Finally Got my ATI 8500

[The PIT]

Well my G550 whips it's ass in 2d Quality.
The drivers are as buggy as hell the lastest ones don't install and you have to disable norton protect to finnish the installation with the old drivers. If you don't the radeon will crash out under win98.
Under win2k I got stuck at 60hz even though the card thought it was running at 85hz. Eventually found another tab under monitor properties which isn't under the monitor tab but under display where I could set the refresh rate by turning off ddc .

Whoever wrote these drivers needs shooting.

[Maggi]

sorry to hear ... no certified drivers available ?

[The PIT]

I see theres some other drivers around, uncertified of course which I'll give a try at sometime.

[Novdid]

I got tired of waiting for my 8500 so I went for a 7500 instead, cost me 150€ less. The speed of the 7500 is more than enough for me.

But most importantly the drivers are quite mature under 2k for the older Radeon chipset. The 5.13.6011's work great so far for me.

[xortam]

From what I hear the 7500 has better TV picture quality than the 8500s if that matters to you.

[Pace]

I've got an old ATi with the same bug on Win2k. The main problem is it switches DDC back on every reboot and power saving change.

D...'...O...H...!

[Indiana]

You guys ought to use the 5.13.3286, the 5.13.6006 or the 5.13.6011 drivers. They are solid here in Win2k.

[Novdid]

I've already tried the board's TV-out, works very well. Can't say if it's better than a 8500 though, haven't seen one in action.

The reason is that there's essentially no 8500 boards in Sweden...4 months after release. I would say that's worse than the shortages of the G400 MAX 2,5 years ago.

[PeTe]

Hmm..

1) there are refreshfix programs atleast for XP, not sure if there is one for W2k. I used a prog that i ran once, and refreshes in games have allways worked since. Nice thing with my old Hitatchi monitor that it allways shows the res/refresh when it changes resolution.

2) The drivers that comes with the card REALLY arent worth the install, guessing best W2k drivers are now the 6011-leaked beta's ( there are 6018's but not sure that you can use them with w2k ).

3) The drivers arent perfect, but the 6011-> are pretty good ( and if you are using drivers from the CD then i understand why you call them buggy as hell. ).

In fact really dont have that much issues with the drivers, there might be a "high-poly" bug in the drivers still, but since i havent played RTCW too much ( the forrest level ) i havent seen that yet.

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HOLD THE PRESS.
Just read from the Rage3d.com forums that there are 6014 WHQL drivers available for EVERY RADEON CARD FROM THE MICROSOFT WINDOWS UPDATE. Dont know if these work with W2k or just XP. But check them out.

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PeTe

[The PIT]

I wonder if I'll have to disable norton protect again? Another thing I've noticed that if I enable 32bit z buffer the card will crash in 3dmark 2001.
I've noticed the silly monitor settings in win2k has caught several people out as well.

[Schattenreiter]

> The PIT wrote:
Whoever wrote these drivers needs shooting.
----

Ati stays Ati. No matter the cost. Like Matrox, wouldn´t you agree?

Seriously: Deactivate Norton Protect! Norton is unfamous to protect you´re system. But who protects your system from Norton?!

A friend of mine had a defective Norton-Install on his machine and had to reinstall Windows to keep his system running again.

Deactivate it and try again. You loose nothing (The Norton CD should be bootable, isn´t it? So in any case you´re protected.)

And forget crashes in 3dmark2001. As long as all your games run fine and stable under 32bit...

[The PIT]

Well I broke windows 98 again by uninstalling hydra vision as I had no plans to use for a while and we're back to low system resources and error messages saying norton antivirus couldn't run. This is funny as doesn't load on startup. I uninstalled it and the error messages disappeared. But I still need and want virus protection.
Win2k drivers aprt from the orginal drivers nothing will install.
I'll have another go tonight.

[Bohrn]

Hey The Pit, use either Omega's latest, the leaked 6012's or wait a few(2-3) days for ATI to release these for Win9x. They just released some for WinXP, and they are supposed to be great.

There are forums up at www.rage3d.com that have alot of useful info, but you have to dig thru all the rest of it to find it. The forums there are really big with alot of posts.

If you get the latest leaked drivers(which work GREAT) you also have to manually enable anisotropic filtering, as ATI broke it(duhh) on this ver. But it is easy to do, there is a tool made by a fellow called, get this, Homer Simpson that is quick and simple. Also, as these are not release drivers, I'm sure ATI will enable it. There are even sliders in the tabs there for it,they just don't work yet.

I haven't updated my sig yet, but I am running the 6012's with the hack for aniso. And I have no problems, image quality is great(2d not quite as good as g400, 3d way better), and speed is freaking BLAZING!

This will be a truly great card. Hope ya get it fixed up.

[flyawaydog]

I got one too thinking I could use the dual head features of teh ATI card like the Matrox. WRONG!!!!

The ATI card is lame. I cant use different resolutions on different moniters. The G400MAX did that fine in Win2k.

8500 32 bit looks worse than matrox 16 bit in UT.

I am probably going to send this thing back. Its sucks. (oh the framerates are faster in UT, but It is so jumpy and stutters so bad that it isnt worth it.

And I already miss the tech support forums. I cant go to ATI for help.. tech suppor there is... form letter emails. So far no response to a driver request for multiple resolutions.

Now I have the 21 moniter at what I want the other requires that I move the outside of the screen around to see what is on the screen. But the refresh rate is locked at 60 hertz and is reprting at 43.

[Wombat]

The drivers of the 7200 and 8500 may be the same <I>files</I>, but I hope they aren't the same drivers. The 8500 should have a much more advanced core, and the driver interface different, one would hope.