ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 324
ATi is bringing out their new card, the Radeon 9800 Pro, and all of the hardware review sites which depend on ATi's generosity for pre-release hardware have released their necessarily favorable reviews. Here's a few: Hothardware.com, Hexus.net, HardOCP.com, Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, Extremetech, PCWorld.
Independent review sites? (Score:4, Insightful)
Enquiring minds want to know (before they blow ${WEEKS_WAGES} on new toys...)
Jon.
Re:Independent review sites? (Score:5, Informative)
They may not be any more independent, but at least they're honest [theregister.co.uk]...
Re:Independent review sites? (Score:5, Informative)
Payola? Damn - I really wish there was some!
BTW, here's our ATI 9800 Pro review
http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/r350/index.ht
Re:Independent review sites? (Score:5, Insightful)
What do you mean by independant? They all take ad revenue now, and often that ad revenue is from either hardware companies or retailers. Most of the reputable ones (AnandTech, Tom's, Sharky's, etc) have guidelines on who they will and will not accept ads from - in the case of retailers they usually have to have a good rating [resellerratings.com].
How do they get their hands on pre-release hardware
The hardware companies aren't freaking stupid. It's called marketing, and the marketing departments make sure that the top reviewers get the hardware ahead of time. Sure, you could send them something the day it's out, but that hurts the marketing push. Especially since it can take a couple weeks to do some reviews. And you want to make sure that if the reviewer has a problem they can get help.
At least it's better than the old print reviews, where they would get the hardware before release and then print a couple months after release -- since print cycles are so freaking long (especially for monthly magazines).
Just how close to payola is the whole thing, anyway?
Most reviewers have to return the hardware afterwards. Of course, there's always swag, and they get tons of it. From everyone. Occasionally they'll get to keep the hardware, and upon occasion the big sites will have charity auctions or giveaways for random stuff (although that's often just another marketing gimick - the site is donated hardware specifically for the purpose of giving it away).
If you want a "truely" independant site that gets no stuff from anyone, then go look for the chintzy sites that review stuff weeks to years after it's out. You know... the sites that you think suck and are horribly outdated.
If you want to know what you should buy then read the reviews from a couple of the top sites, and then go scan some forums. The forums are by average geeks and will give a wonderfully negative review of pretty much any product.
Re:Independent review sites? (Score:2)
though websites have to be careful, one mistake and you're tainted(thg for example is considered crooky by many).
Re:Independent review sites? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, you also get things like the infamous NT vs Linux benchmark: Let's test a rollout of NT specially calibrated and tuned for us by the NT development team, versus some old Linux distro we found in a trashcan.
Whenever you see one of these reviews, just ask yourself: where's the money to do this coming from? That'll tell you whether you should believe it or not.
dave
Re:Independent review sites? There's a sweet spot. (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, confounding this formula is PT Barnum's line "I don't care what they write about me as long as they spell my name right." Some suppliers may continue to release early products to unfavorable, but popular reviewers, just to increase the overall level of press coverage. Worse yet, since the early product is provided by the product supplier, it may have been specifically modified from the "retail" version to work better on benchmarks, just for the review. For that matter, the reviewer may be tempted to soften a review for the sake of a site advertiser's new product.
Still, what's a consumer to do? I guess we have to take early reviews with a dose of skepticism. Before we make a purchasing decision, we have to wait for a reviewer to buy an off the shelf unit and test it. That's the best way we can be sure the review is more in our interests than the product supplier's.
Re:Independent review sites? Payola (Score:2)
Do you don't. At least, I hope not. You are already getting compensation in the form of early access to the product. If you got to keep the product or any other form of compensation, it would hurt your credibility as a review.
Low credibility = reduced eyeballs = no web site
And then, you don't even get to try out the new toys anymore.
Re:Independent review sites? Payola (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Independent review sites? Payola (Score:2)
Another Review (Score:5, Informative)
Balanced Review from The Register (Score:2, Informative)
quote:
Anandtech (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Anandtech (Score:2, Funny)
The Anantech article is also unabashedly crammed with flash ads for ATI video cards. So polluted I'm finally motivated to remove the flash plug-in. I respect their reviews, but WTF is WRONG with these people?
Re:Anandtech (Score:2)
Re:Anandtech (Score:3, Informative)
Put that file [abusenospam.free.fr] in the chrome subdirectory of you mozilla profile, and all the flash ads on anandtech & other sites should be gone, without breaking legitimate flash usage (stupid games, awkward menus, 900kB site intros, etc.)
What were you expecting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Err, what were you expecting? If you give a kid a new toy that's faster, shinier and has more bells and whistles than his old one then he's going to be impressed and say that it's faster, shinier and has more bells and whistles than the old one.
I have no doubt that if nVidia, ATi, Matrox or whoever released a card that stank the place right up then these guys would write about it - what do you think they'd do, michael, fake benchmark results?
Do these cards represent good value for money? No, not unless you have money to burn. Are they interesting to gamers? Yes, because what's in a $600 graphics card today is what'll be in a $200 one in a few months time.
Re:What were you expecting? (Score:4, Insightful)
hmmm
But I'm not so sure that a bad product will get a negative review, particularly if the product manufacturer is a big player. Some of these review sites are big names (in the right circles; gaming for example) and their opinions count with consumers. But the sites themselves also depend on "breaking the news first" for their customers. A bad review might lead to a hardware company not being so willing to give out pre-production stuff in the future. I'm not saying that the reviewers are kissing manufacturer backsides, but I wouldn't be surprised if they temper their bad reviews.
just a thought
Re:What were you expecting? (Score:2, Insightful)
However, there does seem to be a tendency to focus on the positive aspects of the products, but still, those benchmarks are out there, and clear explanations with them what they mean, how they were obtained, and why they are the way they are...
Re:What were you expecting? (Score:2, Insightful)
And what's in a $200 graphics card after a few months will be in a $50 graphics card in a few more months, at which point I'll buy one.
Re:What were you expecting? (Score:2)
Re:What were you expecting? (Score:2)
And when the games are released in white-box budget editions, I'll buy them too...
Re:What were you expecting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does this get modded up? That's great that you don't have much interest in 3d gaming and/or you don't feel the need to buy the latest and greatest. Lots of people have different interests in different things. If the latest video card doesn't interest you, move on.
However, just because you're not throwing down $400 for a new graphics card, you're no saint. You didn't save any whales, the world hasn't been made a better place. People need to buy the latest and greatest shit so that the technology can eventually filter down to you. That's how it works.
Letting the world know you don't care to spend money on a top dollar video card is about as insightful as me saying how I'm not going to smoke crack and kill hookers all day today.
Re:What were you expecting? (Score:2, Funny)
So I guess thats just me and Rob going out today?
I'll bring home a dead hooker for you.
Seeing as how you get those urges to crack open a cold one.
Re:What were you expecting? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish hardware sites would talk about more interesting things: serial ATA, 10Gbps ethernet (yes you heard me right... that's what's next...), giant LCD screens (or plasma), 7.1 channel sound, not a graphics card that gives me a 3% edge on directX 9.0 games of which there AREN'T ANY. Okay, rant over :)
Re:What were you expecting? (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems like most of these hardware sites are pretty honest. Matrox threw all its eggs into its Parhelia basket, and probably threw around lots of swag in hopes the card would get Super Bitchen press from the Super Bitchen gaming hardware sites.
Guess what? You can't put lipstick on a pig and say it's J-Lo. Parhelia stank on ice, and the hardware sites were more than happy to point it out. Now Matrox is in danger of going bust thanks to the Parhelia's failure.
However, don't put much stock in Benchmarks. The video card companies seem to be able to game the benchmarks...can you say Quack Quack [tech-report.com]?
Re:What were you expecting? (Score:2)
Hey Michael... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hey Michael... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hey Michael... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's extremely fair, especially since the submission came from an editor, not an anonymous source.
It is fair, however, to question the bias of hardware reviewers who recieve free pre-releases to play with and depend on those pre-releases to provide the reviews which earn them a living.
There's no evidence that these reviews were biased in any way. There is only supposition of guilt, which is preposterous, because these same reviewers have the same relationship with ATI's competition.
Re:Hey Michael... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is fair. (Score:4, Insightful)
Thats all well and good if you aren't a paid employee with customers, but this site stopped being that years ago. Unfortunately, we, the slashdot readers let them get away with it time and time again while paying their salaries by adding content and viewing the ads.
Re:Hey Michael... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now look at the operating system market and the lack innovation there. Imagine what we COULD have if Microsoft DIDN'T own the market.
GeForce FX taught nVidia a good lesson (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully nVidia will recognize that it made a dreadful mistake way back at design and specification time on the FX, and learn from it. If it doesn't then it's commercially dead, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Within the company, this probably requires booting out some managers and pressing some engineers' noses onto red-hot heatsinks.
I agree, there's no need to bash the reviewers. Everyone knows that they try to butter up the hardware suppliers, but they still deliver fairly objective reviews, so there's no real problem.
nVidia's big mistake... (Score:2)
As originally intended, the GeForce FX chipset would have easily outpaced the Radeon 8500 series, but when ATI showed the Radeon 9700, it forced nVidia to do a crash program development to speed up the GeForce FX chipset as far as possible, which resulted in the card with its thermal cooling system akin to the Outside Thermal Exhaust System (OTES) pioneered by Abit for their overclocked GeForce4 Ti4200 cards. Unfortunately, the card ended up being quite noisy from the cooling system and its performance was not quite the Radeon 9700 equalizer nVidia had hoped.
Hopefully, nVidia has learned its lesson and the upcoming NV31 and NV34 chipsets will have higher performance without having to resort to a noisy oversized cooling system.
For ATI developers: Linux support of R200 Models (Score:4, Interesting)
These cards are partly supported by the DRI project on dri.sourceforge.net since they lack important features as texture compression making them useless for games as DoomIII.
Thanks.
ps. Or at least, please help the DRI guys complete the great job.
Re:For ATI developers: Linux support of R200 Model (Score:4, Informative)
2.1. Video Driver Enhancements
* ATI Radeon 9x00 2D support added, and 3D support added for the Radeon 8500, 9000, 9100, and M9. The 3D support for the Radeon now includes hardware TCL.
Looks like pretty good support to me... I really prefer that to a binary-only driver such as NVidia's.
Note for ATI and nVidia developers (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, disabling the VGA BIOS would allow users of Alpha/Sparc/MIPS/PPC/Power(3/4) platforms to use a wee-little standard VGA graphics card that we know works (like a S3, Permedia2, G200, or RagePro), then throw a hefty ATI Radeon 9800+ Pro XPERTONIA ++plutonia++ 256MB or nVidia GeForce FX 6000++BrownOut/cooker 256MB L24a adaptor into the AGP port or hopefully see a 64bit PCI model from ATI/nVidia and we could use your hardware!
Sincerily,
The Alpha Troll
Not again!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not again!!! (Score:2)
mcp:kaaos
Hey michael (Score:3, Interesting)
I know I speak for everyone here when I say "michael, JUST SHUT UP!!!!!"
Re:Hey michael (Score:2)
Fairness in reviewing (Score:5, Interesting)
I've noticed this same trend with US motorcycle magazines when the clamor for they latest and greatest motorcycles. They rant and rave about the bike's strong points and minimise its shortcomings. The British bike mags (at least the ones that I can get here in Canada) don't seem to be as forgiving about problems with a bike, yet they all still seem to be able to get early access to the bikes.
Re:Fairness in reviewing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Fairness in reviewing (Score:2)
I do believe that biased reviewage might have made AMD's K6 look competitive with Intel's offerings of the time. I just bought an old PIII 500MHz that blows away all the several K6-3 450s and the K6-2 500s that I have built, in real office tasks, where there are only rarely an FP op, where AMD's offering was claimed to be faster at that task.
Re:Fairness in reviewing (Score:2)
>>>>>>>
But they do. Have you actually read the pointed-to review or did you just rely on the BS the original poster said? These benchmarks are totally open. You can download them and run them for yourself. As others have said, faking benchmarks would easily be caught when everything is so public.
Slashdot's attitude really pisses me off sometimes. You've got a whole bunch of sanctimonious jerks who try to minimize hardware enthusiasts and their websites. What irks me the most is that the same people who bitch at others for getting excited over a $400 graphics card get all worked up over 20GB/sec Sun backplanes. Or $11,000 headphones or reference speakers or chrome car parts or whatever. We all have our little areas of interest. Just because you're a programmer or sysadmin and do "real work" doesn't make you a "better" nerd.
PS> I'm not a gamer. I used to be, and I used to follow all these sites regularly. By and large, they all have higher journalistic standards than, say, Slashdot... I still get excited over these things because I do OpenGL programming, and unlimited length shader programs are just damn sexy!
ahem (Score:5, Interesting)
seriously though - was it like last week 9700PRO became available? what's up with this break-neck card-releasing? I didn't think it was christmas yet...
Re:ahem (Score:2)
Because not all men think with their dicks, and ATI knows this?
Dinivin
Re:ahem (Score:2, Funny)
>ATI knows this?
Riiight, ATI concentrates their marketing on a little-known marketing segment with lots of disposable income: eunuchs.
Re:ahem (Score:2)
Re:ahem (Score:2)
The 9700 Pro has been available for about six months.
Re:ahem (Score:2)
Re:ahem (Score:3, Informative)
Or, of course, you could just assume that this [newegg.com] is all made up. Note the 3rd review, written in early September by some teenage fanboy.
Hell, the ATI AIW 9700 Pro has been available since November.
Re:ahem (Score:2)
Re:ahem (Score:2)
It's obviously not, since the new GeForce still isn't out yet, and it was supposed to ship before Christmas...
Seriously, though, the 9700 was released about five months ago. nVidia hasn't gotten around to releasing their competition to it (in their defense, they're releasing it this week), so yes, ATI is ahead of the game.
Given the number of nVidia fanatics running around, ATI needs to be doing it better and faster and more often, at least for a while. The best thing to happen for the video card industry is for ATI to kick nVidia's ass for a while, and then for nVidia to rise to ATI's new level. Competition is what we all should want to see.
We've seen phase one, now it's time for nVidia to collectively say "yikes!" and start competing.
Re:ahem (Score:3, Funny)
Re:ahem (Score:2)
Re:ahem (Score:2)
As noted elsewhere, the 9700 Pro has been available for a number of months.
However, I'd guess the real reason behind this "new" product is due to process improvements on the part of ATI's fab partners. A few tweaks and higher yields means they can squeeze a few percentage points performance out of their high-end cards for no increase in cost.
What the submitter missed is that the higher-volume "mid" range card (9600) is on a new process (0.13-micron). Smaller process = less cost for comparable performance to its predecessor (the 9500). This benefits gamers as the cost of "pretty good" performance continues to fall.
Comparing the two, it's obvious that the performance delta between them is substantially less than the cost difference ($400 vs $150).
Re:ahem (Score:3, Insightful)
The monkey is harder to render :-)
Keep it up ATi. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Keep it up ATi. (Score:2)
Four hundred dollar car? When did ATI start reproducing the Pinto?
Re:Keep it up ATi. (Score:2)
if ATI wants to have me and others like me start to reccomend their hardware start providing drivers for OS's other than the legacy Microsoft products... Or print on the box "FOR WINDOWS ONLY - ALL OTHERS GO AWAY".
I influence 50 video card purchases a year. i personally have bought 6 of them this year for my use or business use.. and they ALL have been Nvidia because of ATI's lack of linux support.
Re:Keep it up ATi. (Score:2)
I don't know where you're getting the PowerVR. I haven't been terribly impressed with their drivers. Until recently, they didn't even have AGP support, nor XVideo support. The XVideo support is still very buggy. Specifically, I've been experiencing the following on RH8:
- No RH8 support (the last driver release was Oct. 2002)
- Drivers built with GCC 2.95.x, so they won't load safely with stock kernels built with GCC 3.x
- Complete system freezes when watching full-screen TV.
- Horrible sound quality when watching TV and playing sound at the same time.
- Disgusting flicker in 3D apps, including texture blockiness and artifacts.
Re:Keep it up ATi. (Score:3, Interesting)
Here is an inquire article about it too (Score:4, Interesting)
Quoting: ATI will call the extended set of DX9 features the DX9++, although we suppose it could add just as many ++++++ as it wanted to. ... ... Nvidia should perhaps call its own DX9 extensions DX9## or DX9.NET.
the sad thing is, though - I would not be surprised if Nvidia did release a DX9# or something stupid like that. I mean, look at Athlons naming themselves AthlonXP. ack
Re:Here is an inquire article about it too (Score:2)
Yeah, Microsoft is everywhere. Just the other day I realized my house had these things called "Windows".
More ati = more gooder (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:More ati = more gooder (Score:5, Insightful)
Yay. And then in two years, ATI will be the big scary company, Nvidia will be the underdog, and we can all applaud Nvidia for providing ATI with some competition. The cycle will complete itself, ad nauseum.
I'm starting to think that Slashdot readers are actually communists; nobody's allowed to root for the big guy (who presumably got bigger because of the better products).
And the good news is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Tho I won't have the top of the line =(
It beats having the bottom of the line =)
Re:And the good news is... (Score:2)
so much for being top of the heap...
What? no ASC? (Score:3, Funny)
I'm browsing slashdot using Telix and the refresh rate is really bad with the 9500ASC.
Pixel shader horror (Score:2, Interesting)
"In ShaderMark the GeForceFX pretty much terrible when it comes to pixel shader 2.0 performance compared to the 9700Pro and 9800Pro. Performance of the GeForceFX is horrible compared to what these cards are showing us. The 9800 Pro improves up to 50 FPS in some cases compared to the 9700 Pro. There is no doubt that the 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro have very strong pixel shader speed.
This benchmark also does give some credence to the 3DMark03 PS2.0 numbers.[my bold face] More PS2.0 coming next week that will really get you asking questions."
a nice change (Score:5, Funny)
(from the Register)
"Effectively a 0.13 micron version of the four-pipeline 9500 Pro, the new chip will run both faster and cooler than its predecessor"
Yes cooler... COOLER.
Not so freaking hot you need to strap a briggs&stratton lawn mower engine up to a card to power the fan to cool the f'ing thing. Are you listening Nvidia?!
Re:a nice change (Score:2, Funny)
"Man, that fire, it's like burning so much COOLER than that time we burned our school books!"
More Coverage (Score:2, Funny)
I have two questions. (Score:3, Interesting)
2. How many games will be out within the next six months to take advantage of this cutting edge technology?
I understand this is the business practice of these times. To always wait about 6-8 months before hyping up the next release of something. Why so many changes to squeeze more fps? Is it like trying to add 10 more HP to your Honda? How many people on this place can actually look at a screen shot or video and name what type of graphics card is being used and what options are set like AA and such?
Re:I have two questions. (Score:2, Informative)
I, and most hardcore gamers, can not only tell the difference between 45 and 100 fps, but it makes a very real difference in my response times. I simply do better if I play at a high resolution, high contrast, with a high framerate. So much so that I will tweak the settings in any game to be able to run the max resolution at the highest framerate, even if I have to turn off the pretty stuff and kill my sound quality to do it.
As for AA, no I can't tell you whether I am looking at 16XAA or 8XAA without seeing them side by side. I can however tell you instantly whether I have at least 4Xaa and I am in a flight sim (where it REALLY makes a difference)...
Re:I have two questions. (Score:2)
Absolutely! YOu should see Quake3 on my old Rage Pro vs my new 9700Pro! You can definately see the difference.. or get ahold of 3dbenchmark and run it.. see the differences as it tells you waht the actual framerates are.
2. How many games will be out within the next six months to take advantage of this cutting edge technology?
Well, I think UT2K3 is pretty cutting edge.. it beats the heck out of my system as is, which is an Athlon XP 2200, and a radeon 9700pro and 512MB of ram. So the games are already here.. and the next big one will probably be Doom3 which, apparently, you will need godlike hardware to even touch.
So yeah.. the games are there.. and will be there.. I just bought the top I could find because I was tired of having to step upgrade each time I found a new game I liked.. the 9700 pro should be sufficient for quite a while.
Maeyrk
Re:I have two questions. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I have two questions. (Score:2)
>>>>>>>>>>
Yes. If the average rate is 100, you'll almost never see the game stutter when 10 people are on the screen and everything is exploding at the same time. If the average is 45, it'll become a slideshow when things get hot.
2. How many games will be out within the next six months to take advantage of this cutting edge technology?
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Many. Doom III and all its progeny should be out by then, along with stuff like splinter cell. It'll be a good long while before we have cards that will run Doom III at 1600x1200 at 100fps.
Cut the editorializing crap please (Score:5, Insightful)
I have BOTH bleeding edge cards right now, and unfortunately for NVDA, it's just plain "true" that the Radeon's are top dog at the moment. If you don't believe them, run your own benchmarks.
On the whole ATI vs nVidia thing... (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's the text I'm refering to below.
----
Pipelines, pipelines... February 25, 2003
Hello, world.
Just wanted to write a word or two regarding the issue raised couple of days ago. Seems like the whole Internet community wants to crucify nVidia about the controversy of how many rendering pipelines GeForceFX realy has. Is it 8 pipelines with 1 texture unit, or 4 with 2, or ... uh... I don't know anymore. And it really DOESN'T matter that much!
The only thing that matters is how fast and how good it can render pixels. And both GeForceFX and Radeon9700 are great products, the kind of hardware that developers long for. So, personally, I don't care much what's "under the hood".
Don't get me wrong, I am into 3D-graphic hardware, but this pipeline thing really went out of proportion. Number of pipelines is a good hardware information, and that's all there's to it. It really doesn't need to reflect the speed of the hardware directly. Come to think of it... currently, there are no games that utilize even 1/3rd of nifty features these two boards have.
Oh, before I forget... I'm not "nVidiot" (and I'm not "fanATIc", either). I'm just a game developer who wants good and fast technology for the future. And both ATI and nVidia have it now!
Just my two cents.
Dean "3D" Sekulic
(Programmer)
P.S. Yes, I snapped.
And you blast the reviewer sites? (Score:4, Informative)
Okay if your not sure, then you should go back and look at Tom's Hardware revealing the massive flaws in Intels chips in years past, or for those who say they are AMD lovers at TH, then check the videos they made of athelons melting down. Yes they did get a cold shoulder from Intel, but that didn't stop them.
While I will be the first to say that the is nothing such as "unbiased" in the world. Most of these sites try very hard to be objective. The ones that don't loose credibilty very quickly. These sites have their writings out on display, go spend some time looking through back articles, Bias is very easy to spot over time.
http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20020819/inde
You can see from the above article that the 9700 was released more than 6 months ago.
While they have had serious driver issues in recent time (notably the 8500), the drivers for the 9700 are top notch and were at release.
For the record my preferences are for ATI and AMD, but I can set aside bias and state that the K6-2 sucked and that the later version of the Athelon run way too hot considering AMD use to be know for a cool chip. And I can point out that ATI drivers have sucked bad in the past. But the fact is, that right now both companies are and have been, providing the best value for the dollar (and in ATI the scores). And that's why I like them. Hey I used to be 3dfx person, and I hated ATI at one time....
Opinions change. Facts don't... use some next time.
Re:And you blast the reviewer sites? (Score:3, Funny)
--Dan
Reviews In Themselves Are Opinions And Subjective (Score:3, Interesting)
As for the reviews themselves, I stopped getting a stiffy long ago for the "biggest and baddest" video card. These days I look at the price more than the polygons it can clear. I also consider the driver support since I've also outgrown the "tinker forever" phase. I buy a card that is priced well and just works.
Why did this happen? The last ATI card I bought was at the time the biggest and the baddest and also a piece of junk since it never ever worked right nor did any game work with it correctly. So for all of the reviewers that said that ATI was super elite I found it a piece of crap. After that card I demanded that all cards work out of the box or else it goes back. No stellar glossy review will convince me otherwise.
But my bad experience doesn't invalid the reviewers that said that the ATI was stellar. It is their opinion and its no more or less valid than my experiences. So take my "review" as is and take theirs the same way. You should not take my experiences as the way all Raedons perform nor should you take the pundits experiences either.
Good news for nVidia (Score:2)
ATI Radeon 10300 just doesn't sound right.
Ha HA! (Score:2)
At least for 6 months or so...
Then I'll need to get a new card, because of course I need to run the newest games at 1600x1200 and higher with all the options on.
Except when I play multiplayer. Then I'll reduce resolution to 640x480 and turn all the effects off. Because having a 200+ framerate really does help, even though my monitor only refreshes at 85Hz.
RV300 Price Points? (Score:3, Interesting)
The 9800 is only marginally better than the 9700, and the 9700 is far far better than the new 9600. The new 9600 is supposed to be $219 and the new 9800 replaces the 9700 at $399. That leaves a big gap.
What I'm worried about is if ATI is going to continue producing 9700's, will they be under $300? Anything less than $299 and I'll feel ripped off. (Unless I can get a price adjustment from CC.)
Still, I got a good deal I suppose. I never would have spent $399, and if they stop making 9700's then I paid a fair price for it too.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Funny)
mcp:kaaos
Re:What? (Score:3)
Perhaps they should take a look at 1) the cpu, 2) the memory, 3) the storage, 4) the broadband and any number of other markets and realize making something ridiculously fast and even more ridiculously expensive isn't a very good idea. If you go out and buy their cheap cards twice as often as you'd upgrade to their top of the line cards, you'll spend half as much money and always have a latest generation card capable of playing all the latest games with all the greatest detail levels with a framerate fast enough that you won't know the difference.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that's just not true.
Take UT2k3 as an example. Turn up everything on high, set your anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering to max, and go play online... your frame rate is going to suck so badly it doesn't matter how good you are.
And if you're hoping the card will perform better when Doom3 is released, well...
That said, you can back things off very slightly - particularly on the AA and AF fronts - and things will be just fine with a $150 video card. And you can do what you suggest. Which, frankly, is probably fine for most people.
And while by and large I don't stare at the eye candy when playing UT2k3 online, there was a massive improvement in going from a GF2 to a GF4 Ti4200 - upping the visual quality very much improved the experience (and the frame rate boost didn't hurt my play either).
And, yes, you really do want your framerate above 60 fps at all times. Below that you will start seeing stuttering -- video cards don't display motion blur like film or video do, so 24 or 30 fps is not good enough.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
We're talking about graphics cards that have more transistors and processing power than most CPUs. Have you looked at the R300 or NV30 GPUs? The shaders are fully programmable... just like CPUs are. Except they're a whole lot faster for the operations they're designed for.
You're also talking about video cards with 128 MB of memory that's 2-3x the speed of the stuff you put on your motherboard. Of course, a few years ago, 128 MB was more than you'd put in anything short of a workstation.
In otherwords, that $150 video card has more horsepower than the an entire workstation did just a few years prior. Oh, and the workstation cards are based off the same chips but only cost about 4x as much now - which is a considerable improvement over how it used to be.
Hell, I still remember seeing one of the first VR systems in the early 90s from GVU at Georgia Tech. It was designed to help reduce acrophobia and consisted of a SGI Onyx with a RealityEngine2. It could usually do 30 fps at 640x480 in 8 bit color with non-textured simple solids. Put more than a dozen or so objects in the FOV though and you started stuttering badly. The system cost roughly $600,000 - without the VR goggles.
About a year or so later you could go out to CompUSA and buy a 3DFx Voodoo card for $200 that could handle 100x the polygons, with texturing, at the same resolution with a higher frame rate.
Heck, companies are now looking at the GeForce FX and ATI Radeon 9700 cards and considering doing movie-quality rendering on them. Because they're getting that good. And you can do it in a tenth the time it would take otherwise. Trading a $10,000 workstation for a $400 video card sounds like one helluva deal to me.
Let's chain down the game developers and make them use $40 SiS305 cards, or better yet, $20 second-hand Matrox G400s and Voodoo3s
Why? Those cards are all cheap for a reason - they're crap. They don't support any of the graphics capabilities desired nowadays (the G400 and SiS305 don't even support the graphics capabilities of their time). You may get UT2k3 running on a G400 or V3, but not at a reasonable frame rate, and in order to get that reasonable frame rate you have to ditch visual quality features. There's simply no way around it.
Doom3 on such a card? Yah, right.
If you're happy with graphics from 5 years ago, then keep playing those games. But whining about cost and "it's not a workstation" just shows how amazingly ignorant you are.
Re:Chunky Capital (Score:2)
Re:What? (Score:2)
Re:What? (Score:2)
Re:What? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What? (Score:2, Interesting)
Already done -- middleware such as RenderWare, Net Immerse, etc., already provide this, and are starting to be used more and more.
The reason there hasn't been a standard for graphic engines, is because the problem is an old one -- flexibility (abstraction) vs performance (hard-coded). Game engines that are flexible used to suffer a HUGE frame rate hit, which is completely unacceptable on consoles, where they needed 30 fps minimum.
e.g.
BSP Trees vs Sphere Tree. A BSP Tree needs to be processed off-line (meant for static data, not dynamic), but gives perfect sorting, in linear time. Sphere Trees can handle dynamic objects just fine, but can't be used for sorting.
As CPUs have been become faster, and the graphics work has been offloaded to a dedicated GPU, the CPU has more time for the "general" solution, that is "fast enough."
Cheers
Hah! (Score:2)
Nonsense. My old GF2MX performs better, just by way of it existing and the 5800 not.
Re:R9800 (Score:2)
http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDM5LDM
Re:Is this gay or what? (Score:2)
Thats for homos and you know it.
Of course a homo in denile is the worst kind of homo.
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Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
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