I've been seduced!

[Gurm]

I sincerely hope the Radeon thing works out, since ATI has always produced solid hardware...

HOWEVER...

I am very suspicious of a company who has FOUR products which are still being actively marketed which still have incomplete, buggy, or in many cases nonfunctional drivers.

Even if the Radeon has some miraculous out-of-box support (God only knows what orifice ATI pulled that out of), one need only examine the level of support available for their last 4 products (Rage Pro, Rage 128, Rage 128 Pro, and Fury MAXX) to determine the state of their driver support.

If the out-of-box drivers work, great! I say great, because those are the only functional drivers you will EVER see for this card. Period.

- Gurm

------------------
Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[paulcs]

I bought a TV Wonder right after I bought the appropriately named "Rage Fury." I only had one problem. It was not compatible with ATI's drivers. It would run with a TNT2, but not my Fury. Or anyone else's Fury.

ATI eventually fixed it with a driver update, but they disabled OpenGL somehow.

Little did we know that OpenGL could be re-enabled with a registry edit. Unfortunately, a user had to figure this out. ATI tech support appeared to be blissfully unaware of the fix. As far as they were concerned, the user had a choice: TV Wonder support or OpenGL support. This was pretty bad because Quake 2 and ATI's DVD player seemed to be the only programs people could run without getting lockups.

This is ATI's MO, as far as I'm concerned. Do the hard stuff well, but through sheer negligence, screw up the easy stuff to the point where opening Windows Explorer might take down your system.

Another undocumented feature of the Fury's early drivers. If you upgraded drivers, which you absolutely had to do, and followed ATI's directions to the letter, the procedure would trash Windows. Right after their first update, ATI's forums exploded with frantic users with almost entirely yellow 640x480 displays. It wasn't pretty.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Ali]

I just read that review of the MAXX, and did you notice it has a L1 cache?

Quote:
The board's capabilities are primarily determined by those of the 3D-processor. Rage 128 Pro has two pipelines that are able to process two pixels per clock cycle in single texturing mode or one pixel per clock cycle in dual texturing. Setup engine speed is 8 million triangles per sec. On-chip L1 texture cache is 8 KB.

I didnt know Video chips had cache.

Ali

[Humus]

Ali:
Or course they have cache, otherwise you'd have like 1/10 of the performance. They usually have two main caches, one for vertices and one for textures. That's why polygon sorting by texture is important in games to get maximun performance.

[Livius]

If I remember correctly, when ATI first pulled the Rage 128 out of their hat (after the TNT heydays and on the eve of the TNT2 - this is why the Rage 128 got the spotlight for a while [some 2 weeks]) this was a great marketing point - the on-chip cache that enabled great 32bit performance. Everybody got frantic - never mind the lousy 16bit performance, the horrible 16bit dithering, and the games that would not run.

IMHO the only decent (not good, mind you) card ATI ever produced was the original Rage. Since the, they've been screwing up consistently. I wonder whether or not S3 has beaten them or ATI is still in the lead... (let's have a poll on this, shall we

BTW (I forgot) - Sharky said the 2D of Radeon is on a par with Matrox. I simply do not believe this. I've seen many reviewers arguing this point, but my own experience tells me otherwise.