ATi Radeon 9700 Full Release Review w/ Benchmarks 318
Chalupa_Man writes: "ATi Technologies has officially released their new Radeon 9700 Pro today.
Real benchmark numbers and a full review can be found here. The card is
impressive for sure and should have NVIDIA on the ropes for a while, as it beats
out a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 handily, especially with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic
Filtering enabled. Image quality is also top notch for this new high end DX9 compliant
product from ATi." sunny_talwar adds these links to more reviews of the new high-end Radeon at AnandTech's and Tom's Hardware. Update: 08/20 03:06 GMT by T : Cp writes "Gamers Depot also has their full review up of the Radeon 9700 Pro, including nice images of the driver tabs and 6x Antialiasing performance."
Way to go slashdot. (Score:4, Funny)
HardOCP too... (Score:4, Informative)
A good thing (Score:2)
This Discussion is Irrelevant... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm serious. How many of us base our video card purchases on the recommendations he makes? He knows the cards in detail, knows what features they support and how well, and he sure as hell knows how well they'll perform with the next id game.
So John, is this card worthy?
Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... (Score:2)
It sounds to me that ATI has some serious card here. Now if they can overcome their pitiful history of sorry drivers...
Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... (Score:2)
Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... (Score:3, Informative)
Quote:
When ATI started talking about R300 and hinted that it would be significantly faster than anything NVIDIA had up their sleeves, we were understandably skeptical. The progression from there is best summed up by what our own Matthew Witheiler had to say about the R300: "It all started with Carmack's endorsement of the card; that was huge for them. Now it has erupted into something that I didn't think was possible"
Matthew's final statement sums up the feelings all of us at AnandTech had about the R300; we were impressed that John Carmack provided such a glowing endorsement of the technology back at Quakecon, but we were floored once we actually saw working silicon in action.
Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... (Score:2)
Allow me to speak for John on this one... (Score:2)
Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... (Score:2)
I don't base my decisions on any one data point, especially one from someone wanting to sell me a product. To do so would be stupid.
As do hundreds (if not thousands) of others.
As I said above, his views can potentially be seen as one trying to sell you his product. I prefer to get my reviews from more notably un-biased sources. I'm not saying Mr. Carmack's opinions are biased. But, at the same time, I wouldn't necessarily base my Goodyear tire purchase on Ford's recomendations.
Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... (Score:2)
All of them.
The most important thing is to determine how significant the bias is, and how it plays a roll in the decision process.
Mr. Carmack, for instance, may wish to get you to buy his latest game, but his bias is in presenting his game as good as possible with the special effects/speed etc.
This is different from a bias where a reviewer likes a particular company, instead of a product.
Not to say either is better, or worse, but there is always bias.
Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... (Score:2)
I know, different matter entirely, but it was just to prove that assumtions are sometimes wrong. And things can change.
And until I can buy Doom 3 (Score:2)
Was a Voodoo1 the top choice for Quake 2 when it came out?
What're you doing here?!?! (Score:2)
Get to work, or it's back to default poll option for you!
Here is what John sais (Score:4, Informative)
John Carmack
"The R300 is an ideal rendering target for the DOOM engine, it can do both our highly complex pixel shaders for light surface interactions and can very rapidly render all the stencil shadow volumes which deal with all our dynamic masking of way light operations"
"3D accelerators are all about performance, quality and flexibility and the R300 breaks new ground over anything thats come before it in all three areas."
Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... (Score:2, Insightful)
So...
There was a story yesterday about a conference ID held. If you noticed the banner ATI was sponsoring it. Obviously he is going to recommend ATI...but if we can all agree that he is a pure hacker at heart than he will never sell out. John is just using the best hardware, because like all of us geeks he wants speed, and feautres (lots).
Now that we agree he is a pure hacker, the X-Box question is trivial. He likes a good challenge, and wants his baby (new technology) to be in front of every geek face in the world.
To summarize:
1. Carmack has no reason to "sell out"
2. Hackers like the newest best gear
3. Hackers want everybody too see their creations.
Re:This Discussion is Irrelevant... (Score:2)
More people buy Windows PC games than Apple Mac games.
More people buy Mac games than Linux games.
Yet oddly, poor 'bribed' Carmack supports all 4 platforms. He almost built Quake3 on a JavaVM.
Hell, there was a Sega Dreamcast version of Quake 3.
Play's well with penguins. (Score:3, Informative)
Compared to some other companies *cough*NVIDIA*cough* ATI has been very helpful to linux developers. While NVIDIA only releases binaries, and only for x86, ATI actually provides developers with technical specs to aid development on other platforms (PowerPC anyone?).
From ATI's website:
While ATI does not develop Linux or XFree86 drivers for its graphics cards in house, we actively support 3rd party developers that provide driver support for the majority of ATI products with development kits and information.
Radeon drivers for Linux are in development. XFree86 and the DRI Open Source Project offer Radeon 2D support with their latest released source code. 3D support is scheduled to be released Q1 2001.
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:2)
I used to buy Nvidia-based cards (mostly from Asus), and technically they're great, but nowdays I try to only buy documented hardware. I've been wondering for a while which video cards I should buy for a desktop system.
My Fujitsu Lifebook (P2040) has an ATI Rage Pro Mobility of some sort, and it seems to work fine. To get the X Video extension working so I could view CDs, I had to download a new driver that isn't yet in the XFree86 distribution, but it works great.
Re:Play's well with penguins (for a good reason) (Score:2)
Probably because they want some competent people to write some drivers for them. :-)
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:2)
Please check DRI website and stop writting this.
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:2)
And I appreciate being able to build a box extra cheap with an old 2D video card.
That's the problem with binary drivers -- you're buying a time limited product.
And yeah, I do still have a machine on an old Trident 8900 video card. It just doesn't need a $500 upgrade (no AGP slot and 486 processor == No NVIDIA for it). Thank God for the longetivity of open source.
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:2)
A) A RivaTNT2 (minimum reqs to get into NVIDIA driver land) is $20. How poor are you?
B) The kernel wrapper is Open Source. You can modify it to run on whatever kernel you want. A bunch of people hacked it to make it run on FreeBSD, and NVIDIA techs even provided support!
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:2)
This must be your happy day then, cause XFree86 4.2 comes with Radeon 8500 drivers (has since it was released, I use it with my 8500 every day) and ATI just released some really sweet FireGL drivers for XFree86 4.1 & 4.2 that also work with the Radeon 8500's.
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:2)
Nor does XFree86 4.2 contain 3D drivers for nVidia cards.
There are, in fact, open source 3D drivers available for the Mach64 line of cards (under Utah-GLX, and a branch of the DRI). There are also open source 3D drivers for every newer ATI video card, from the Rage 128 to the Radeon 8500. In addition, there are binary only drivers (much like nVidia's, only more stable) for the "Built by ATI" Radeon 8500s.
Dinivin
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:2)
I bought an ATI All-in-Wonder to use to do some video capture, VCD some TV shows, etc. On the windows side, the box wouldn't work (it needs to be the ONLY video card in the system, or it either doesn't work or locks up your system in 90 seconds - I timed it.). So with my top-of-the-line 3D card, I need to physically remove it when I want to record video - even telling the AGP card to be secondary doesn't work... it STILL locks up. Their vaunted tech support answer? "um, just use our card for 3d, or remove the other one each time". Um, pass.
So I decided to use it for a PVR in Linux. Good luck getting that to work. There's this thing called GATOS, which works on SOME of the ATI Video Capture cards (and not necessarily all of the same model), but is apparently too complicated for me... (okay, I need to install this Kernel Module, recompile the kernel, make sure the headers are where it thinks they should be, download from a CVS tree the latest source, install that, install this other thing, then a program to watch TV and another to record!)
ATI - NEVER AGAIN.
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:2, Insightful)
I never understood this anti-NVIDIA fud.
Look, they write drivers for us, which these days outperform the windows ones sometimes.
what the fuck are you complaining for?
and this crap you say about binary only, they ARE released in source, I have it right here. Ok sorry their openGL libraries I don't have the code to. But you can download the driver code off their website
here are other things about them. Each release has a rather substantial ChangeLog. They support cool things like Xrender. They give us support for that mouse cursor-shadow hack that you see in windows. They even let Brian Paul implement some of their proprietary openGL extensions in Mesa.
so, troll, tell me again why NVIDIA sucks. last I checked, running an NVIDIA card under linux you have a MUCH MUCH MUCH better chance of having fast 3D than with an ATI card. when I mean much better, I mean like 10 to 1.
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:2)
They docs they gave were sparse and contradictory. They only gave docs under a strict NDA agreement with a chicken-and-egg test for who gets access to them which filters most people out.
They are not allowing people to develop support for TV-out or Hyper-Z or a lot of other features. Hyper-Z I can understand, but TV-out? Come on... Don't tell me I have to go back to nVidia just for TV-out.
Is it just a fast Rage 128? (Score:3, Interesting)
Apparently if you have a really fast Rage 128 games like Q3 will run fast. But who needs a fast Rage 128...we need drivers that treat an N-generation card as such, not an (N-1) generation card.
So my true questions are: do the _current_ drivers support
1. hardware T&L?
2. vertex shaders?
3. pixel shaders?
4. FSAA / SmoothVision?
and last but not least,
5. TV-out / Multiple monitor / Video-in?
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm... Yes. There are open source drivers for anything lower than the Radeon 8500... There are open source drivers in development for the Radeon 8500, as well as closed source drivers from ATI for the FireGL cards (which, BTW, work with the Radeon 8500, and are much more stable, for me, than any version of the nVidia linux drivers).
In addition, there are 3rd party commercial drivers for the Radeon cards, too.
Oh, and let's not forget that if you want 3D acceleration for a new nVidia card under FreeBSD (for example), you're screwed. I've had no problems getting the DRI working on my Radeon 7500 under FreeBSD (and will be trying with an 8500 tonight).
Dinivin
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:2)
the linux nvidia drivers come from the same codebase as the windows versions, so any card supported by windows will be supported in linux.
Re:Play's well with penguins. (Score:2)
If you're a gamer and using Linux though (if that's not a contradiction in terms) then NVidea is the way to go at the moment. It's true their drivers are closed source, but they are very very fast! Even the old Geforce2MX I have in one of my headless servers (dual 800MHZ P3) managed to run RTCW beautifully last time it had a monitor!
Re:BS (Score:2)
You're the one full of crap.
From the DRI on BSD page [freebsd.org]:
However, in the good news, a couple of users have reported success with r200-0-1-branch of DRI CVS with Radeon 8500s on FreeBSD.
Maybe you should do a little research before posting blatant lies.
Dinivin
valuable information about GPUs (Score:2)
I would presume that if nVidia is that worried about their GPUs, then they're patented as well as closed source. Hardware can be reverse-engineered, but it can be a pain in the neck crawling around SEMs and trying to turn it back into a schematic, and then trying to turn that back into functional blocks so you can walk up the hierarchy and comprehend the whole. I know, I've done it. Supplying Open Source-style documentation would make it easier to reverse-engineer the hardware.
On The Other Hand...
IMHO a big part of the reason for closed source drivers is that it can take a lot of work to release proper documentation. Closed source drivers can be done by poor documentation plus the fact that the programmers may well sit down the aisle from the hardware guys. They talk daily, and that fills the gaps in the documents. Painful for both, but frequently cheaper and less painful than doing a good job of documentation.
On The Gripping Hand...
One of the harder aspects of patenting something can be detection of violation. If nVidia were to release their documentation and let this stuff work its way into the Open Source community, then they could watch the software concepts flow, and know where to start looking for hardware infringement. Presumably the nVidia driver model is most useful for nVidia hardware. If the nVidia driver model began being used against upstart JoeVideo cards, then they'd have good reason to take an SEM to JoeVideo chips, the the Open Source drivers would have pointed the way for them.
Whether Open Source wants to be in a position of assisting with patent prosecution is a different question.
Quack Benches (Score:2, Insightful)
ATI has been around for days (Score:2, Insightful)
They've been in business since the dawn of the x86 age. They always made solid cards.
Around the time of the stealth64 ATI lost its edge because they didn't see the potential for the consumer gaming market. (Stealth64 was the hot gaming card back in the doom days, ask thresh) Despite companies like 3dfx releasing the voodoo1 and Creative releasing the VLB 3D blaster, it was years before ATI came out with a graphics chip with even rudimentary 3D support.
Nvidia, a new company only took couple of chip revisions before they were able to match 3dfx's performance. It's no surprise that a company like ATI with years of 2D behind them would be able to quickly beat out the new top dog Nvidia.
Kudo's and good job ATI. Now if you could only price these new cards in a reasonable range, let's say less than $200, you could definetly become the new king.
pricing (Score:2)
I'm sure you know this and I'm not really sure why I responded, but there it is.
comparing to a geforce4 is useless (Score:2, Insightful)
Honestly anyone could have told you months ago the 9700 would beat the gf4... it's a new generation card.
And whats the use in getting it this month, since most games out now are still based on 5year old GFX engines that run decently on a geforce2.
and please spare me the tears of 60fps vs 200fps :)
--me
Re:comparing to a geforce4 is useless (Score:2)
Yes, the NV30 will probably beat the 9700. But when it is arriving? Some estimates I've heard don't have it showing up until Feb '03. Six months.
Anytime you're ready to buy a new vid card (or CPU, or mobo) you can wait six months to get something better. But sooner or later, you have to buy something. Putting off a purchase because something better is coming down the road is never a good choice, because there will always be something better down the road. If you need a machine right now, but it now and get the best components for your needs.
And in six months or whenever the NV30 arrives, you know what? Most games will still be based on 5 year old GFX engines that run decently on a GF2.
Re:comparing to a geforce4 is useless (Score:2)
Heads - wait 3 years for games to be developed that can actually take advantage of the features of a new card (good luck finding a 9700 or GeForce5 in 3 years)
- or -
Tails - buy that card now and know that it'll be good for at least 3 years
Decisions, decisions.....
Re:comparing to a geforce4 is useless (Score:2)
Buying PC components is like this; your computer is off the leading edge within weeks, if not days or hours.
However, you're pretty much right in that most games don't require the 3D power of a new card unless you're running at 1600x1200x32, and even a GF2/3 should handle that OK. However, there will be those that absolutely must have the latest & (presumably) greatest.
I already have a 9700 (Score:5, Informative)
* 2D: WOW! I have been a diehard Matrox fan because of the awesome 2D on their boards. However, I think Matrox might have a challenger on their hands. Even at dizzyingly high resolutions, the fonts were crisp and clean.
* 3D: Very nice. It has been image quality than the Geforce Ti's with FSAA enabled. However, it cannot compete with the Matrox Parhelia here. The Parhelia, though it has slower framerates, has better color saturation and 16x FSAA w/o a massive performance hit.
* Drivers: so far it was worked fine under WinXP. I got the SVGA xserver running on it after mucking around with Redhat for a couple hours. I am hoping a dedicated XServer is coming out for this card since it needs one badly.
Anyone else have any luck under Linux?
X server (Score:3, Insightful)
ATI will provide some documentation to selected members of the XFree development team, but they do not release all the programming information to the world, nor do they pay anybody to support their cards.
Perhaps that might change if enough people make it clear to ATI that Free Software drivers for XFree, source on the CD that comes with the card and pre-compiled binary modules for the current releases of XFree will sell more cards.
Of course, the odds of this happening any time soon are roughly 2-to-the-9421 power, and falling...
Re:I already have a 9700 (Score:2)
mee too! Maybe The Weather Channel will $$support$$ the development of open source XFree86 drivers [slashdot.org].
I'm still waiting for the 8500 drivers due out in Q4.
-metric
SVGA Xserver? (Score:2)
I'd really like to hear your information if it pertained to the XFree86 4.x tree. XFree86 3.x and its separate Xserver binaries for each card disapeared a long time ago. XFree86 4.x has an ABI which allows driver
Now, if there was a way that per-user accounts could have an XFree86 override and there were easy tools for both CLI and GUI configuration, and these were all the default settings in distributions, and the changes made in a session were stateful (IE: if I changed the res down a notch and restarted X, it'd be at that res, even if I had many modes defined), we'd finally be close to where Windows / MacOS is in terms of easy-GUI configuration.
Setting up X is still too much black magic.
Re:I already have a 9700 (Score:2, Informative)
Ah my friend you misunderstand.
Overall, the Parhelia is slower than the 9700. However, the relative performance drop when 16xFSAA is enabled is less for the Parhelia than for the 9700, i.e. the 9700 may lose 50% of its framerates when 16xFSAA is enabled, while the Parhelia may lose only 20%.
Note that these numbers are merely to illustrate the point and do not refer to actual performance.
-RahulThey should package video cards with games.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Radeon 9700 Pro wipes the floor with competition (Score:2)
But, let me say it, the 9700 wipes the floor with everything else -- though that's pretty much obvious. As a side note, were a log scale used, and my GeForce2 put on the scale, it'd be a negative number as large as would 9700's be a positive number.
Radeon's released a great product here. Kudos to them. I could probably play Descent 3 or Tomb Radier 4/5 with the 9700 at 1600x1200 with all the eye-candy at 5000fps.
The question here is do you buy it now or wait for the NV30? I say it depends on who you are. I myself am not much of a game person, though I have a few (very limited) favorites: I like the Tomb Raider series and the Descent series; I'm also partial to Janes USAF. That said, I'll never buy a game outside of these areas, UNLESS GameCube's Eternal Darkness [eternaldarkness.com] comes out for the PC. (I might be buying it anyways, as there's an emulator for the GameCube which works on Linux).
What I say you do is figure out how much power the games you want require. Also, how much power do the 3D apps you want require. Buy your graphics card based on that, and buy for a value.
To me, that means you don't buy it as soon as it comes out. You wait until the next major release comes out, then buy it; i.e., you buy the Radeon 9700 when the next Radeon comes out, or when its price drops significantly. Similarly, you buy the NV30 when the NV35 or whatever comes out, or when its price drops significantly.
Once a product is no longer bleeding edge, you normally pay for it what its a actually worth, and not some insanely high cost. Look at the prices of the GeForce 3's now: pretty reasonable at $100 to $250 or so dollars, usually. GeForce4's ell for about $400 dollars...are they really 1.6-4x better than the GeForce3's? In other words, if you could cluster GPU's, would one GeForce4 beat out 2-4 GeForce3's? I don't think so. That's what the price says, but I think they fall short of that.
Re:Radeon 9700 Pro wipes the floor with competitio (Score:2)
Re:Radeon 9700 Pro wipes the floor with competitio (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, right. I've been in the emulation scene for quite a while, and I work for an emu site. I know about all the latest-and-greatest stuff that comes out. The only GC emulator I've seen, or even heard rumored, was an April Fool's joke.
If you can show me this emulator, then I apologize. But if not... well... I told you so.
Re:Radeon 9700 Pro wipes the floor with competitio (Score:2)
I haven't tested it, so I don't know if/how well it works. But there you go. Maybe its the hoax you were talking about.
Re:Radeon 9700 Pro wipes the floor with competitio (Score:2)
Re:Radeon 9700 Pro wipes the floor with competitio (Score:2)
Fuzzy math... (Score:2)
In other words, the 9700 is some unspecified number of times as good as the GeForce (e^(2a) where a is the number).
I don't mean to be a nazi pedant, but wtf does that mean?
More In-Depth Review (Score:2)
I'll buy my next video card when. . .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously though, heh. I want decent multi-head support in ALL my games, as in BUILT AROUND the concept. Imagine having one screen for your inventory and maps and so forth and another one for your actual playing field.
Sharky extreme review link (Score:3, Informative)
Mostly the same glowing reviews.. It'll be interesting to see how Nvidia's next card responds.
Nvidia's next card: (Score:2)
Don't believe everything you read, you just wait and see, i will be back baby!
thanks,
Nvidia's next card.
Stop it already (Score:4, Funny)
Holy polygons, would you just quit the hype already? I *just* ordered a dual-867 Power Mac with GF4 Ti, and I spent a pretty penny for that upgrade - can't a guy bask in hardware glory without some bithead like you going and raining on his GPU parade? Sheesh.
Re:Stop it already (Score:2)
Got a sweet deal on it for $1399, CompUSA was making room for all the dual processor G4's. Hope you enjoy it.
-Pat
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Direct X 9 ? (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point (Score:2)
Re:Direct X 9 ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Direct X 9 ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Direct X 9 ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wolfenstien in 1280x1024, lightmap, all eye candy was usually 250-330 FPS. When it hit 400 FPS I about dropped a load.
LMAO!!
Other than being glad that the architecture is advanced enough to achieve such numbers, why would you be astounded at this? I mean, its only another ~100 FPS that you only notice because you can see the actual FPS numbers, not because the quality is any better. See, I was astounded when I dumped my old TNT2 for a Radeon 7500 a month or two ago and I could actually walk through a fire fight (in any game) without the FPS dropping into the single digits (5 FPS TFC is not fun). I was astounded at that, but still not load-droppingly-astounded
Having said that, I still can't get extremely high resolutions with all the extras on to work absolutely great on my 7500, although $57 for a 64 MB DDR 7500 back in May was not that bad
Re:Direct X 9 ? (Score:2, Funny)
My GeForce2 already runs Wolfenstien at like 800 fps. How did you manage to get it into 1280X1024 mode though? I didn't think there was a VESA mode that high in DOS.
Re:Direct X 9 ? (Score:2)
And even IF you've still got tonnes of power left, this is what multitasking is for; if my system can push RTCW along at 400FPS, I can leave some expensive background task running and still have perfectly smooth gameplay.
Re:Direct X 9 ? (Score:2)
Re:Direct X 9 ? (Score:2)
4x the pixels doesn't mean 4x the geometry, or 4x the AI, or 4x the bandwidth requirements (ok, the final image is 4x bigger, but the textures and geometry you're pushing aren't also 4x bigger).
Look at the benchmarks for the 9700 for Q3; 1024*768 = 203FPS. 1600*1200 = 180.6FPS. The nearly three times as many pixels of the higher resolution resulted in a loss of just 10% of the framerate.
Re:And why??? (Score:2, Informative)
As well, when video cards come out every six months, and games like the Quake series every year or more, you're going to see the same game used for a while.
Once Doom 3, Unreal 2k3, eetc. come out. maybe those will be added to benchmarks.. Who knows.
Re:And why??? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And why??? (Score:4, Insightful)
However, Anandtech's review [anandtech.com] of the 9700 has some benchmarks that include the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine. There are also some cool CPU scaling charts in there. Epic has been providing Anandtech with build of the UT2003 engine for quite some time. All of their recent reviews include UT2003 numbers.
Re:I gave up ATI. (Score:4, Insightful)
Despite their recent excellent showings in hardware, I too refuse to buy ATI because their driver support is, at the very least, a complete insult to the sensibilities of even a modest geek. For that reason I'll continue using my NVIDIA card until it burns out (which will be as soon as the fan stops spinning), and then I'll go and buy their latest and greatest. At least their drivers are generously provided and updated, sometimes on a weekly basis.
Re:I gave up ATI. (Score:2)
Never had an ATI ISA TV card, did you?
They couldn't even get it working well with windows 95 (I know, I tried every windows version I could get my hands on).
Blech. But at least they're stepping into the open source movement, so perhaps this won't be such a problem in the future (at least on Linux).
Re:I gave up ATI. (Score:2)
ATI products were crap back in the days of Mach64 and the like--both hardware and drivers. This all changed with the introduction of the Radeon series, however. I've had no problem with their latest cards and Windoze drivers. Far more importantly, ATI products have better support in Linux because ATI, unlike NVidia, actually documents their hardware and plays friendly with Open Source developers. And it seems to me Radeon boards still have the GF4 beat hands down in 2D image (ie. analog signal) quality at high resolutions. Somebody with a high bandwidth oscilloscope want to do some S/N analysis?
Re:I gave up ATI. (Score:3, Interesting)
- ATI All-in-Wonder Radeon
- ATI TV Tuner
- Hauppage TV Tuner
Granted, it might be partly AMD's fault, but I shouldn't have to worry about compatibility, and with Intel I don't have to. I didn't want to use nVidia because they don't have an acceptable alternative to the All-in-Wonder series.
Re:I gave up ATI. (Score:2)
On Windows XP, however, it worked right away. Perhaps you could try XP? What capture software are you running? I recommend VirtualDub [virtualdub.org].
Re:I gave up ATI. (Score:2)
Perhaps, but in my purchasing experience:
- 3 out of the 5 AMD-based systems I've owned (one K6/100/?, one K6-2/300/VIA, one K6-3/?/VIA, an Athlon/700/VIA and an Athlon/1.2/ALI) were unstable and/or had compatibility issues.
- 0 out of the 4 Intel-based systems I've owned were unstable (a 386/16, a 486/33, a P2/233, and recently a P4/1300, all using Intel chipsets)
I just have bad luck with AMD.
Re:I gave up ATI. (Score:2)
I had a fan on it. It died and the CPU fried itself. P4's underclock themselves to prevent this from happening.
Re:I gave up ATI. (Score:4, Informative)
Next, I found out that the benchmarks I had looked at so long were for a tweaked set of drivers that ATI had released to get better scores on Quake and the card sucked for anything else and wasn't as good for Quake as I thought! This was one week after I'd bought the card.
I'll NEVER trust them again.
Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers?? (Score:2)
Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers?? (Score:2)
Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers?? (Score:2, Informative)
The 9500 will be released in a couple of months (as in mentioned in the Tom's Hardware Guide article). It will be a scaled down 9700. It should have a lower clock speed and fewer texture units.
Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers?? (Score:2)
Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers?? (Score:3, Informative)
Digit 2 - Performance relative to others in the same series
Digits 3 and 4 - meaningless
Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers?? (Score:2)
7xxx first gen radeon
8xxx second gen
9xxx third gen
The Radeon 9000 is not a DX 9 compatible chip, its mroe or less a tweaked 8500. meaning it gives aproxatmetly the same performance as the 8500. Its actually a little less cause the 900 can't do single pass texturing or something.
Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers?? (Score:2)
Anyway, thanks for the correction/update.
Re:What is the meaning of the ATI model numbers?? (Score:2)
Not that I'm worried, it's far better than the geforce it replaced (having supported drivers rather than that binary junk that crashes every 20 minutes is a great plus) & the 2D performance is quite good... not as good as a Matrox, but usable.
Re:Vs. NV30 (Score:2, Insightful)
Your analogy is asinine. It's like comparing the Fastest P4 to the Fastest Athlon.
The comparison is apt because until right now, the Geforce4 was the top end. When the NV30 comes out, will you post that they should wait to test it against the next ATI offering? I doubt it.
Re:Vs. NV30 (Score:3, Insightful)
*shrug* It's just the way the review sites work.
Re:Kudos to ATI (Score:5, Interesting)
I supported them when everyone else laughed at me. I supported them- until I bought neverwinter nights last weekend. They have NO DRIVER SUPPORT. they're response to 'your card won't work and continues to crash' was 'suck our balls. if you want to play, you have to use the 2-versions-past drivers.' Don't believe me? look up the all-in-wonder-radeon drivers on their site and look at the known issues section. That isn't acceptable to me.
I bought a geforce4 mx440 yesterday, and it works great. First non-ati card I've bought. I hear that each time nvidia releases new detonator drivers, it improves ALL of their cards, including the older ones. so yeah, I felt the need to rant on that.
mod me down if it gives you your jollies, but just keep in mind your supporting a company that doesn't support you.
NWN Benchmarks? (Score:2)
The rest of you benchmarkers: fuck off. If I have to read another masturbatory "analysis" of how one card's Quake3 framerate is 4 times the refresh rate of the best available monitors, while an inferior card can only do 3 times, I will have to write you email to see whether you also spend a lot of time wondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Meanwhile, I'm seriously starting to wonder whether there is some payola behind the scenes of these uncannily similar choices of games to benchmark.
Re:How well do they compete? Radeon 8500 (Score:2)
I should of spent the money and got the 128 meg version.
But for 87 bucks I got something that kicks ass.
Go ATI.
Puto