ATI Radeon is a DAMN SWEET card.

[The Rock]

[rant]

This is for all you folks who love that Matrox 2D and are looking for a good gaming card: ATI Radeon is IT. I look through the posts here and NO ONE mentions ATI. Nothing said but Nvidia and Kyro. I suppose given ATIs past driver horrors, thats understandable. But they've come a LONG way since that old crap. I just replaced my Geforce 2 GTS with a 64meg Radeon VIVO, and its SWEET. DO NOT be afraid to buy one of these things. Awesome 2D / DVD / 3D all under Win2k with a VIA chipset and STABLE as hell. This card kicks. It is THE best all around video card I've owned since Unreal Tournament forced me to sell my beloved G400. Since ATI bought ArtX, their driver team has doubled, and so has the frequency of driver releases. Not to mention the quality of the drivers has improved immensely. I can't believe that people still don't consider this card as a decent alternative to Nvidia. Its almost as fast (in some cases, faster than a GF2), looks a zillion times as good, has excellent 2D, AMAZING 3D quality, DVD, etc. You Matrox gamers who are waiting on the "next big thing" from the big M should consider the Radeon to hold you over.

[/rant]

Bart

[Kruzin]

That's not a [rant], it's a [rave].
Plenty of people have talked about Radeons here. It sounds like a very decent card (although I have heard it's much better with 9x than 2k). If I was in the market to shell out bucks for a new card today, Radeon would be a serious concideration.
But I'm not in the market, and My G4x0 cards are doin fine....so I'll just wait for the Gwhatever to come around....



[This message has been edited by Kruzin (edited 05 April 2001).]

[Rags]

Too bad they still can't get a decent set of win2k drivers out, I have a 230 dollar paper weight sitting in my daughter's barbie box now because the Radeon drivers are so screwed.

Rags

[xortam]

Apparently the Radeon is the current card of choice for HT folks. They don't care about gaming and are using the card for DVD playback under Win98.

[Helevitia]

"I can't believe that people still don't consider this card as a decent alternative to Nvidia."

I've owned one for months now for the very reasons you mention above. I am just glad I bought it a while back so that when M does(hopefully) come out with there new card, I'll feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of this one because I AM upgrading to the next M card unless it just completely sucks. That is hard to imagine though.

Dave

------------------
What if the Hokey Pokey is what it's all about?

[Lucid]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by The Rock:
...since Unreal Tournament forced me to sell my beloved G400.</font>

Huh?

[mdhome]

Hello Rock
Can vouch for the Radeon. Its been my main cvard for 3 months now but boy am I looking forward to Matrox's next.


regards MD

[Indiana]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Helevitia:
"I can't believe that people still don't consider this card as a decent alternative to Nvidia."

I've owned one for months now for the very reasons you mention above.
</font>

The same here, especially ith ATI new low prices, they were the last push for me to get a RadeonDDR 64MB. And i'm quite happy with it, I didn't have, at any time, the urge to put my G400 back in...

And since I already owned a NVidia product, I definitely cannot understand that people who are not happy with the G400s 3D-speed don't consider it as first choice replacement. If you have any concern for image-clarity (and if you don't you should really NEVER have got a Matrox-card in the first place....) you simply can't be pleased by NVidias products.

[Pace]

Just a couple of points...

1. Opinion here has been quite favourable to ATi's best for quite a while, and was the main alternative to the GF range. The Kyro II obviously attracts a lot of attention due to it's tile based rendering. However, ATi's drivers in Win2k are slow. Do a search on Radeon and see...it's been mentioned quite a bit.

2. Image clarity is not the reason I bought Matrox, it was the whole package! At the time of the G400's release, Matrox were the leaders in every area of graphics I'd say, with the slight worry of poor OGL performance. However, many people will buy Matrox on the strength of DualHead alone, never mind the rest of it's features

P.

[The Rock]

Win2k speed with the Radeon is fine (fast as hell for me) with the 3116 drivers. They aren't as "slow" as people make em out to be.

Bart

[Indiana]

Yes, overall Win2k-speed is fine with the later driver-sets. But there still are some few games that only get 60-70% of the Win98 framerate, like MBTR (not that i'd like this game very much, though...).

The T&L performance in Win2k is quite a bit slower than in Win98 - but this mostly effects only the 3DMark200x High Polygon count tests, so i don't really care.