What OS! do you use?

[Gurm]

Originally posted by 3dfx
Well I've decided to stay with XP and I found out why I was getting abysmal performance from my computer, well it was smargart in the ATI drivers it kept enabling fast writes and my Radeon 9700 hated it so I managed to disable it through smartgart and the bios. I belive that this can only be done with certain drivers. Cat 2.3's and original Cat 3's and my kit now run's problem free touch wood

Let me know if you continue to have problems with this. I'm something of an ATI aficionado at this point, as well as a contributor at Driver Heaven... I repack drivers when Omega and Cyborg are too busy/lazy to.

- Gurm

[KvHagedorn]

Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.

Caesar made a precarious position for himself, and put himself above everyone else.. quite far above everyone else. He was rudely awakened to the reality of his mortality one day by several guys with big knives.

(I know Jesus was talking about Augustus, but the principle stands.)

[Slougi]

Originally posted by Gurm
No 3D modeling, no 100% compatibility with office apps. See dZeus's recent post when you want to talk about video playback - nevermind editing. Working with photos is hard, considering that photoshop is not yet ported. Every year I wait for these simple needs to be met, and every year I am disappointed. Again.

Well, there is Maya for Linux, Renderman, and the somewhat clumsy oss blender. What exactly do you need? GIMP is not quite up to Photoshop, but does a lot of things right. I actually like the interface more than Photoshop, due to detachable menus. Video editing is a no go, agreed, but video playback is superb. At least on gentoo it is as simple as "#emerge mplayer" and watching it compile, then play whatever you want

[UtwigMU]

Just went from 98SE/NT4.0 to single 2ksp3.

Mostly happy so far. I've used XPs at work, heck i had working copy a week b4 release and I'm not to fond of them.

[3dfx]

Originally posted by Gurm
Let me know if you continue to have problems with this. I'm something of an ATI aficionado at this point, as well as a contributor at Driver Heaven... I repack drivers when Omega and Cyborg are too busy/lazy to.

- Gurm

Hey!
Thx Gurm
tbh I cant wait to see a new set from ATI, or a new set of Omega's, one of the main things I'd like to see in the drivers is 16 bpp AA a feature seen in the leaked drivers yet it is only supported in D3d and the drivers are not very stable.

[Indiana]

3dfx, fastwrites do work with the R9700Pro with every driver I've had on my rig up to now (and I don't think I've missed many...).
However the only score where they do make a real difference in speed seems to be the EMBM test of 3DMark2001.
And apparently Fastwrites do not work as good on NForce chipsets as they do on the later VIA ones (lost quite a bit here from swapping from the KT333 to the NF2) - but that doesn't really matter, because the NF2 is faster in everything else that does make a real difference in performance.

P.S.: Have you actually tried the leaked 6275 driver yourself? I've yet to experience a crash because of having them installed - and this is in both, Win2k and XP.

[Gurm]

Originally posted by KvHagedorn
Caesar made a precarious position for himself, and put himself above everyone else.. quite far above everyone else. He was rudely awakened to the reality of his mortality one day by several guys with big knives.

(I know Jesus was talking about Augustus, but the principle stands.)

Yep. So you let the politicians take care of him, and in the meantime you pay your taxes same as the rest.

- Gurm

[Gurm]

Originally posted by Slougi
Well, there is Maya for Linux, Renderman, and the somewhat clumsy oss blender. What exactly do you need? GIMP is not quite up to Photoshop, but does a lot of things right. I actually like the interface more than Photoshop, due to detachable menus. Video editing is a no go, agreed, but video playback is superb. At least on gentoo it is as simple as "#emerge mplayer" and watching it compile, then play whatever you want

Did you READ that link that dZeus posted? It's in the video thread right next to this one. The current state of mplayer is... that it sucks hard compared to all Windows media players, but that it leads the pack of linux players. Sounds like most Linux software, sadly.

Gimp is great - unless you actually need to work with PS plugins on PS documents... the key here is interoperability. Linux is great if you never have to trade documents with Windows or Mac users.

Office suites - same deal. They're great until you actually have to modify someone else's actual Word document or Excel spreadsheet. Then they suck... due to interoperability and compabitility issues.

As for Maya - I'll have to try it. Last I heard the Linux port was not so good. I'll play with it.

- Gurm

[Gurm]

Originally posted by Indiana
3dfx, fastwrites do work with the R9700Pro with every driver I've had on my rig up to now (and I don't think I've missed many...).
However the only score where they do make a real difference in speed seems to be the EMBM test of 3DMark2001.
And apparently Fastwrites do not work as good on NForce chipsets as they do on the later VIA ones (lost quite a bit here from swapping from the KT333 to the NF2) - but that doesn't really matter, because the NF2 is faster in everything else that does make a real difference in performance.

Fast Writes, for the most part, make NO difference in speed on modern ATI chips. They DO create very real stability problems. Most of the tweaked drivers turn them off by default, and we (we = ATI driver repackers and tweakers) recommend turning them off, period. This is not your older brother's treasured PPro with an Apollo chipset.

P.S.: Have you actually tried the leaked 6275 driver yourself? I've yet to experience a crash because of having them installed - and this is in both, Win2k and XP.

I have mixed feelings on them. I'll probably be fiddling a little now that we're back in town (away for a week and lookie - new drivers! never thought I'd say that about ATI).

- Gurm

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by Gurm
Gimp is great - unless you actually need to work with PS plugins on PS documents... the key here is interoperability. Linux is great if you never have to trade documents with Windows or Mac users.

Office suites - same deal. They're great until you actually have to modify someone else's actual Word document or Excel spreadsheet. Then they suck... due to interoperability and compabitility issues.

I should point out that the problem here really lies with the Windows/Mac software, or rather the attitudes of their developers. OSS file formats are completely open - even if they're not specifically documented, the source code is there for anyone to read and learn from. If say, Adobe wanted to support the XCF (Gimp) format in PS, I'm sure the OSS community would encourage and help them do this in any way they could. Similiarly, AbiWord and OpenOffice use XML as their native formats, specifically to help interoperability.

By contrast, Win/Mac file formats tend to be kept very secret. We all know about how Microsoft change the Office file formats with every version, even though there's no need for it. They do this specifically to hinder other programs from reading/writing them.

So yes, interoperability is a problem, but one deliberately caused by the proprietary software developers. Of course, that's little comfort if you're on something non-Win/Mac and need to work with someone else's Word/Excel/PS/etc. document...

Oh and to go a bit OT, I agree tear-off menus are very nice. (It's actually a GTK feature Slougi, you can do that in any GTK(2) program.)

[3dfx]

I have tried the leaked drivers and I tend to agree with Gurm's mixed feeling's statement. I mean it's good and Bad for me, good is the AA in 16 bpp but the bad is less stable. This is mainly due to the fact that for some reason I cannot disable fastwrites in SmartGart with this Set.

[Slougi]

Originally posted by Gurm
Did you READ that link that dZeus posted? It's in the video thread right next to this one. The current state of mplayer is... that it sucks hard compared to all Windows media players, but that it leads the pack of linux players. Sounds like most Linux software, sadly.

I did read it, I just don't agree to it. MPlayer is every bit as good as wmplayer, does not take a long time to load, supports windows codecs, and is easy to configure. Actually I never needed to do anything except open it, right click -> open -> select file, and there we go. And there are nice skins available, believe it or not Can post screenie if you want one

Edit: Oh, btw, office xp and 2000 work pretty well in wine. At least office xp works without a hitch here. My mom doesn't really like openoffice

[Slougi]

Originally posted by Ribbit
Oh and to go a bit OT, I agree tear-off menus are very nice. (It's actually a GTK feature Slougi, you can do that in any GTK(2) program.)

Yup, I know, by default it is off in gtk2 though. QT supports this as well.

[Gurm]

Yeah those ATI drivers are kinda weird.

Basically it goes like this:

"We went to version 500 in series 2, then decided that everything over 450 was unstable, so we started at 450 for series 3, and added a bunch of stuff... now series 3 is at 462."

So when someone posts revision 480 as a leaked beta... I'm always a bit leery. I too have found very little to appreciate, and a LOT to dislike. I'm going to go out on a limb and officially recommend NOT using them for the time being. Within a couple weeks we'll see those additional features in the Catalyst 3.1 release.

- Gurm

[Indiana]

Originally posted by 3dfx
I have tried the leaked drivers and I tend to agree with Gurm's mixed feeling's statement. I mean it's good and Bad for me, good is the AA in 16 bpp but the bad is less stable. This is mainly due to the fact that for some reason I cannot disable fastwrites in SmartGart with this Set.

I never had stability problems because of Fastwrites being on, but that of course also depends on the used mainboard and its BIOS.
If it is not working well, why don't you simply disable fastwrites in the motherboards BIOS?

P.S.: Here is an example for the difference Fastwrites are making to the EMBM score of 3DMark:


The Fastwrites score in EMBM is over 30% higher than without.

Gurm: The 6275 are fast and stable here. Only the sharpness of 3DTextures seems a bit down from the previous Catalyst 3.0.