for those dissing Ati drivers...

for those dissing Ati drivers....i thought this was quite funny
[anandtech]
Yesterday we brought you pictures of ATI's R300 running in VIA's booth and as we originally guessed it, VIA shouldn't have been showing off the card. It turns out that ATI ended up getting quite upset with VIA but in the end the running R300 card should have been embraced by ATI as some very good PR. Today a visit to VIA's booth revealed an ASUS GeForce2 card running in place of the R300.

To those at ATI that were worried about VIA bragging about having R300 in their suite, VIA did nothing of the sort. We recognized the board as something other than R200 or RV250 and thus inquired a bit further but for the most part VIA was simply calling it an 8X AGP card by ATI.

Is there any reason for ATI to be irritated with VIA over this? We can understand why, but at the same time, as long as no benchmarks were released and the system was running reliably there's no reason for ATI to be worried. In fact, if anything, this helps validate ATI's quiet message that they are significantly ahead of NV30 in terms of development. Interestingly enough, while the R300 equipped KT400 system was running just fine yesterday, today we witnessed it bluescreen with the GeForce2 installed. Go figure.
[/anandtech]

all i can say is that i remember when ati had a "special opengl driver" on their site and i needed it to play serious sam. that to me was bad drivers. and onless you were running beta drivers performance was a problem. not to get anyone excited but when was the last ati linux driver you saw made my ati? of course none of this is relivant to the meat of your post. ati shouldnt have gotten into a tizzy.

hmmm....yeah, i did have some problems last week trying to import video on my RageFury Pro (it would only do it in AVI and was skipping frames like crazy).....but other than that its been fine....i just posted this because i thought it was ironic that the Geforfce2 crashed while the R300 with beta drivers rant the whole way through....

when all of the features on an ATI card work right and it outperforms Nvidia is when ill get one

-Malakai

I don't understand? I have 4 ATI cards, and never had a driver /stability problem yet. Performance isn't as good as NVidia, but ATI doesn't cost as much either. But I am really thinking about getting a Ti4200 or 4400.

Plus, my ATI's can handle 200+ FSB

I haven't had a driver problem with my 64mb VIVO in many months, and then only with beta drivers. My card has been getting faster with every driver release. I've had it almost 2 years! Infact, I think Nvidia has been slacking a bit since they think they're so great.... thanks for the post funnyperson!

-Rav

I cant see myself buying a nividia card ever unless they lowered there prices. I have had no probmes or stability issues with my 8500 and it runs all my applications and games great. Its like arguing amd and intel pointless. They have close to the same performance and they beat eachother in different benches but one costs more. My reason for sticking to ati is that I can spend less, save more for future upgrade. This way i can update more frequently.

I dont think ati needs to worry about much. Might motivate nvidia to pick up the pace on their card perhaps. Sound like a fast card, with 8x agp and i think I read like 22.4 gb/s of memory bandwidth.

subconcept said:

I cant see myself buying a nividia card ever unless they lowered there prices.

Click to expand...

The GF4 Ti 4200 can be found for cheaper than the Radeon 8500, and surely it will outperform it.

AudiMan said:

I don't understand? I have 4 ATI cards, and never had a driver /stability problem yet. Performance isn't as good as NVidia, but ATI doesn't cost as much either. But I am really thinking about getting a Ti4200 or 4400.

Plus, my ATI's can handle 200+ FSB

Click to expand...

umm, their AA sucks compared to quincunx, and it took ATi over 5 months to get it (Smoothvision) working.
and how about truform? i almost got an 8500, till it started bloating the hell out of the objects on screen.
I wont be buying that Matrox card either, because it's AA wont be copatible with about half of all games.

i do not think a company should release a product till everything works. Nvidia's features always work and work well out of the box. thats what i like to see.

-Malakai

AudiMan said:

The GF4 Ti 4200 can be found for cheaper than the Radeon 8500, and surely it will outperform it.

Click to expand...

only if you pick the most expensive 8500 and the chapest 4200....i can get a Radeon8500 for 100$....you cant find a geforce4 Ti anywhere for that price...

Malakai said:

umm, their AA sucks compared to quincunx, and it took ATi over 5 months to get it (Smoothvision) working.
and how about truform? i almost got an 8500, till it started bloating the hell out of the objects on screen.
I wont be buying that Matrox card either, because it's AA wont be copatible with about half of all games.

i do not think a company should release a product till everything works. Nvidia's features always work and work well out of the box. thats what i like to see.

-Malakai

Click to expand...

I guess that explains why I haven't had any problems with the ATI's since I don't use or know what smoothvision or truform is

funnyperson1 said:

only if you pick the most expensive 8500 and the chapest 4200....i can get a Radeon8500 for 100$....you cant find a geforce4 Ti anywhere for that price...

Click to expand...

My mistake. I didn't notice the drop in prices for the Radeon 8500's until about a few hours ago I've been really keeping an eye on the 4200 and 4600's.

ROFL
smoothvision is ATi's version of anti-alaising. if your a gamer and u dont know what that is u need to be shot

anyway, Smoothvision removes jagged lines (jaggies) from games, but takes an incredible performance hit as opposed to Quincunx (Nvidia's version of AA) and doesnt look as good.

Truform attemps to take blocky objects and increase their polygon count and make round objects rounder and less blocky, but most of the time it doesnt work and makes objects all bloated.

and ATi's Ansiotropic filtering sucks, it just doesnt work right.

-Malakai

Malakai said:

i do not think a company should release a product till everything works. Nvidia's features always work and work well out of the box. thats what i like to see.

-Malakai

Click to expand...

um, then why does nvidia's video out suck so much?

Malakai, I'm not really a hardcore gamer at all. I just play CS sometimes and Age of Empires,,,, AND 3D Mark My brother is hardcore tho so maybe he might know,, but he doesn't know anything about tweaking. Radeon 7500 is more than good enough for me!


As for the TV Out,, I don't think any TV out works right unless you have a SVGA to HDTV converter. ATI's TV Out is way too distored, but I have never tried Nvidias.

AudiMan said:

ATI's TV Out is way too distored

Click to expand...

Mine is never distorted when I use my Video out . ..

I've used the s-video out on my 64 VIVO for a long time. Set it for maximum sharpness and its beautiful. DVD's look great as does Divx. Also nice to play racing games on the big TV with my wheel. The color comes out great. Only problem I've had was screwing up the refresh rates so my TV out was stuck as a 512x384 window!

-Rav

For me DVD's look fine, but when I try to play games like Counter strike, or surf the web on my TV it just doens't cut it. The picture seems so fuzzy and the colors are a bit out of whack.

I tried this with the Rage 128 AIW, and the Radeon 8500 with the same results, so I gave up
Hopefully the Ti4600 will be more clear.

What kind of TV did you say you have? I havent seen a better TV out yet then my RadeonVE that is that I use for Video work.

AudiMan said:

For me DVD's look fine, but when I try to play games like Counter strike, or surf the web on my TV it just doens't cut it. The picture seems so fuzzy and the colors are a bit out of whack.

I tried this with the Rage 128 AIW, and the Radeon 8500 with the same results, so I gave up
Hopefully the Ti4600 will be more clear.

Click to expand...

Nvidia's on the gf4's asnt supposed to look any better than ATI's TV-out

just lettin ya know

-Malakai

I just got me a Radeon 7500 OEM w/64 mb DDR from newegg. And they sent me the wrong drivers!!!! It wouldn't install nor the the drivers from there website. Not until I removed the standard PCI adapter, rebooted and forced it to install the 7500 driver from the list did it work!! Since it's OEM i had to d/l the reference drivers and it worked finally. I was confused about this cause the card was made by ATI but the regualr drivers didnt work. I never had any trouble installing my GF4 Ti4400 (or anyother nvidia card) in my main rig.
Also my VO is coming out black and white. Im sure I got the settings right. My GF4 Ti4400 output is perfectly clear and colorful on my 37 inch TV.