the new Radeon @ Toms

[maha_x]

Head out to Toms to check the new Radeon.

Some cool hardware... Hope it'l bring the GF3 prices down. I personally dont think I can spend that 400$... I bet the GF2U gets a price cut also.

Its difficult time to buy a grapics card as it feels stupid to buy one without DX8 features, but those DX7 parts are so much cheaper...

[AKDUDE]

I was im pressed by the feature set, but its obvious ATI needs to do some serious tweaking in such to get the card up for A september release.

Also, its kinda funny almost, to see nVidea release the DET 4's this week. I bet they were not sure what to do, release the DET 4's during the Radeon 8500 preview or wait till the actual card came out and was being reviewed by 1000 websites intead of 3 websites.

Heres what good ol Tom had to say about the DET release...

All in all NVIDIA's Detonator 4 release leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It was obviously timed for a release date that would possibly hurt ATi. Fine, if this makes the guys feel better. I'd prefer a driver release date that gives the customers the best driver as soon as possible and as late as necessary to ensure reliable operation. What I don't like is that the new driver shows its biggest improvements in the typical benchmarking programs, such as 3DMark2001, Quake3 or AquaMark. Rarely used game benchmarks see only little or no gain, while Giants is even losing out considerably. I leave it up to you to make a rhyme on that. Detonator 4 is a good thing for most owners of NVIDIA based cards, but I challenge the choice of its release date as well as the fact that at least one (new!) game does better with the old driver.

[maha_x]

Hey what are those two other sites besides Toms?

Hardware wise ATI has it good, they just need to get those drivers tuned up. Or mayby the Crossbar takes the win anyways... Time will show.

[maha_x]

hmmm... Comparing Anands and Toms preview seems as if Tom has made some mistakes... And he didnt get the SmoothVision to work either.

Tom:

Radeon 8500 does not come with a solution quite as sophisticated, but its memory controller is also dividing the 128-bit memory interface. While GeForce3's crossbar controller splits the 128 data lines in 4 blocks with 32-bits each, Radeon's memory controller is using a two-channel design with two blocks of 64 bit to make data transfers more efficient.

Anand:

The chip still implements a single channel 128-bit DDR memory bus (some of ATI's leaked presentations were misleading in their listing of a dual channel 128-bit memory bus). This is virtually identical to the 128-bit memory controller in the original Radeon in that it does not make use of any crossbar-like features like the GeForce3.

Also Anand tested different games, which allmost all showed worse performance than GF3. Also in my oppinion Anands writing appears much more un-biased and professional.

Well, thats what I noticed...

[Mord-Sith]

Im hopping prices will drop as well. I just dont see the need to buy either the g3 or 8500 when only about 3 games support dx8. I think im more in the market for a g2 ultra 64. Also hopfully by the time the 8500 actualy gets released the det4 will be even better. I love how nvidia is still squeesing life out of my old g1 256 ddr

[AtomicGuY]

GeForce 3 MX will support DirectX 8 fully and will be $199 US or less depending on your package. And it has the speed of a GeForce2 Pro.

[AKDUDE]

Maha,
www.anandtech.com and www.sharkyextream.com also did "previews" of the card.

AKDUDE

[maha_x]

So it was sharky who got the third board... Thanks for the info. Anand I found myself.

GF3MX should be a interesting product... Any specs for it? Is it gonna be lower rated DDR board or are they going with the SDR again? When do we get GF3MX?

[Nagorak]

Based on the inherent crappiness of the Geforce 2 MX, I wouldn't really hold my breath for great performance from the Geforce 3 MX.

I thought the Radeon 7500 looked very competitive as a budget card, even though it doesn't completely support DX 8.1.

If you have a Radeon or GTS or higher card now, though, buying either the 7500 or the GF3 MX is pretty much a waste. You'd be better of just waiting for the prices on the GF3/8500 to come down.

[maha_x]

well, Im looking to upgrade my GF1DDR. DX8 features are not very usefull right now so Im considering to skip-go this round and go for some bit more budget card like the new Radeon. Next summer or even after cristmas there should be more choises and money for me.

If U wanna make any recomendations, shoot :)

[AKDUDE]

Id say wait it out if I were you. I have a Radeon LE, flashed with the Radeon DDR 32meg bios, A Geforce DDR, and a Voodoo3.

THe Geforce DDR and the Radeon are semi close, but the Radeon Beats it in the popular tests. Both can play games at 1024x768 with no problems at all, its just that the Radeon Looks better doing it.

Id so wait it out a few months, to see whats going to happen. Im sure ATI will sort its problems out. As Toms Hardware stated, the preview cards ARE NOT the ones that ATI will be selling. He stated that his chip was had a A12 code, and the newer ones would have better a better stepping and would be called A13. Since physically the preview chips are differant than the production models that will be out next month we may be surprised. Also one thing to note, the new Radeon is just at the beggining of its life span. With buggy drivers and "preview" cards (read NOT FINISHED) they were able to keep up with the Geforce3 pretty well. The .15 micron core the Radeon has, coupled with the 3.6ns Ram, gives it alot of headroom for overclockers to play with.

ATI also has another chip coming out, code named R300. IT slated for Jan/Feb (probably will be delayed though).
AKDUDE