ATI did it again...

[Nuno]

They are promising good drivers for YEARS. Now they have an excelent piece of hardware (Radeon 8500), they blew it all over again with dodgy driver support.
They spend all the time tweaking for 3dfart2001, I suppose... Shame on them...

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/01q4/011016/index.html

The current driver set 4.13.7191 for Radeon 8500 does not support SmoothVision, ATi's multi sampling FSAA solution, but only the old super sampling FSAA instead, which allows only inferior FSAA performance. In fact, SmoothVision has not yet been enabled in any driver, but it is supposed to be added by the end of this month.

The current driver is known to have issues with Athlon systems, but is supposed to run fine with Pentium 4 systems.

Tests showed that the new WindowsXP-driver does not perform stable. It is also showing inferior 3D-performance compared to Win9x or Win2000.

I just don´t believe ATI can fix it sooner enough. Maybe 1 year from now, they got half decent drivers (assuming the same Radeon 1 pathway, but even original Radeon drivers weren´t this bad)

[Helevitia]

Well, wait till its actually in the consumer hands to make judgement. Nobody actually has one yet.

Dave

[isochar]

Doesn't the 8500 use the same drivers as the 7500 and 7200?

[The PIT]

Athlon systems is probably referring to Via chipsets they're always having drivers rewritten for them.

[GT98]

If you read Rage3d.com DG on the Radeon 8500 you'll find out that theres alot of errors with Tom's quick Review. From the other reviews I've seen there are still some performance issues, though I wont pass judgement till I see DX8.1 out and the DX8.1 drivers for the card. Plus it was too good of a deal to pass up a Dell special R8500 for $216 bucks with overnight shipping! I'm still getting the Next Gen Matrox Card...maybe we'll finally see a Card that will put Nvidia in its place


Scott

[Topha]

i remember buying a card called g400max, which got really good reviews except for the drivers

ill be buying a new system in a few weeks, and it looks like it will have a 8500 AIW in it

[Indiana]

Yes, and this review was done by "I'm all bribed by Intel and NVidia" Tom. If you'd list all errors in NVidias 20.x drivers, it would read even much worse, still in overall NVidia has the best drivers out there.
I'd really wait for some real review or even better for the average comments of users in the forums once it is out.

If you still don't know how to take those online computer hardware reviews, simply take a look at the SBLive reviews... It was always rated excellent, not one single mention of the crappy drivers or the inferior sound-quality, worse than even some of Creatives own older cards.

[Gurm]

Running these drivers on a standard Radeon 64MB SDR right now (gotta love price drops - it ran me $89 retail!), they work fine in XP - no major problems YET. Did I mention that I've really missed ATI's video support?

- Gurm

[EvilDonnyboy]

I can buy an OEM Radeon 8500 TODAY. All i need is to drive 30min to missisauga (just oustide of Toronto). $340cdn. Also the Radeon 7500 has been widely available in Toronto for over a week now. Considering Toronto's in canada, major US cities usually get these things earlier. True ATI's based just outside of Toronto (Richmond Hill, basically considered Toronto anywaz), they make 'em in south-asia and usually ship 1st to USA.

anywaz, I don't think their drivers are nearly as terrible as it coulda been. At least everything works fine (with the exception of Smoothvision). All that's needed is for the speed hacks and optimisations to filter into the drivers.

GF3 didn't have as fast drivers as it does now when it released. SO give ATi a chance to fix theirs up. If 3 months from now, and the drivers aren't dramatically improved, I'll be bitching by then too. Cause i'll prolly have bought a 8500DV by then.

[DuRaNgO]

Yup, Tom's is the last place to go for an objective review

[RusCoder]

Look here http://www.digit-life.com/articles/r8500.new/index.html if you want a real "in-depth review of the new ATI RADEON 8500". Warning: it's very long.

[[GDI]Raptor]

Tom is sponsored by Intel & nVidia, take his article about processors loosing their heatsink in "Quake III" for ezxample.... that was to stupied.......

[isochar]

What I find wrong about the article at digit-life is the use of Win98SE as the benchmark. WinXP has clearly shown to be a superior OS in every aspect.

When the ATI card goes to WinXP, the sub-standard drivers give it 25% worse performance in a good portion of games. Whereas the Nvidia drivers give the same, if not better performance. Stability and quality issues with the ATI drivers are another issue...

[Gurm]

I don't understand why everyone bashes ATI's current driver offerings. They're not great (I prefer the Omega drivers - Omega took over where Lightspeed left off) but they are certainly improving.

nShitty-hahahahaha drivers, on the other hand, routinely **** people over. Why go there?

- Gurm

[isochar]

nVidia GF3 500ti gives the same performance in WinXP as Win98.

ATI on the other hand gives the 8500 user a 25% performance decrease when using WinXP.

Tell me again how nVidia is screwing people over?