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Graphics Software

Radeon 9700 Pro: ATI Ahead 378

Posted by Hemos from the battle-rages-on dept.
Keefe writes "The epic battle between ATI and Nvidia wages on. While Nvidia awaits arrival of their near-fabled NV30 for redemption, ATI conquers all by introducing the fastest and most advanced graphics card to date. The next-generation ATI Radeon 9700 Pro marks the second time Nvidia cedes the performance crown to ATI (the first time being the brief glory when the ATI Rage Fury beat the Nvidia TNT). See how the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro stacks up at Techware Labs."
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Radeon 9700 Pro: ATI Ahead More

Radeon 9700 Pro: ATI Ahead

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  • Eh? (Score:3, Informative)

    by hikousen ( 636819 ) <{info} {at} {heavycatweb.com}> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:11AM (#4998435) Homepage
    PC Gamer reviewed the 9700 four months ago.

    ???

    • Re:Eh? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Nevermore-Spoon ( 610798 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:29AM (#4998557)
      "PC Gamer reviewed the 9700 four months ago."

      No kidding, this is the most out of date story I've seen on slashdot. Next the'll be releasing

      386 Released with a math CoProcessor
      reviews explaining the performance difference between the 386SX and 386DX here [pw.edu.pl]

      • Re:Eh? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Gruturo ( 141223 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @12:06PM (#4998759)
        386 Released with a math CoProcessor
        reviews explaining the performance difference between the 386SX and 386DX here

        Ehm.....
        Actually the link between the math coprocessor and the SX/DX name is an 80486 thing.

        80386SX (Singleword Xchange) had a 16bit bus and could be plugged into a 286 board.

        80386DX (Doubleword Xchange) had a 32bit bus and needed a new motherboard design (but was way faster because of the wider data bus, and could directly address more memory)

        When the 80486 was introduced, the SX/DX distinction remained, this time to indicate the presence of the built-in FPU.

        Urban myth wants that 80486SX's were full-blown CPUs in which the FPU silicon had failed tests, or, later, was just disabled, even though perfectly working.

        Even worse was the fact that the 80487 was actually a FULL CPU+FPU, and not just an FPU. Upon startup it would disable the main processor and do everything. What a waste of power....
        I never knew if the Weitek 4167 did this too.

        • Re:Eh? (Score:4, Informative)

          by TheCrazyFinn ( 539383 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @12:46PM (#4998982) Homepage
          The 386sx could not be plugged into a 286 board. While they shared a bus design, the packaging was different, and therefore needed changes to the Motehrboard design. It also shared the 24 bit address bus of the 80286.

          The 386DX had both a 32bit Data bus and a 32bit address bus.

          The 486SX was a 486DX with the FPU disabled (This is not urban myth, comparisons of the die confirmed this), nobody knows why the FPU was disabled, apart from the fact it was.

          • At the time, Intel stated that the lower price of the 486SX wasn't just a marketing ploy, but representative of the fact that the FPU required significantly more (and more complicated) QC testing than the integer logic on the CPU, so the lower price reflected the lower cost to manufacture. Not that anybody believed that, mind you. Intel also claimed the FDIV bug in early Pentiums was incredibly rare and not worth worrying about.

          • Re:Eh? (Score:2, Interesting)

            by wik ( 10258 )
            To add more fuel to myths/rumors/lies, the story I heard was that they had particularly poor yield in the coprocessor region of the 486 die. It doesn't seem hard to believe that certain aggressive component layouts would be more susceptible to manufacturing faults than others.

            Intel would rather than have a part they can sell for less (a 486 minus the coprocessor) rather than a completely "broken" and unmarketable part.
        • And I thought that all that time reading World Almanacs I was doing was useless. You have inspired me to keep reading them. Someday, somewhere, someone will ask me what % of surfaced mined coal is exported out of southern Peru and what % of their GDP it accounts for or the average January temperature in Tanzania and I will know!

  • Legacy Gates (Score:5, Informative)

    by Vegan Pagan ( 251984 ) <deanasNO@SPAMearthlink.net> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:12AM (#4998439)
    I wonder how much extra circuitry this chip has in order to be backwards compatible. I rember reading that the Geforce 3 had to have some legacy circuitry that wasn't used in Direct Draw 8 games in order to run Direct Draw 7 games. Now that we're into DD8.1 and DD9.0, how much more legacy circuitry is in there?

    • Re:Legacy Gates (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:20AM (#4998487)
      There are no legacy circuits and there will never be any. Most of the 3d acceleration is done in hardware and every new version of DirectX has new facilities for games the use. The card manufacturers can choose to support these features in hardware of in their software through HAL. If a manufacturer thinks, that a certain feature can better be done in software, than that's the way it shall be.

      Don't expect the stuff we had with all the Intel procs.

  • Hey, 2002 is on the phone... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:12AM (#4998441)
    ... it wants its news back.

  • Hmmm... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by veddermatic ( 143964 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:12AM (#4998442) Homepage
    First they point out a Salon piece mentioning "selling out" and now we get an ATi puff piece for a video card taht has been out for months...

    If only I had a brain, I could figure out what this meant!!

  • Who would spend ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by carlcmc ( 322350 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:13AM (#4998446)
    3-500 dollars today for a card that will be severely outclassed by a card in a few months. There are no new games that demand a card this instant. I personally plan on buying a new computer and geforce fx when doom3 comes out. Unless you have to buy a new system in the next 3 months why not wait?

    • Re:Who would spend ... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Dark Paladin ( 116525 ) <jhummel.johnhummel@net> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:20AM (#4998489) Homepage
      This is the main reason why I haven't upgraded my PowerMac yet (and I'm sure Doom III will be out for it...) and the biggest reason why I'm a console guy these days (having converted back with the PSOne hit $99 and I was suckered into playing Final Fantasy VII).

      I'm still working on a backlog of games - Alice, Suikoden III, Halo, Metroid Prime, No One Lives Forever 2 (on my PC - the only thing it runs is games these days), and I'm just not as "upgrade conscious" as I was the time I bought a new computer because it didn't run Wing Commander III. (And with games like Ultima VII and the like becoming Open Source projects, I've got an ever bigger backlog ;.)

    • Re:Who would spend ... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:48AM (#4998651)
      Um, and what do you think GeForce FX is gonna cost? It's also going to be 3-500. Oh and I have news for you as well, there will some other product few months after the release of GeForce FX that will badly outperform it. So if you use your analogy, you might as well just wait forever and not buy anything...

      It's the same with processors, or just about any technology equipment. In few months there will be something bigger and better. In some cases smaller and better :P

      I have upgraded from GeForce Ti4200 128MB to the ATI 9700 pro a month ago, and it's been great... I have went from TNT to TNT2, from TNT2 to GeForce 2GTS, from GeForce 2GTS to GeForce 4 Ti4200... before. Normally I try to skip a at least two releases of the latest graphics card, unless there is some great leap in technology, or I have extra money... And neither happens too often :P

      • Re:Who would spend ... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by fault0 ( 514452 )
        > Oh and I have news for you as well, there will some other product few months after the release of GeForce FX that will badly outperform it

        Yep, and who is to say that ATI themselves won't put out a card that outclasses the FX at it's launch time.

        > Normally I try to skip a at least two releases of the latest graphics card, unless there is some great leap in technology, or I have extra money...

        Yep, same here.

        Voodoo2->ATI Rage 128->TNT2->Geforce 1 DDR->GeForce3 200->GeForce4 4400->Radeon Pro 9700

        I went from my gf3->gf4->rad9700-pro (one generation to the next to the next) because I had extra money :P

        Doom3 will probably run fine on the 9700 pro, so I don't think I'll upgrade until the successor to the successor to the 9700pro/gf-FX comes out.

    • Re:Who would spend ... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Erv Walter ( 474 )
      Actually, there is at least one game out today that made the 9700 Pro worthwhile to me. Asheron's Call 2 [asheronscall2.com] crushes basically everything out there when set at it's "most pretty" settings. It happens that the 9700 Pro is crushed the least of current cards. As AC2 was designed to look best on cards/systems a year or more from now, I'm sure that it will work great with the Geforce FX, but for the next several months (or more), the 9700 Pro allows me to play with beautiful graphics today.
    • While you're playing Doom3 on your GeForceFX, I'll be playing it on my ATI 10,000 Pro which will probably be released the day after nVidia starts selling the GeForceFX.

      The longer nVidia delays getting their product out the door, the more time ATI has to trump it.

      Even if ATI doesn't release a new card right away, they'll drop their prices when the GeForceFX does hit store shelves.

    • Re:Who would spend ... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by handorf ( 29768 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @12:09PM (#4998789)
      If I recall correctly, some of the GEForce FX previewers were expressing doubts about the GEForce MX being much faster than the ATI 9700 Pro.

      Apparently the way nVidia was quoting it's memory bandwidth numbers was EXTERMELY misleading (like, electically impossible) and, if ATI quoted it's numbers in the same fashion (it was based on some compression, IIRC, which is already in the 9700 Pro) ATI's card was still faster.

      Still, there's no reason NOT to upgrade now. This card will run Doom 3 just fine when it comes out (not that I care) and it runs all my current games quite well. There's always something better right around the corner.

    • Re:Who would spend ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @01:27PM (#4999400)
      > There are no new games that demand a card this instant.

      Try these games at 1600x1200 @ 32-bit, and then tell me a new video card won't help.

      - Battlefield 1942
      - UT2K3
      - Morrowind

      Personally, if you just got a GeForce 3 or 4, then yeah, you won't see that much difference, except you'll be able to crank up the resolution with the newer cards. For people who have a GeForce 2 (and below) (like me), upgrading to a ATI 9700 Pro, or GeForcs FX *is* a big difference.

      But you are correct -- Games requiring 64-bit and 128-bit framebuffers won't be out till next year (2004). I think that's the time to pick up the GeForce FX.

    • You can wait for the day when there isn't a new piece of hardware on the way that'll toast your current kit, but then you just wait forever.

      I actually bought a 9700 Pro just the other day, to go in a new PC. All the parts for that PC were custom chosen, a few to have a good price-performance ratio (e.g., only an Athlon XP 2100+) and a few because they're the best around and I don't expect to upgrade them any time soon (the 9700 Pro).

      I've been watching the market for several months now, and AFAICS the 9700 Pro I bought is way cheaper than it was those few months ago when it came out, and is likely to be way cheaper than anything new by nVidia initially will be, if and when that comes out. The performance of the 9700 Pro is still way ahead of everything else currently available, so buying a new PC now, with games very much in mind, what would you have done? Saved a whole 25% and bought a Geforce 4 Ti4600 instead?

  • This just in: (Score:3, Funny)

    by gheidorn ( 613169 ) <greg.heidorn@gDE ... om minus painter> on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:13AM (#4998447)
    The internet is on computers these days.
  • is that it's currently God's Own card until the next one comes along (Probably from nVidia) then it'll be crap.

    Repeat as necessary.

  • thats the point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ojamin ( 455410 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:14AM (#4998452)
    I think the point the author is trying to make is that the card has been out for months, and Nvidia STILL hasn't released their next big thing. Look what happened to 3dfx when they where slow out of the gate with next gen cards.
    • Nvidia with lauches every 6 monthes isn't fast enough? Only took ATI, what 3 YEARS to beat a Nvidia card? By your line of resoning we should also worry about ATI because they haven't topped their own card in like monthes!
      • But the GeForce4 is a year old now and the GeForceFX won't ship for some time. The Radeon 9000 series came out a little more than a year after the Radeon 8500.
        • sorry, but no. The GeForce 4 is only about 7-8 months old at the most. I bought mine in April of last year almost immediately after it was release. (Fell into some free money)

    • Re:thats the point (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MisterFancypants ( 615129 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @12:27PM (#4998870)
      This is quite a different situation. As others have mentioned, since there won't be any PC games that really take advantage of DirectX 9 level features for months yet, ATI's "lead" is purely imaginary at this point and only of interest to the frames-per-second monkeys who think getting 400 FPS in Quake3 timedemos means something over getting 300 FPS (despite the fact that their monitor is generally going to render only 85 of those frames per second anyway).

      Also keep in mind that Nvidia has been making the (painful) switch to 0.13 Micron for the GeForce FX. In a few months, ATI is going to be stuck in a situation where it needs to make this switch as well to stay competitive, and then we'll see how good each company's timing is.

      And timing really is the important thing. Consider Saturn vs Playstation 1 or Dreamcast vs Playstation 2, in the console world. In each case, Sega had a BIG lead-time advantage over Sony with (at-the-time) "next generation" consoles, and each time Sony came out on top. "First mover" advantage isn't all it was cracked up to be in the .com era if you actually look at the history of such things.

      • um.. Sega had stopped making Dreamcasts when the PS2 was released?

        Additionally, I'll take a game at 1600x1200/32bit with 4x FSAA and ansiotropic filtering cranked up at 85FPS over 1600x1200/32bit with no FSAA ar ansio.

        ATM I can do the latter with my Ti4200, not the former, if I had an R9700Pro, I could do the former.

  • Being faster... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jace of Fuse! ( 72042 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:15AM (#4998454) Homepage
    Being faster means little when you have no modern competition. If the current ATI's remain in the lead performance wise when the next Nvidia chipset is released, that will be a major victory for ATI. On the other hand, ATI does have the crown at the moment, and the longer they are in the lead the more market share they could take from NVidia. Then back to the first hand, a whole lot of people aren't ready to upgrade yet and may not be for a while, so being in the lead when nobody is buying isn't really an advantage after all. On the other hand once again... oh, nevermind.

  • How it stacks up ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mustangdavis ( 583344 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:15AM (#4998458) Homepage Journal
    interest on my credit card!!!

    ... "how the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro stacks up" ...


    Hmmm ... lets see ....

    Nvidia GeForce4 TI : approx $100

    ATI 9700 : around $300

    Games or software that need 9700 over GeForce4 : 0

    Maybe I'll wait until the cost comes down and until there is a true need for that card .... other than to brag to people that I have more money to waste on a graphics card than they do :)

    9700 ... I'll pass

    • Re:How it stacks up ... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:21AM (#4998503)
      Nvidia GeForce4 TI : approx $100

      ATI 9700 : around $300

      Games or software that need 9700 over GeForce4 : 0

      Seeing that look on your friends' faces: Priceless.

      There are some things money can't buy; for everything else, there's ATI.
      • Nvidia GeForce4 TI : approx $100

        I know you said 'approx' but the lowest ti4200 with 64 megs of RAM I could find was $110.

        And the 9700 Pro is @ $280.

        And sure, most games today do not need a 9700 Pro. But what about the games in the next few months?

        Seems cheaper to me to pony up the extra few bucks and get a card that will deliver the goods for the next couple years than a cheaper card that is almost at the end of it's product cycle.

        Unless, of course, you intend on only running X Windows on it.
    • I hate to say this, but a number of games that need DirectX 9.0 are going to be shipping within the next year. Asheron's Call 2, Doom III, and very likely EverQuest 2 will need DX9 features for highly-complex background scenery these games will generate.

      Why bother getting an nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200 chipset card that will likely bog down with the games I mentioned because they won't support many DX9 features in hardware? Besides, the new Radeon 9500/9500 Pro boards are reasonably priced (under US$200) and offer full DX9 compliancy.

    • Actually the only GeForce models that are aprox 100 are the MX model which is just a suped up geforce 2. Just about everyone says to avoid the MX model like it was typhoid Mary.

      Nvidia has missed an entire product cycle, Most of ATI's offerings are smoking NVidia's at the same price point. Not to mention being more technologically advanced.
      Asheron's Call 2 isn't a DX9 game but it uses the vertex and pixel shader pipeline, and represents at least one game that could probably use the extra horse power of the 9700.

  • Either make of card works well for text-based MUDs (Score:3, Funny)

    by Patrick May ( 305709 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:16AM (#4998469)
    Why is everyone so excited about faster rendering? The text at Ancient Anguish [anguish.org] has been displayed fast enough for years!

  • ATI ahead? What? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by koinu ( 472851 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:18AM (#4998480)
    nVidia has convinced me with their FreeBSD drivers. Good work.

    • Re:ATI ahead? What? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Chundra ( 189402 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:23AM (#4998517)
      No kidding! You should see how slick my emacs, xterms, and mozilla look. Thanks nVidia.

    • You mean the drivers that take 5 minutes to start up X when they don't cause my machine to spontaneously reboot?

      Dinivin
    • Absolutely... a graphics card is much more than just the hardware. NVidia seems to consistently deliver rock solid and blazingly fast drivers for *all* popular platforms, and ATI is always behind in this regard. They have binary distributions for more Linux/GNU distributions than you can shake a stick at, and if that fails, building from source is pretty easy.

    • ATI ahead? Yes Indeed! (Score:2, Informative)

      by austus ( 199520 )
      Nvidia releases binary drivers. ATI releases specs. If you think about it, which is better?

      Don't be suckered just because Nvidia has thrown you a bone. If you read some of the developer mailing lists for say, Mplayer, the Nvidia binary drivers leave a lot to be desired.

  • The surprising part... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by foxtrot ( 14140 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:21AM (#4998498)
    is not that this is the second time that ATI has been faster than nVidia, it's that this is only the second time that this has been the case.

    Back in The Day, it seemed that 3dfx would come out with their card, and hold the performance crown for a few months, then someone else would release theirs, and hold the performance crown for a few months, then 3dfx would release their next generation of cards, and the cycle would continue that way.

    It's been all ATI and nVidia now for a number of years, and ATI has only just now figured out that if they want to sell graphics cards to gamers, they have to be faster every once in a while?

    I hope it reverts to the old model. Competition can only yield better graphics cards at lower prices.

  • NV30 - A better value than you think (Score:5, Funny)

    by Teckla ( 630646 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:22AM (#4998511)
    The NV30 will be a better value than you think. Not only will it replace your old video card, but it'll replace your old hair dryer, too!

    -Teckla

  • Time to change again?? (Score:3, Funny)

    by My_nickname_is_taken ( 636921 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:25AM (#4998529) Journal
    Man I just upgraded to a Riva TNT2... Does this mean I have to upgrade AGAIN???

  • Old news and almost redundant. (Score:3, Informative)

    by GothChip ( 123005 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:26AM (#4998538) Homepage
    Wasn't this card released a few months ago? About two days after I bought my GeForce 4 Ti4600 :-(

    But having seen the videos for the Nvidea Fx card I can't see ATI holding the crown for long.
  • Okay, i was checking up on Pricewatch [pricewatch.com] to see the price differences between the R9700 and nVidia's offerings. WTf is up with this GF4 TI 4800? Is it just a version that supports AGP 8x ? Because, it's MORE expensive by 20 bucks than a Radeon 9700Pro (at 232$)

    I still agree with whoever (likely several people) said that its pointless to spend so much cash when this kind of polygon pumping power isnt even needed yet.
    By the time you actually NEED one of these it will be in the 150$ range; the only reason you need one now is the geek equivalent of penis envy
    • You young bucks ain't seen nothin'. In my day you had to buy two $300 video cards and connected them up through a special process called "scan-line interlace" if you wanted to be cool.
    • Okay, i was checking up on Pricewatch [pricewatch.com] to see the price differences between the R9700 and nVidia's offerings. WTf is up with this GF4 TI 4800? Is it just a version that supports AGP 8x ? Because, it's MORE expensive by 20 bucks than a Radeon 9700Pro (at 232$)

      Pricewatch is sandbagging you about the price, due to the way that dealers are listing video cards. If you go to the actual search page [pricewatch.com] for that price quote, you'll see that the entire first page of results is for the Radeon 9700, not the 9700 Pro. Only at the very bottom of the second page of listings do you find an entry for the 9700 Pro, at $276 [gameve.com]. All of the lower-priced entries have phrases like "not 9700 pro" or "9700 pro also available" in the Product or Description fields. So the GF4 TI 4800, at $250, is $25 cheaper than the cheapest 9700 Pro. The Radeon is still the faster card, but it's not the cheaper card.

  • Actually... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tuxinatorium ( 463682 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:30AM (#4998563) Homepage
    The Radeon 8500 outperformed the Geforce3 Ti500 and came out months before the Geforce4 Ti series. They're continually trading the performance lead. The only instance of nVidia ever keeping the performance crown continuously from one product generation to another was Geforce2-->Geforce3.

    From the time the Geforce2 came out until the Radeon 8500 came out 17 months ago, ATI had the unquestionable performance crown, but since then it has been juggling back and forth, which is to be expected since each new product release is about 6 months after the competitor's last release and the technology improves as time goes on. nVidia has a habit of shooting for a holiday release but not actually shipping until the new year, and ATI has made their last two releases in August. So when either one of them makes a new release they have a 6-month lead over the other company's product, so you should expect them to always trade performance crowns unless one of them is more than 6 months begind the other in R&D, which would be saying quite a lot.

  • Open Source Suport (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bwt ( 68845 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:32AM (#4998570)

    Last time I checked, NVidia had an obnoxious policy of not releasing technical info for all the functionality of their cards. Is that still the case?

    How is ATI regarding open source support? Can I run a fully powered video card from ATI without having to download special drivers directly from ATI, like I used to have to do with NVidia?

  • Buy a 9500 Pro instead (Score:5, Informative)

    by SensitiveMale ( 155605 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:42AM (#4998619)
    The only difference is 1/2 the memory bandwidth. While that may seem like a lot, the 9500 pro actually gives @ 70% of the performance of the 9700 Pro.

    and....

    The 9700 Pro, 9700, and the 9500 Pro use the exact same GPU. So download a new bios at www.3dchipset.com/temp/warp11.zip [3dchipset.com] and you can overclock the GPU to get almost 90% of the performance of a 9700 Pro.

    Read all about it here Firingsquad.com [gamers.com]

    Also make sure to get DirectX 9 [microsoft.com]

    and New Catalyst 3.0 Drivers [instacontent.net]

    And the 9500 Pro is a cheap at $180 delivered.

    www.pricewatch.com [pricewatch.com]

  • Not as far as OGL apps (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gyan ( 6853 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @11:43AM (#4998628)
    With respect to using apps like 3dsmax, I would still stick to nvidia Quadro4 or softquadroed Geforce4 Ti cards.
  • The problem with the 9x00 series is that ATi still has a long, long way to go in the driver department. I cannot tell you how many "cutting edge" gamers I've run into who cannot extract a decent picture or more than 5FPS out of this card due to horrible driver problems. To the best of my recollection, this has pretty much always been the case with ATi, and although they have been better recently they stil have a long way to go before they match nVidia's stability.

    Just a warning to those of you who (inexplicably) want to pay a gigantic premium for the fastest card on the market for about another quarter.

    levine

  • ATI and bad drivers (Score:2, Interesting)

    by spanky1 ( 635767 )
    I don't know about you, but I have been burned by ATI over and over again with regards to driver quality. I sincerely hope they are still not bad about drivers but I'm not going to risk it again.

    NVidia has always had top notch driver support, and they continue to support even the oldest TNT cards with driver updates. ATI tends to drop new driver support after a couple years.

    I'm waiting for the GeForce FX. I just hope I can get one with dual DVI.

  • Radeon 9500 Pro (Score:3, Insightful)

    by h0tblack ( 575548 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @12:09PM (#4998786)
    Maybe this [hardocp.com] article about ATI's Radeon 9500Pro would have been a better one to link to. It shows how this cheaper R300 based product compares to other offerings and how it beats the Ti4200 hands down and often outdoes the Ti4600. It may not be the killer card that the 9700 is, and may not be a true entry level card, but for the mainstream gamer market it gives mighty fine performance for your cash.

  • High end 3D cards all but irrelevant (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @12:26PM (#4998864)
    I know I'm going to get blasted for being a Luddite, but try to read more into this than a rehash of "640K is more than anyone will ever need." Please?

    First, PC video has gotten very fragmented in terms of capability. Hardware Transform & Lighting (T&L) first appeared in the GeForce 1 several years ago. The follow up, the GeForce 2 became a very popular, almost standard, card. But there are still major PC retailers that ship with motherboard video, such as Intel's extreme-whatsit and so on. These chipsets are not T&L capable. Still, several years after the first T&L cards appeared, there is a huge segment of the market that doesn't have hardware T&L. These are fast machines in every other respect (bottom end these days is 1.8GHz), just not T&L accelerated 3D.

    Of course the hot video feature these days is programmable shader logic. But realistically what percentage of very capable PCs support this? 10%?

    Second, the bottom has fallen out of 3D gaming on the PC. The sales figures of games that are perceived as Big Hits, like No One Lives Forever 2, are, in reality, abysmal. We're talking under 50,000 copies. There are some 3D games that are doing well, but it's a small, small handful. Just that "Oh yeah, what about Doom 3?" comes up in these discussions shows how weak the market is.

    My point is that video cards keep improving, but at the same time, there's no market for these features, nor is there a market for the features of cards two generations back. I don't like this, but that doesn't change anything. Certainly it's fun to write shaders and to be able to buy something for $400 that's significantly better than $100,000 hardware from just a few years ago, but that's looking at the situtation from a "look at what I have in MY computer" perspective, not something I can realistically expect to be in most of the PCs out there.
    • First of all, take a look at ATI's sales figures for the first quarter which included 9700P sales--UP 34% sequentially! In fact, shortly after shipping the 9700P ATI announced that the demand for its new high-end graphics product was going to materially affect its earnings in a positive sense--and that's just what happened. By the first of October ATI had shipped 1 million + of its $400 3D accelerators into the market, according to an article I read. By now I would image they've shipped somewhere between 2-3 million of them. Twice I saw various enews outlets carrying stories on ATI being surprised by demand for the its R300-based products and having to seek out additional FAB space immediately. Actually, this market is vigorous and very healthy, and if anything there is a pent-up demand for products like this.

      Second thing you forget is that M$ is driving 3D into the mainstream with its DX initiatives--which basically means that someone using a GF2 and someone using a 9700P can run the same 3D program--the only requirement being that the hardware developer has written DX-compliant drivers. Of course the guy running the old 3D card won't get anything close to the performance and atmosphere of the guy running the 9700P, but he can still run the program, and that's what counts. Upgrading his 3D card is up to him. Those who like 3D games will buy these cards--those who don't, won't.

      *chuckle* If everybody had to run 3D games prior to their being published we'd never have seen the first 3D game--so obviously that's not a requirement. 3D gaming software is just like any other--there's never a case where "everybody" buys it, no matter what it is. There are still tens of millions of people who are still running Windows 98, for instance. "Everybody" participating isn't required for an unqualified success in this market because the market is segmented.

      That's my last point--you talk about videocard markets being segmented--that's because the market itself is segmented! Not everybody wants a 9700P, but millions of people do, and that's plenty enough demand to create a sizable market. Talking about fragmented--look at the automobile industry. It's extremely fragmented, but the market is so huge that companies make money anyway.

      I guess it all boils down to the fact that "one size does not have to fit all" for markets to succeed and thrive. Indeed, the raw diversity of the American economy stuns people who experience it after the limitations of planned economies. They often find the amount of choice staggering.

      There is a cohesion and a method to it all. APIs like DX and OpenGL are making it happen, along with the competitive efforts of hardware companies like nVidia and ATI. In another year or so you won't be able to buy a graphics accelerator, for any cost, that won't include a decent level of 3D acceleration--indeed, even ATI's current value line of videocards is OpenGL 2.0/DX9-compatible. The 3D card market is just like any other--higher end products get designed and built because there's a real demand for them.

      Also, instead of looking at one 3D game--why not look at combined sales for all of them to judge the success of the market. People's tastes differ--I can't stand the "Sims", for instance, but many people love the games. Looking at the sales depth of a single 3D game will tell you little about the overall market.

      In my system at home for instance I replaced a GF4 Ti4600 with a 9700P and couldn't be happier. I make use of the features of the product--especially its incredible fill rate and bandwidth which allow me to run older games faster than was possible before, along with stunning visual effects like FSAA and anisotropic filtering--which are applied by the driver and can be used with any 3D game. So even running older 3D software I can see a big difference between my former GF4 Ti4600 and the newer 9700P which I bought back in September. I feel very much as if I've gotten my money's worth.

      Just to let you know there's another side of the coin here...

  • How many of us Linux Zealots (Score:4, Interesting)

    by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @12:35PM (#4998905) Homepage Journal
    have a Windows box around "just for gaming." Yet we lambast Microsoft regularly on Slashdot and to our friends? Seriously, if you want people to switch, how about only buying games that run on Linux or other Open Source OSs'? All I play is Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Quake III, and Unreal Tounament 2003 which run great on Debian Testing (my Redhat 8 laptop is another matter-HELP!). Is gaming that important that you have to run a Windows box and buy Windows-only games? A little monetary support to the manufacturers who help us could go a long way. Gaming could be the "killer app" for a lots of would be Open Source converts.
    • Dude, seriously. Shut up. You're pandering for karma, it's blatant.
    • I'm a Windows zealot who keeps Linux around just to use as a cheap web and mail server. I could shell out some cash to support the platform I like and purchase a server license so I can run IIS but that doesn't make sense to me. Now if the shoe was on the other foot and I was a Linux zealot who only had Windows to play games then I think I would want the platform that gave me the most games. I wouldn't punish myself by limiting my choices to just a few that were native on Linux or ran "ok" under WINE.

      Sometimes you just need to bite the bullet and use the best tool for the job.

      I hammered nails with an ice cream scooper once but once I realized it was much easier to use a hammer I only use the ice cream scooper for dishing out rocky road.

  • I'm not a fanboy, but... (Score:3, Informative)

    by drfishy ( 634081 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @12:57PM (#4999065)
    ATI is in REALLY good shape right now. As far as their drivers go, they're really getting much better. ATI will have had the performance crown for 6 months or so by the time the FX comes out, by that time they'll have a card based on the R350 core that should at least equal the FX, and come June or July the completely new R400 core based cards should be around, more than likely beating Nvidia's next big thing by a long time. Nvidia is a hype machine, but they're not delivering, they dropped the ball big time by not getting the FX out at least by Christmas. And I bet if you took the dustbuster off the top of the FX and ran in at clock speeds that normal cooling can facilitate it would be on par with the 9700. And top performance means nothing anyway, it's what, like less that 5% of the market? ATI currently has the fastest mobile chipset, pocket chipset, value chipset, and their mainboard chipset is for the P4, not the Athlon like Nvidia, who do you think is in a better market position? They've basically got Nividia beat everywhere right now (as far as stuff already on the market goes) they seem pretty serious about being the one to beat themselves.

  • ATI Rage Pro better than TNT ? what? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Matt Ownby ( 158633 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @01:01PM (#4999121) Homepage Journal
    With all due respect to the submitter of this news article, I have to question the statement that the Rage Pro beat the TNT.

    As I recall the days when Quake 3 was getting ready to be released, the id guys specifically said that they were trying to really hard to make Q3 work on the ATI Rage Pro, and the way they were going about making it work was allowing the user to turn off enough eye candy (ie remove enough features) so that the game would be compatible with the Rage Pro. The end result was that it looked rather ugly. On the other hand, as far as I know, the TNT1, although probably too slow to play Q3 feasibly, could support full eye candy, including 32-bit color.

    I actually played the game on a TNT2 for a while, which, I believe, had the same features as the TNT1 with a speed boost.

    Now if you are talking about quake1 benchmarks or something, I don't know which card would've been faster (rage pro or tnt1) but let's face it, there's more to video cards than just high framerates, as 3dfx found out (the hard way).

  • The Wages of Sin (Score:3, Funny)

    by BorgCopyeditor ( 590345 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @01:02PM (#4999130)
    The epic battle ... wages on.

    This has been Elmer Fudd weporting. We now weturn you to your wegular newscast.

  • The speed doesn't matter if the drivers suck (Score:4, Insightful)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @02:21PM (#4999846)
    Two weeks ago, I bought a Radeon 9700 Pro. In that time, I have managed to get three out of my huge pile of 3D games to work with it, and only Quake III works well. ATIs driver coders are off in lala-land, and games can't cope with them. No two people seem to have the same problems with the Radeon 9700 Pro, which makes troubleshooting a nightmare. I would have been better off just getting an Nvidia card for half the money to hold me over until the next Nivida card came out.

    ATI cards are just not good for gamers. While Nvidia focuses on speed and stability, ATI focuses on cramming any possible feature they can into their All-In-Wonder cards, at the cost of a decent driver set for people who want a card that just attaches to a CRT and WORKS. I will NEVER buy another ATI card, and I will always remember why I ran all my systems on Nvidia for five years before screwing up and getting this fucking ATI card.

    • Must be something whacked somewhere ... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by waltc ( 546961 ) on Thursday January 02, 2003 @03:28PM (#5000400)
      I've had the opposite experience since September when I replaced the GF4 Ti4600 I had (moved it to the wife's machine at home) with a 9700 Pro. I have found the drivers terrific so far, from the included version on the CD up to the current 3.0 DX9-compliant Catalysts. What's more, I've tested the card with more than 35 3D games in my library--closer to 40--and have yet to find one that wouldn't run, or either ran so poorly the game was unplayable. From my point of view it's simply the best 3D card I've ever owned--especially for 3D gaming.

      Also, this is the second motherboard I've used the card with--the first was an MSI KT333 chipset board, my current board is a nVidia-based nForce2 chipset board manufactured by Chaintech, which supports AGP x8 and several other things. The card runs extremely well. I've not even been tempted to swap cards with the wife and go back to the nVidia Ti4600 product--no way...

      I would strongly suggest that either you have some underlying system incompatiblity of which you are unaware which prohibits the card from working properly--or else you simply had the bad luck to pick up a defective card (in which case an RMA is order.) Your experience is certainly not representative of that of the reviewer of the article on which this thread is based, none of the other reviews of the product (and there have been dozens of them), or my direct personal experience. Think how you like but I thought you should know your experience is anything but typical.

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