Aiw 8500

[Topha]

When is this supposed to be available? I think at one time it was supposed to be out before the standard 8500, but that doesnt seem to be the case.

Anyone know??

[Tom]

8500DV

According to the ATI website,
Fall 2001......

But that doesn't really tell us anything, does it?

This is the video card that I'm waiting for....

[EvilDonnyboy]

Same. It's looking to be a hyp card. Let's just hope the multimedia drivers work great from the launch.

[Dr Mordrid]

Slow down boys...

the word on the test sites is that ATI has cheated on their benchmarks by reducing the resolution of the textures. Also there are complaints that the drivers are somewhat unstable, which is no real suprise for an ATI card.

Dr. Mordrid

[xortam]

ATI drivers

That's unfortunate but what's the alternative?

[dancray]

I still can't believe they do not have true dual display capability...ie...2 computer monitors...not the cop out with only one compute mon and one tv.

[xortam]

DH

Is that right? I mainly need the second head for DVD viewing on TV but VGA support will be necessary as well.

[EvilDonnyboy]

Dr Mordrid, I'm quite aware of that. But i'm still going with the 8500DV for a few reasons.

1st is to help the local economy
2nd I hate nvidia. (but i'd still buy their card if it was good nuff)
3rd there's really no card that compares. Visiontek will be releasing a GF3 Ti500 with AIW like features. TV tuner, VIVO, mpeg2 capturing, RF remote etc. But I doubt it will have as good visual quality (screen image quality, caputure quality, TV-out quality) as the AIW.

and btw, right now only Q3 seems to be affected by ATi's driver "cheating". And it's easily bypassable.

[Dr Mordrid]

Yes; Q3 *seems* to be the most affected, but that's mainly because it's the most often used benchmark for gaming. That they chose to do that with the most commonly used benchmark makes me wonder what the results will be when we see real-world tests on other games & s/w.

Methinks they are targeting the "me too" market with misleading early promotion. Typical for most card makers, but ATI does it more than most.

Don't get me wrong; I hope the 8500 DV ends up being a viable card for dual-mode editing. Such a product is needed in the market and it would be nice to see the first real one turn out to be a barn-burner.

I just don't trust ATI to produce with decent drivers after my previous experiences with their product line.

Dr. Mordrid

[The Rock]

The drivers are 100x better than they were a year or 2 ago. ATI has made great progress on that front, and beginning to move to a unified Radeon driver architecture is a smart idea. My Radeon 64 VIVO has been the only card well-rounded enough to compete with my old formerly-beloved G400. A lot of people keep harping on the driver issue, but they're doing well with that lately. And lest we forget the Geforce 3 drivers weren't so hot out-of-the-gate either. My faith in ATI is growing again. And that benchmark cheating doesn't mean jack to me, considering that Nvidia has been doing the same kind of thing from day one.

Bart

[Topha]

Originally posted by Dr Mordrid
Slow down boys...

the word on the test sites is that ATI has cheated on their benchmarks by reducing the resolution of the textures.
Dr. Mordrid

yes, but nVidia has been doing that for years now

[Hati]

Some infos on the AIW8500 over at anand :

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1555

Interesting card indeed.

[Pace]

Um, how did NVIDIA cheat? I think ATi's cheating is something beyond even what NVIDIA have done, NVIDIA might optimise for a certain game - but cheating on a specific executable is a little bit off...

Paul.

[The Rock]

Nvidia is worse; they optimize drivers for a useless benchmark like 3Dmark2001. In fact, I saw several people in another forum all excited about how the latest detonator drivers increased their 3DM2k1 score by 700 points. They weren't too excited after they started benching actual games and realized the games played SLOWER. I couldn't stop laughing.

Bart

[dZeus]

they also cheated by not doing trilinear filtering but bilinear filtering plus some filters instead (in fact they stole that technique from 3Dfx if I recall that correctly). I'm not sure if they still do this, but this is just one example