I copy and pasted this from my post in Anandtech Articles in case anyone cares about my opinion.
Hmm, lotsa different thoughts on the R2. Good preview. Definitely looking forward to a review when it comes out with some new drivers.
As far as drivers... I haven't had any problems with Radeon drivers in 98se or win2k. I moved to win2k around the time when the Radeon win2k drivers were up to par so I never had slow performance in that. However, since then, or in win98se, the very newest drivers compared to CD drivers have performance within just a few fps of each other. Unless of course the win98se drivers were already optimized as fast as possible but I doubt that considering Nvidia has released the Det3 with extra performance and now the Det4s with yet more. So I'm not sure if I can be convinced that drivers will improve performance alot. Perhaps they will some, but will it surpass the GF3 in most benches? Regardless of image quality, features, etc... it seems to be that what 90% of people care about and that's what sells. So if new drivers (that are released soon too, not 1yr down the road) can improve the performance drastically up to GF3 levels, what about the GF3 Ultra? Unless they really make better use of hyper-z or something that is not working properly that would boost performance up.
Even with the GF3 Ultra, the R2 still has the edge in features. And how much faster will the GF3 Ultra be? I don't follow the GF3, but it has 3.8ns RAM, correct? Well I don't think they have much faster ram out. I heard somewhere around 3.2ns but I'm sure that's not very widespread and expensive as hell.
Finally, what is against all these other opinions, do we need that fast of games?? I looked at the Det4 article first and it was 106fps or something at 1600x1200x32 in Q3A with a GF3? That is fricking amazing! I don't think anyone needs 100fps! 60fps is plenty even. But OTOH, Q3A doesn't require the fastest system either to run well. Perhaps if the R2 has superior image quality and colors then it might be a better buy than the GF3. I don't know of the better RF filters of the GF3 affect 3d image quality or not.
I did noticed it runs at 250/275 (I refer to the 8500 in all cases but I don't quite see the point of the 7500). Appearantly the new core is fine by running an asynchronous clock when the Radeon was optimal to be ran at a synchronous clock. I'm sure the core could be bumped up a bit though. The hsf looks pretty small and if they have good yields maybe 275/275 could be achieved. I didn't see any mention of what speed ram the 8500 uses though so I don't know how much that could possibly be overclocked.
Anand, were you not able to overclock it or something? I'm wondering why there was no mention of it.
Another thing, I looked at the win2k/98/XP driver test and that's pretty interesting. It looks like they did some good things with the beta R2 driver for win2k (can't say the same for xp, crashes!). Still looks like vsync problems. *sigh* is it that hard for ATi to fix vsync? That sucks it's almost as bad as the Win2k refresh rate bug carrying over to XP. I did noticed that in Q3A, the GF3 gained about 23fps from 98se to win2k! Wow!
Whew I've been going for a while.
Oh yeah I hope ATi continues to release drivers for the original Radeon. Actually, I hope they just release them if it improves performance...
edit: One last thing to add to this already too long post. I seen no mention of VIVO features. Or an AIW version? Any clarification here? I hope they have one that is like the Radeon 64 VIVO but I use the VIVO but don't need dvi thingy or a TV Tuner.
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