AIW Radeon in win2k, who has da combo?

[randomlinh]

So, does it work well?? Other than maybe games aren't quite up there? Is gameplay so bad it's not playable? or is it like Geforce 1 SDR level or something?

 

[hans007]

my friend hawk who happened to sell these for a while in the forsale forum tried it. Well basically its horrible. Performance is 35 to 60% slower, and it crashes windows sometimes. That was with a 32mb ddr one, but its probably the same. A 64mb radeon is about 10-15% slower than even a v5-5500 across the board (and the v5 doesnt exactly have the greatest win2k drivers). 2d is excellent though.

 

[Hawk]

What in the world are you talking about? =) I don't have an AIW, I have the 64 MB. The AIW is in my brother's, running ME, and I haven't tried any games basically, except for UT, in Win2k. It ran okay, but was a little slower. It doesn't crash Win2k though, and I never tried a 32 MB DDR on Win2k.

 

[PochiePooh]

I think Hans007 is just kidding, or maybe it's because he owns a Voodoo5 5500. But um, sorry, no, 64mb Radeon does not lose out to the V5 across the board. Anand's review shows that the overall performance of a V5 is even worse than a Voodoo3 3500TV.

I bought one of the AIW Radeon from Hawk. It does have a lot of features. However, I've been having these problems:

1) TV picture looks worse than a worn out VHS. The picture pixelates badly. (I have cable, so there's no reason for the picture to look that bad really.)
2) RCA video in again looks very bad. I plug my Playstation into the RCA Video, the quality of the picture looks better than the RF connection of my cable line, but the picture is still not REAL-TV quality.
3) ATI's DVD player stutters during play. I can clearly notice the little pauses during movie. This happens also on my friend's AIW Radeon. Oh get this, ATI's DVD decoding software refuses to play a DVD if you do not have a sound card, or do not have sound, meaning it won't play mute. Anyway, when we used PowerDVD to play the same DVD, everything was fine, no stuttering. Is this just a coincident? I have read that ATI's DVD support is top-notch.
4) TV Guide Plus from Gemstar won't download programs.

I still have not had time to fiddle around with the card and ...er...read the manual. Hopefully, these problems are due to incorrect set-up and not because of the card's fault itself.

I love the recording feature however, no waking up @ 4am in the morning to watch my show, no rewinding and instant fast forward. Cool.

Edit: sorry, didn't answer lnguyen's question. It works fine in Win2K I guess. I have Win2k, and I doubt my problems are due to Win2k compatibilty issues. However, if anybody has the cure for my problems, pls let me know. I haven't seen anybody else posting the same problems, or anything much regarding AIW Radeon. Hopefully it's just me.

 

[Babrone]

Go read todays article on the 64 meg Radeon over at sharkyextreme.com. They tested the card with the "special purpose" drivers (beta) for win 2k and there were HUGE improvements.

 

[JMorton10]

The new drivers still suck in W2K. My dual boot system runs great in Win98SE, but I'm really disappointed in the W2K performance of my 64meg retail Radeon.

1.1 gig Athlon, all scsi, KT7 Raid etc, etc

 

[Hawk]

The only problem I have encountered with the AIW is the error when downloading the Guide+ worthless piece of software, everything else is pretty good.

And yes, even with the Special Purpose drivers the performance is barely bearable, but I anticipate newer drivers in the next week or two (new Win2k drivers came out for all other cards about 5 days ago).

 

[Mustanggt]

?

 

[randomlinh]

yeah, i wanted to buy one from hawk.. but just couldn't to it... stupid money.

Anyway, the question was mainly for a friend, and for me when I pull up enough money for one.. heh.

Well, i guess it's the wait and see approach, or boot into win98 when ya wanna play some games.

As for the cable pixelation... well, i have cable in my dorm, and it sucks bad. I thought it was cause i was using a Studio PCTV card (tv card in general really), but EVERYONE in my building has crappy reception. GRRR. Oh well, at least i can actually RECORD things now I just want the AIW so it's all in one card and to upgrade my TNT2/pro.

Thanks for your input.

 

[Hawk]

Naw, I am in Win2k only, and I mean, the performance isn't as good as Win9x, but it's not like you have to play at 640 with everything turned off. I think you have to go down 2 or 3 resolutions (yes, I know, OUCH!), but it's still decent, at least until they get some better drivers out.

 

[randomlinh]

would you consider it pretty close to 100% stable? Can you do any vid capturing from TV/other source? Gaming performance is really a secondary concern (for me at least).

 

[Hawk]

Well, Win2k hasn't crashed because of the Radeon, though I don't play games anymore either (tried Half-Life today and D3D was kinda weird, had to use OpenGL instead). But if you don't play games, Win2k is pretty good combined with the Radeon, and I think Video in works, haven't had a source to try and record, but TV Out worked beautifully, showed some movies no the TV last night.

 

[PochiePooh]

lnguyen, when I plug my cable into my television, the picture looks very clear, so the reason that it pixelates is not because the cable signal.

Also, the RCA video-in quality is lacking. When I hooked my playstation to my t.v using only the RF adapter, the quality was better than the AIW.

Anybody able to use the Guide+? Please enlighten.

 

[Hawk]

I was able to get video in (just outputed my desktop to the input! =P) but couldn't really tell how good the quality was, but at least the input works.

 

[hans007]

uh.. hawk, if you didnt play games why would you use a radeon? Anyways, hardocp said it gave him a blue screen in win2k for the first time in months. And well if you look on some of the other sites, its really slow. Slower than the v5 , which is pretty bad since well yes i do own a v5, but the v5 isn't exactly fast. Anyways, if it were say 80% of the win98 driver's speed like the v5 is , i'd have one already, but its like 50%. Dont know about the newest drivers, but i got tired of downloading ATIs "special purpose" drivers from when i had the rage128. I remember taking like 3 driver sets and mixing up all the files in them, just to get a single really good set. Hawk had lobbyed to get me to buy a radeon at dinner last week saying it'd be fun beta testing it or something, like we had when we both had rage128s in high school. Too lazy, and its not that interesting anymore anyways. And as for the original poster, i think its around geforce1 sdr level. Hawk said so himself that you have to take the res down 2-3 notches. Which is like going from 1280x1024 to 800x600. Plus this probably completely rules out FSAA.

Here is some reasonable proof as to what i'm talking about with the drivers. If you go to the v4-4500 review http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1340&p=11 on that page it has the v4 4500 losing about 20% in win2k, the radeon 32mb sdr
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1334&p=12 on the other hand, loses like 30-65% or so. Granted these aren't the 5500 and the 32mb AIW that we are talking about, but the drivers are the same, so i am assuming now, that the dropoff is around the same.

 

[JMorton10]

My Radeon experiences :

First my system : KT7-RAID, 1.1gig T-Bird running at 1250 With Peltier/Alpha, 256PC133 Siemons/Infinity, Radeon 64meg VIVO, Adaptec 29160 scsi, 15,000rpm U2LVD Cheetah & three other 10,000rpm Cheetah's, SB Live, Plextor 12/4/32, Plextor UW40x, Toshiba 1212 DVD, scsi zip, two Firewire cards, HP parrallel printer, HP USB printer, TV tuner, 3COM nic W/ Motorola cable modem & Linksys 4 port/router/switch, 56K Phoebe, scsi scanner, USB Smart Media reader, Klipsch Promedia's & 5.1 surround sound, Viewsonic P815-3 21", MS FF Steering Wheel & FF Joystick.

I triple boot W2K, Win98SE & Windows Advanced server. I'm not a huge gamer, but my son is. I love Porsce Unleashed however. I use Win98 exclusively for gaming & W2K for everything else. I have used W2K from the day it came out & I love the stability of it. With all this hardware, it is MUCH easier to get it all working with no conflicts in W2K than Win98. When I had a gts card in my system, W2K worked great for gaming also. The Radeon is by far the best card I have ever used in Win98 & I've tried them all. The image quality is actually better than the G400 Matrox I had. It is giving me fits in W2K however.

I have tried every driver released so far including the new beta & none of them work correctly with my monitor driver. I can't install the Viewsonic driver, so it's stuck at a refresh rate of 60 which gives me a headache. I can use any resolution I want & it lists refresh rates up to 200, but they all look exactly the same. It says "default monitor" in the display properties & it won't let me change it. There is no monitor at all listed in the device manager.

This is a known problem & there is no solution at this time. I threatened to take the card out, but my kid had a fit. It works so well in Win98 that I am going to live with it for a while & hope ATI gets the W2K drivers straightened out. With ATI's track record for driver support, I'm worried that may never happen however.

At this time, I definitely wouldn't recommend that anyone who uses W2K exclusively for gaming buy this card.

 

[randomlinh]

damn, even if you're not gaming.. stuck at 60hz SUCKS. I mean, i could live w/ dual booting into win98 (i have it set up that way now, but not for gaming rather for backup recovery type things)... but working in win2k at 60hz? eewwwww.

 

[Hawk]

Naw, there's a fix for it for the 60 Hz issue! I had the problem too. Let's see...you go to the display settings, then go into advanced. Click the Displays tab, and click on monitor. Change the max res and max refresh, and then you should be able to get higher refresh rates! =) Worked for me (thank god).

And Hans, I have a Radeon the same reason why you have a death computer to surf the web mostly.

 

[JMorton10]

I'm going to go try that right now, stay tuned................

 

[JMorton10]

Well, that didn't work. I can pick any resolution & refresh rate I want, all the way to 2048x1536 (32bit) 75hertz. I just set it at that, then lowered it again. The resolutions all work fine, but all the refresh rates look exactly the same (terrible)

A pure white screen is so flickery I can hardly stand to look at it!!

 

[PochiePooh]

For those who care, I tried the Guide+ again and it suddenly worked, meaning it was able to download the T.V guide from Gemstar ( I think). So, go get your T.V listings.

 

[Hawk]

Oh, and I didn't tell you, if you set it at let's say 1900x1440 or whatever max, and the max refresh to 60, then your max refresh is always going to be 60, no matter what. Here's what I have:

1600x1200
75 Hz

and I am running at 1280x1024 @ 75 Hz (the monitor says so, not Win2k).

 

[Hawk]

Oh, and yeah, Guide+ hasn't worked for me yet, but I guess their site or where-ever you download the stuff from is finally working, cool.

 

[ZaijiaN]

JMorton10: I also have the problem with Win2k and the no monitor thing.

Is this just a Win2K + AIW Radeon problem? I don't think so, because back when I was running my AIW Pro (8mb agp) I also had this problem. I think it might have started when I installed some beta drivers for it. Does anyone else running AIW Radeon + Win2K have the default monitor problem?

 

[Hawk]

I think everyone has this problem, my 64 MB Radeon is like that, and others' are like that too, from www.rage3d.com's forums.