, we have to keep outpacing a ferocious competitor on both the hardware and software side. (something to most companies would find impossible, we did to a point, and we'll continue doing.)

  • Re:Queasy... (Score:3)

    by HeUnique ( 187 ) <hetz-home&cobol2java,com> on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @11:57AM (#924148) Homepage
    Lets see..

    So far, the XFree team did the whole 2D drivers for most of known cards (and they did/doing a great job! - I just hope that someone from the XFree documentation people will write some documentation about the Xv extention, please?? we need some video in X and DGA is not enough!)

    Precision Insight are doing the 3D drivers for the popular cards (Matrox, ATI, 3DFX).

    IMHO, I think We need a new group that will write another "driver layer" which will support most (if not all) Video extensions of those cards - motion compensation, iDCT, you name it (the BTTV did this quite nicely with the TV Tuner cards)- so if a program needs to output a video - it should use this "driver" - same as DRI being used for 3D graphics (I hope I explained myself correctly - I'm pretty tired right now :)

    I hope that some representitives of those hardware companies who read this post can release some info /specs about their video extensions (well, at least Matrox did release some info about their YUV -> RGB conversion if I'm not mistaken).

    Thoughts anyone?
  • I'm surprised there was just Sharky's review. All of the sites normally come up with reviews when the NDA's expire:

    AnandTech [anandtech.com]
    Fast Graphics [fastgraphics.com]
    FiringSquad [gamers.com]
    GamersDepot [gamersdepot.com]
    GameSpot [zdnet.com]
    GA-Hardware [ga-hardware.com]
    HotHardware [hothardware.com]
    PlanetHardware [planethardware.com]
    Tom's Hardware [tomshardware.com]

    For my money, Anand's is the best place to go for these things, although Tom usually has better discussions of the details behind the hardware and features itself.

    Also, 20 questions with ATI [pcinsight.com], mostly about Radeon.
  • we can install our games directly into the Video Ram is the RAM is enough.
  • Well, I donno about you, but at work I got 2 machines and on each one of them - ATI Rage Pro AGP card. One is running XFree 3.3.6 and the other - XFRee 4.0.1 CVS - both of them are running perfect without any glitches...

    Maybe someone could help them write drivers for Windows - I donno :) (And yes, I agree with you about their drivers - on my previous job I had the "pleasure" to see their drivers screws graphics (and I'm talking 2D on NT!)..
  • It took me over an hour just to read the Sharky article, let alone the Tom's article. {enable flamebait mode} 90% of /. commentors don't bother to read the articles anyway, what do you expect? {disable flamebait mode} So you're one of 10%, perhaps. ;)

    WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?

  • Apparently the driver supports acceleration only in 24-bit colour, and you need 32-bit colour to get rid of some tiresome analomies in Netscape (i.e. the very strange black and white icon display). Thus my desire for a better card.

    Thanks for all the responses, folks! I'll look into both 3DFX and Matrox.

    D

    ----

  • Re:Crunch time for 3D? (Score:3)

    by taniwha ( 70410 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @12:20PM (#924157) Homepage Journal
    I think it will slow down - but probably not for the reason you think - there's a memory bandwidth wall fast approaching in the consumer space - by which I mean that if you are using off-the-shelf DRAMs there's only so much bandwidth you can get out of them and they're already pushing them to the max - no more factor of 10 performance boosts in the pipes without gross rearchitecting of people's graphics pipes (and software/drivers/etc). We saw this same thing happen with 2D - for a long time companies were fighting to outdo each in 2D graphics performance - 64-bit cards, 128, 256 etc - but you can only push bytes into dram so fast and wider buses mean more pins but only factor of 2 performance increases - eventually there came a point where everyone's performance became pretty much the same and no-one really cares any more provided it's 'fast enough'.

    Instead in the 3D space I think you'll see a broadening of the features available - and more optimization to avoid drawing pixels at all - Radeon seems to already have some of this with it's 'Hyper-Z' stuff

  • Well, if you'll run lspci (on redhat - /sbin/lspci) - you'll see that the MAXX appears as 2 cards - so it foolish your PC to think you got 2 cards..

    Support (if I understood from many people correctly) is not easy for this card and Precision Insight are not planning to support the 2nd MAXX chip..

    So, I'm affraid that at least on Linux/*BSD - you're stuck right there with the 2nd processor (I doubt that they'll write a whole new driver for the MAXX to support the 2nd processor on Windows 2000)

  • Haiku (Score:2)

    by 575 ( 195442 )
    ATI's new toy:
    Video card with more megs
    Than your first hard drive
  • There are Mac versions of some ATI products, although you naturally have to get a card specifically designed for Macs, you can't just plug your PC card into a Mac.

    All Macs ship with ATI cards (currently Rage 128). In fact, one would assume that this announcement is tied to the opening of MacWorld tomorrow, where new hardware is expected. I'm not knowledgeable about aftermarket cards, but new Macs use AGP slots and older ones use PCI, so as long as drivers are available, PC cards should work fine.

    Off-topic: So what are the odds that Apple is really coming out with a cube tomorrow? I'm still thinking that this is their best misinformation job yet -- but that something Insanely Great is coming instead.
  • First off, the driver for the Radeon will probably be none other than Gareth Hughes, one of the developers that wrote the Rage PRO driver. The quality of that driver is comparable to some of the better quality drivers for Windows (well... allowing for the Rage PRO- which is a lame chip compared to other chips... :-)

  • Video Capture? (Score:3)

    by Starselbrg ( 45165 ) <slashdot&peterthatcher,mailsnare,net> on Tuesday July 18, 2000 @09:54PM (#924188)
    I finished up the review thinking to myself "wow, this is quite a fast card, and from ATI no less". Then, all of the sudden, on the last page listed under "pros" I see that video capture is supported!

    It has on the fly MPEG2 compression of video-in. That's simply amazing; what's more amazing is that no one is talking about it. This is feature I've been looking for in a high-quality video card.

    The big question is, however, will there be Linux support for this? I know there isn't really any video-editing software for Linux. But, with a cool card like this, people might get interested in it.

    If this feature had Linux support and if the priced dropped a bit (boy, $399 is pricey), I would certainly buy one.

  • Not so fast...

    First, this feature is also available on the Rage 128 cards as well

    Second, in order to really USE the mpeg-2 encoding (which is done entirely in software) - you'll need a very fast Pentium III processor

    Third - I really doubt that you'll see this supported on Linux - ATI won't release even a piece of document about this feature- unless you'll sign an NDA - and even with that - I'm not sure you'll get somthing..
  • thought the g400 drivers where more stable by now, since g400 is almost a year old now...

    Apparently the M$ drivers are _real_ stable, and the DVD/TV out support is outstanding, but these things tend to take longer on Linux :(

    why not just reuse my old mystique 220 instead? ;-)

    Heh, don't play much Q3A do you? ;)

    Your Working Boy,
  • So, why does anyone need a video card with 64MB of RAM and a 183MHz chip? Like, what are you trying to display? 1,000 fps in Quake III? I mean really, beyond 30 fps and your eye really can't tell the difference. What, are you displaying a bitmap of the Milky Way galaxy at .2 micron pitch and you want to rotate it in 3-D in real time?

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