Ars: ATI a takeover target?

[Jon P. Inghram]

OMG, did you have to pledge undying loyalty to ATI to become a beta tester or what!? Feels like we're being invaded by fanATIcs from Rage3D...

[Mikko]

ATI's motherboards have R3x0 cores onboard. And they're cheaper than Intel's boards. nForce boards have GF2 graphics on the early ones, GF3 on the intermediate ones, and I imagine GF4 or better on the brandy-spanking new ones. THOSE boards are also cheaper than Intel's.

I believe that GF2, GF3 and GF4MX will beat Radeon 8500 in very rare situations only.

[Gurm]

No, just eternal hatred of nVidia.

Seriously, though I'm not especially biased. I have had my share of GeForce cards. I'm STILL biased against them on the basis of image quality, although admittedly they've gotten quite a bit better. Nobody will ever stack up to Matrox in that arena though. I still have a G550 I use in one machine, I just don't play games on it.

But I am a bit leery of nVidia. I've seen too many GeForce cards MELT. I've never seen an ATI card blow its caps.

There have been debacles, sure. The early 9600's were problem-ridden. No question. That was a huge issue. ATI also have this habit of dropping not-quite-ready-for-primetime "features" into their release drivers. The automatic overclocking wasn't QUITE ready. Neither was the exception recovery. Neither was CCC, to be honest.

But Christ, there are new nVidia drivers all the damn time. From nVidia, from other sources, betas here, release drivers there. Can't bloody keep TRACK of them. On the other hand, you can be PRETTY SURE that Catalyst 3.4 is, in fact, both newer and better than Catalyst 3.3 was. You can't say that with ForceWare 54.77 versus Forceware 53.12, half the time the 53.12 is NEWER, or the 54.77 has some horribly broken component.

And nVidia has been CONSISTENTLY bad. Their OpenGL has always been GREAT. I hand them that. No question, if you want the latest game from ID to run flawlessly, plug in an nVidia card. When RTCW came out, I played it exclusively on a GF3ti200, my 8500 collected dust. But everything not OpenGL related has been subject to extreme clusterfvcking from driver to driver.

Also there's the heat thing. And the EXTENSIVE "cheating on benchmarks" thing. And the engineer poaching thing. And the "crushing 3dfx because they had a better product" thing. Overall, NVidia is just a scummy company. That's not my professional opinion, that's my PERSONAL opinion.

I admit that they're faster on a regular basis. Their OpenGL is better on a regular basis. But the rest of it stands.

[Gurm]

I believe that GF2, GF3 and GF4MX will beat Radeon 8500 in very rare situations only.

Or in any OpenGL game. Let's call a spade a spade...

[leech]

There is only ONE reason I went with nVidia over ATI; Linux.

ATI's drivers still consistently suck under linux. From weird redraw errors on the desktop, to OpenGL games being completely hosed.

nVidia's drivers have their share of issues as well, but they at least work and work well under linux.

Leech

[Victorian]

When's the last time you checked? Omega hasn't done a repack in over a year. This is what I mean. You're basing your entire estimation of their driver support on the way their driver support WAS. In 2003 I might have agreed with you.

Huh? He's still doing his thing. Just checked his website and he's current with the 5.6's

[The PIT]

There is only ONE reason I went with nVidia over ATI; Linux.

ATI's drivers still consistently suck under linux. From weird redraw errors on the desktop, to OpenGL games being completely hosed.

nVidia's drivers have their share of issues as well, but they at least work and work well under linux.

Leech

And the latest ATI drivers still won't work for me under Suse Linux 9.3.

At least I've got the system working at 1600 x 1200 without the ATI drivers and since I'm not gaming it can stay like that for now.

[Kurt]

and I'm using the latest and greatest ATi driver on a PC (thank god not my main one anymore!) and dual head SVCKS majorly. OK, it's not a bug, just a feature.

they still haven't figured out how to make it work without making you lose _more_ time than with only one screen.

no games on that PC so I'm not complaining about them. haven't had much trouble with ATi's in that respect, except with my old Rage128.

most trouble I had with BSOD was with NV Ti4600 on win2k. that has passed. now I have problems with my win2k install on Nforce4. not sure it's them, but there isn't much on it (not even office) and it does strange things at times (like mouse problems opening windows and things - no spyware or other nasties whatsoever, could be a bad KB/mouse not sure)

[Gurm]

Huh? He's still doing his thing. Just checked his website and he's current with the 5.6's

Look at them. They aren't a repack. They're a bundle - Catalysts + Tweaker + Presets. No mixing and matching. No driver twiddling. No "OpenGL from a previous build".

[UtwigMU]

Well currently based on few Ati owner's experience and on my experience Matrox Parhelia Linux drivers are better than Ati. Also framerate is on par with Windows in Enemy Territory (Parhelia).

Otherwise I've seen a lot more Ati 9xxx issues than nVidia 5xxx and 6xxx issues on Arstechnica forums and saying that everyone had 9xxx is not true as there were a lot of people either holding to their Ti 4's or even got FX series because of being fanboys.

[Mehen]

ive had some issues with 5xxx cards, some of the driver updates did stupid things, there was about 4 months worth of drivers that came out (early 6x.xx's i think) where my tv-out didnt work.
as for ATI cards, my brother hasnt ever had any issues with his 9800xt, and ive never had any issues with the 7000's ive had, and ive never heard anything bad about the 9600pro/xts that some of my friends have.
On the other hand, the 128mb 8500le that we had in the house for awhile gave us nothing but problems...

[Gurm]

ive had some issues with 5xxx cards, some of the driver updates did stupid things, there was about 4 months worth of drivers that came out (early 6x.xx's i think) where my tv-out didnt work.
as for ATI cards, my brother hasnt ever had any issues with his 9800xt, and ive never had any issues with the 7000's ive had, and ive never heard anything bad about the 9600pro/xts that some of my friends have.
On the other hand, the 128mb 8500le that we had in the house for awhile gave us nothing but problems...

There were certain cards that should never have been sold. The 8500LE was never properly equipped to handle 128MB. I'm not certain that the 8500 core was set up to handle that much memory AT ALL, but I have no proof one way or the other, no inside knowledge that would lead me to conclude that. The only people that have R2x0 cores with 128MB that have been VERY HAPPY are those with much newer ones (9250, for example) or a few people with JUST THE RIGHT BIOS on an old 8500/128 DDR. But even those were sort of hacked-together cards. The BEST 8500 was the 8500/64/DDR "Built-By-ATI".

[Nowhere]

It's always nice to convince yourself that you have the best, huh?

[Kurt]

@|Mehen|: I've had tons of problems with the 7500 cards and early 7000/VE. They were drivers issues mainly. 7200 and 8500 were working fine and I never had a problem with my 9700 or 9800pro.

[Gurm]

It's always nice to convince yourself that you have the best, huh?

No, I actually went out and BOUGHT one because it was the best-of-series.