All-In-Wonder 128 owners: is this card just BAD?

[Rigoletto]

I got the card today for £80 retail packed. I KNOW it's only the Rage128Gl chipset, I KNOW it's only 16Mb, and I KNOW it's PCI... but should it be this bad?
Looked at the box... very comprehensive package.
Trouble is so much is going wrong. I can't get sound from the TV, no matter how I try or look for documentation on it. The ATi DVD player sound stutters and ATi has interfered with my ZoranSoftDVD so that that no longer works. As if things weren't miserable enough already, I fire up QuakeIII... oh my god! I've never seen it so bad. Not only is frame rate like halved compared to the Voodoo3, but the graphics are fuzzed up with less detail. And I switched on all best quality settings in ATi manager too! The loading screens are a mess, if they come up at all. And the sound goes distorted and croaky.
I was told that you couldn't get TV out of it if you used the card as the secondary display either. Luckily that store is very liberal on returns. I would have been prepared to use the 3dfx as primary and solve the ATi problems at my own pace, but it won't work fully this way. Am I missing something obvious here?

 

[ArkAoss]

yeah, just use the aiw on a secondary machine

 

[subhuman]

This is why I'm so skeptical about the Radeon still. The RAGE series of cards all have lousy drivers, I've never been more frusterated with PC hardware (except back in the 286 days perhaps).

ATi have never been the greatest at releasing good drivers. Even with the Radeon, the Win2k performance/drivers are hurting.

Hope you get your problem resolved. Easiest way to fix your rage: sell it, and get an ASUS/nVIDIA-ViVo card. Now here come the Radeon owners to chime in with the Radeon VIVO solution... *smile*

 

[Rigoletto]

Well I've just downloaded an enormous updated driver so I'll see how that goes.

 

[skull]

I had the same problem as you spent like 2 weeks trying to get sound to work. You need to hook up one of the cables from the out put on the video card to the audio in on your sound card. Its not a bad card at all for TV tuner etc.. You could use the ati as your second card then switch it to primary when you need it.

 

[Rigoletto]

>cut<

 

[Rigoletto]

I doubt your comment is well informed because I can't change it to secondary in ME. I understand that the order of PCI cards has to be changed to change the boot VGA because I have two PCI cards.
The new drivers have mainly solved image quality and speed in OpenGL but the bad sound and the rest remains.
Also, the image quality sucks in 2D. It's making my eyes water.

 

[AndrewR]

From what I have read, it appears that ATI is not ready for Win2K and ME yet. I have used the AIW 128, the 32MB Radeon, and currently have the AIW Radeon. All three were easy to use with excellent 2D and 3D quality though I have had some minor driver installation issues for the Radeons. The AIW 128 on Win98SE was just fine, and the TV tuner worked very well. The desktop top looked nearly as good as the G400 which succeeded it, and what few 3D games I played on it looked great, too. DVD playback was good though I am not too fond of the ATI DVD player.

The Radeons look very good in 2D but are absolutely stunning in 3D. They are not blazingly fast, but I will sacrifice speed for visual quality (to a degree).

All that being said, I chose to sell my 32MB Radeon in favor of my current Voodoo3 3500 on my secondary system which just happens to run Win2K. I have read quite a few horror stories about ATI problems under 2K (and ME, but less so since it's not quite as popular yet) and decided that I didn't need the hassle since the Voodoo is working just fine. That computer is never used for 3D games now anyway.

 

[skull]

Damn it my first double post. :Q :|

 

[skull]

Andrewr is probably right about them not being ready for ME. Try that cable though and you should have sound in tv tuner.

 

[Rigoletto]

Skull, what you recommend is how my Studio PCTV works. How come ATi did not endeavour to tell me how to connect up the card in this way?
My Voodoo3 never gave me all these problems. Say what you like about 3dfx, but installation always worked without problems and image quality is great.

*hey I was just wandering about ATi sites trying to find answers and I found this link. Now can you say &quot;stupendous Jackass&quot; for me? Does ATi LIKE pissing off users?

 

[skull]

I know it really pissed me off too. There is like one line in the manual about it. Even after that it took me awhile to figure out what they were talking about.

I have a Voodoo 3 as my main card right now. Once you get the card all setup and maybe ATi releases some better Win ME drivers you will like this card a lot. The 2d for the ATi should be better but there isn't much you can do about 3d.

You might want to put the ATi on a second machine or something.

 

[Slugbait]

One of the main reasons the rage boards aren't ready for 2K and ME (especially the AIW boards) is cuz ATI doesn't have WDM drivers yet. They're about a year behind schedule now, so don't expect miracles. For a lot of stuff now, and plenty of other stuff in the future, those boards will become worthless, unless ATI gets on the WDM bandwagon...

 

[Rigoletto]

The ATi doesn't want to play ball as the secondary adapter. If I don't get used to the image quality I guess the thing will have to go back. Is the poorer image quality because it only has a 250MHz RAMDAC?

 

[BiggieN]

i have the AIW Pro 32mb agp one. i used it on my winme machine and it took me 2 days to configure it properly to run. the drivers were ok, but you needed to tweak it just to use it. it was too much hassle for me. i swtched back to my gts and just paid extra for my tv tuner card. i put the aiw in my second machine which was running 98se. that was ok. no configuring needed. i wouldn't recommmend getting an aiw unless u know what you are doing. you might be better off getting a tv tuner card such as the hauppage which has a remote control as well.

 

[skull]

The AIW should work in secondary but you can't use any extras on it...its not ATi its Win ME/98.

 

[Dark]

I don't agree with u guys...I had a V3K agp witha AIW pci and it worked flawlessly in win2k but not in win98se (I couln't capture using some codecs). Win2k server is puzzled by my 2 video card but win2k pro is juste fine. I almost got crazy making the sound work until i discovered that one of my progs was muting the sound somehow (PC to Phone)

 

[Rigoletto]

The situation is so bad I'm almost considering plugging in my SIII and changing the BIOS boot for when I want to use the ATi card. Almost but not quite... I LOVE my Voodoo!

 

[dew042]

it has such good features! but the drivers make me weep in sorrow....

 

[spamboy]

Hey, hey, be nice everyone. I have an AIW, running in ME, and I HAVE NEVER HAD A SINGLE PROBLEM. 3D is smooth, 2D is crisp and fast, video capture goes without a hitch. I even found a utility to overclock it and pumped the memory up like 30% faster. You have to &quot;configure&quot; any video card. It's called setting it the way you like. Now, it's no GeForce, but it's smooth enough in TFC at 1152, and you can't complain about MPEG2 captures and TV...

 

[nuttervm]

i've heard so many bad things about ATI but my rage 128 has always been pretty good to me. drivers have always worked correctly from day 1. the best part about it is DVD. i have never EVER seen a skip or pause or lack of quality in dvd playback. maybe i just got lucky...

i can say their support sucks though if you ever have any questions. took them like 2 weeks to reply to emails, and even then they were unhelpful, uninformative, and gave me the runaround.

my next card when i find this one to be inadequare will probably be an asus or matrox. i've had really good experiences with both brands.

 

[Easy1]

Do yourself a favor and dump that pig. I had a Rage 128 and I don't think ATI ever produced a respectable driver and I suspect they have stopped developing drivers for that card. There were certain games I could not play unless I swapped drivers, some would not work at all... what a mess!! I'll never buy another ATI product.

 

[Rigoletto]

So now I know how to get sound off it.
Now the main problem is the way the card corrupts sound. I find this odd because it's not sharing IRQs with my soundcard. It corrupts the sound in both games and DVDs but not on the desktop I think. Does anyone have any idea how to fix this (I have 13days to give this back and it looks like ATi tech support won't manage).
Folks, I would listen to other people who have experience of a company's tech support. Maybe ATi will turn out bad but I say this: beware of Diamond.

 

[subhuman]

Easy1 - in an interview I saw with someone at ATI (how's that for vague?) it mentioned that the RAGE series of cards had HARDWARE PROBLEMS that they attempted to fix with drivers -- which is why the RAGE series has always sucked/been buggy/had &quot;lousy&quot; drivers.

It seemed from the interview that the Radeon doesn't have (as many?) hardware errors, making the drivers better.

I'm still skeptical. It's going to take more than one product iteration to convince me.