Got my Radeon 8500 today

[Hati]

@Indiana
Thanks, I put an order at comtech too.
Finally lost my hope something from Matrox will show up within the next 2 - 3 months.
Will keep the G400 in my second system.
Cheers,
Hati

[Indiana]

My G400 sits in my second system since quite some time now. The 8500 will replace my old Radeon. (Well Matrox, that's 2 times you missed my bucks already with the G450 and the G550, so when will we see something spectacular?).

Besides IF Matrox announces something worthy in three months, there will be another three until we can actually buy it. Then wait another 3 months and it will be at an acceptable price, so there's enough time inbetween for another solution (like the 8500) anyway.

P.S.: you should d/l the new beta driver for the 8500 as the one it's coming with is known to have quite some issues.

[Bohrn]

hehe, yea, even if I was to need another card in a year, that would be the earliest that a viable matrox product would hit the shelves in my neck of the woods.

and yea, grab the newest drivers, and check out the great screensavers they have at their (ati) site. only for 8500s tho.

[EvilDonnyboy]

I find the screensaves rather unimpressive.

The Island demo however, looks amazing. So many razor sharp textures. The vertex/pixel shader effects looks good too, but doesn't have the impact of the sharpness of those textures.

[Bohrn]

o, thats too bad, I grabbed em before I had the card, o well.

[Bohrn]

well, i got my card today and installed it on my lunch break It is good so far, and the screensavers(ocean, tubes and bubbles for sure, the brains one is a bit dumb) seem pretty cool for me! The oragnicity(new word?) is way up there and the other effects are very nice.

Only prob I have so far is that the Sachs Marine Aquarium screensaver that I have had for a while now doesn't work at the correct refresh rate. I didn't have alot of time, but I couldn't get it to work at above 60hz. Wierd.

I will post a more indeapth piece later, but GREAT card so far. And it is a Canadian company like the Matrox cards so that is good.

[Fat Tone]

I found the bubbles ss to be dissapointing as many of the bubbles are very pixelated. The rest are cool.

And what about Rachaels cheesy smile

[Bohrn]

well, I got the 60hz thing sorted out. It turns out that in the registry, every resolution is set to 60hz. I just changed it to 85 and all is well. Or you can download the latest Omega drivers for it. They are tweaked a bit. They turn off things that are not used(SSE2 optimizations I believe) and they speed things up a good bit, while making other things better like the aforementioned refresh rate changes.

Yes Rachel has a cheesy smile, but overall I am quite impressed by the demos. Very lifelike skin and water etc. Nice!

I am also impressed with the 2d speed and quality. Right up there with my G400 for sure.

I only have the oem version tho, as it was a bit (50 bucks total) cheaper than the retail. And yes, it is a real ATI peice, not some knock off. I ran the part numbers etc. So I payed $379 canadian for mine.

Also apparently, you can flash the BIOS on these cards with the retail BIOS and that makes em run at retail speeds. Not all cards handle this and for now, it is PLENTY fast for me, so I'll leave it alone, but the option is there.

For what I use it for, it RULES! Happy-happy joy-joy. Mech4 looks GREAT and has no slow downs. And I know that I can have a couple of more cpu upgrades and my video card will not be the bottleneck. Now I just need a nicer monitor. I needed one before too, but the G400 wouldn't handle the higher res at playable framerates, so it was a moot point.

[Indiana]

It's here!

Mine arrived today. It's a retail'ed OEM, though - that is, it came with a nice box but still "only" runs at 250MHz. The package says "powered by ATI" (not "built by ATI"), but still the card itself is manufactured by ATI, not PowerColor/FIC/..., it's just running at lower frequency.

After putting in the card I didn't bother to install the drivers that came on CD with it, instead I took Omega's re-pack of the latest drivers and everything is fine: started 3DMark2001, 3DMark200, FinalReality, Q-III, Q-II, Driver, NFS5, FIFA2000, DVDs, some DivXs. No problem visible, the speed is - of course - great.
However at first I noticed the 2D quality to be noticeably down from my old Radeon in 1600x1200, even in 1280x1024 - until I remembered the "shimmering with Trinitron monitors" issue with the old Radeon. Turned the fix on and now 2D quality is just fine - the same as the old Radeon, if not slightly better.
For you hardcore Matrox fans, yes it's still slightly worse than that of my G400, but I can happily live with it.
But I'd strongly recommend everyone with a highend trinitron monitor (Iiyama A201HT/VisionMaster510Pro here) to apply the shimmering fix. I just don't understand why ATI don't turn this on as default - I don't wanna know how many web-sites miss this thing when comparing 2D quality (THG most likely, at least when looking at their totally incompetent Flask/DivX article...)

[X-Caliber]

Thinking about an 8500

Hey Everyone,

I have a fully-loaded G200 (ie: 16M, DVD(useless under XP), RRG) and I was mulling over getting an ATI 8500. I was wondering if there was a (night and day) difference in the DVD quality, is it worth the upgrade? I would also need to get another TV Tuner card. I have checked out Hauppauge's website, but I have no first hand experience. I also wanted to try getting an HDTV tuner, but the one made by Hauppauge can only output a resolution of 450i. I also need the dual head feature, so I can't do the 8500DV thing. What are the different overclocked OEM boards out there? I was going through pricewatch.com and found some boards that sell for ~$200. Are there any better offers?????

Incidently, my choice would be a Matrox card. But I can't wait any longer, I was close to getting a G400 card, but then decided to wait for the G800, which ended up being the G450, and then the G550. There next product will probably be a G650 (which will probably be slower than the G400 in 3D) but I can't wait any longer.

Thanks,

-X-

[Hati]

@Indiana

I took Omega's re-pack of the latest drivers

can you post a link please?

Hati

[Indiana]

For the homepage go to Omegadrive's little corner

Direct links:
Win2k
Win9x/ME
WinXP

WinXP and the 8500 is reported to still be a somewhat problematic combination. But then even NVidia and WinXP isn't flawless, so...

And don't use one of the various tweakers unless you know exactly what you do. The OmegaDrivers set the Registry settings to values optimized for quality and least troubles already, and you can really totally mess up the system with wrong values there. For oc'ing I'd recommend Powerstrip - my card works flawless at up to 275 MHz, at 280MHz I have minor glitches in VertexShader demos.

[Hati]

Thanks for the link!
I will give it a try and see what happens.
Hati

[Hati]

Install with the Omega drivers pack went fine without probs.
As I am using a Trinitron monitor too (Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450) : can you tell me more about how to avoid 'shimmering' (Registry entry?)
Thanks!
Hati

[Indiana]

Yes, it's a registry setting - but I don't know where to set it manually.
For this I DO use one of the Tweakers...
I'm using RaidOn Tweaker because it doesn't change anything just by installing it (I found Rage3D Tweak to mess up my system since it tries to automatically use different profiles for specific apps which are NOT the best setting here - and it's a real pain in the *ss to revert all those various reg-entries to their original state).
Get RaidOn Tweaker here
The option you're searching for is listed in the "Special settings" menu -> "Fix shimmering" select it, quit the tweaker and reboot. Voila. (However if you don't have display - problems (some flickering pixels, ghosting), then you might want to not use it - the old "don't fix anything that's not broken" rule).

P.S.: RaidOn Tweaker is discontinued and there's a new tweaker by the same author called UniTuner (can be found at the same site), but I haven't tried it up to now.

3DMark2001: 8013, 3DMark2000: 10046