ATI R9700 Pro Owners Report

[SCSI]

Any of you have the R9700 yet and tested it's performance with the Catalyst 2.1 or 2.2 drivers? I don't see any new drivers in support of the R9700 on ATI's web site, in fact drivers for it specifically are non-existent on their site. I will be getting my R9700 in a couple of days and was wondering are the driver in the retail box the same as catalyst 2.2? I am confident that the hardware is good, but the driver support has me a little worried a bit. Any news good/bad appreciated. Only those who have the card reply plz.

 

[GTaudiophile]

You'd probably be better asking such a question at Rage3D.com.

 

[SCSI]

Thanks for the link.

 

[Mootorks]

SCSI,

I'm getting my R9700 board tommorrow, however i've been reading the Rage3D boards so I know what has been going on. Apparently the drivers included on the CD are the catalyst 2.2. Their are a few known issues with games, namely in NWN, Battlefield 1942, and operation flashpoint resistance. However don't worry about the support. ATI representatives have been frequenting the boards at Rage3D and helping many people solve their problems. In addition they promise that catalyst 2.3 drivers shall be released in two weeks, fixing most known issues(including the aforemention) and adding a few features as well.

-Mootorks

 

[BFG10K]

FYI the Catalyst 2.2s have been outstanding so far for me on my vanilla Radeon. So far I've only found two extremely minor issues with them.

 

[dszd0g]

This kind of answers a question I have been meaning to ask for a while. I have been considering purchasing a 9700 Pro, because it seems to perform well I like supporting competition. I haven't owned an ATI board since the Mach32, though. nVidia's unified drivers have impressed me greatly, but when I went to ATI's Web page I couldn't even find drivers for the 9700 Pro.

I noticed the Catalyst drivers listed for many other cards.

In a number of reviews of the 9700 Pro the reviewers stated that ATI had claimed they would be moving to unified drivers, but that the drivers they received were 9700 only.

Is ATI really doing unified drivers (Catalyst) now or not?

 

[BFG10K]

All Radeon drivers are unified except the 9700, which are separate. This isn't a big deal as the initial cut of these drivers are still likely heavily based on the Catalysts and from the reviews they look highly polished.

3dfx did the same thing with the Voodoo3 and Voodoo4/5 and their drivers were of a legendary standard. I'm confident that ATi's driver issues are over especially since I'm continually amazed at the speed gains they achieve each time I read a new review that has a Radeon 8500 in it. In some straight benchmarks it is now beating a Ti4600 at 1600 x 1200 x 32 - six months ago this card struggled to beat a GF3 Ti200.

I am waiting for my 9700 more eagerly than I've ever waited for any video card.

 

[dszd0g]

Just to summarize what I have been finding on the Rage3d forums:

I did not see this mentioned in any of the reviews:

Current drivers do not support 16b AA. If your game does not support 32b pixels, then you will not be able to use AA. No ETA is available for 16b AA support at this time. Sorry.

There appears to be a bug in the T&L that is occuring in a number of games (More than what is listed below), but ATI is working on it. Actually working on it is an understatement, ATI seems to be working very hard to track down the problems people are encountering and they seem to be on top of it. Very impressive actually.

It also appears that people are having more success if they do some pre-install clean-up and those with the most success are reinstalling Windows. That sounds a little more painful than should be necessary.

sireric from ATI:
Update:

We have confirmed problems in The Thing, Mafia and Battlefield 1942. The odd thing was that all three had exactly the same problem. Nevertheless, the fix will be available in a forthcoming driver release. The next official release will be 7.76 based, in the next week or so (that release might be the same as the leaked drivers, but certified). The fix will not be in that one, but the next one after.

However, we will attempt to get a beta release of that driver (in some form) available as early as possible (not this week, nor next) -- The new driver is in a very early stage and we need to get QA and certification going before a beta can be released (not too good to fix one problem and create 10 new ones).

In the meantime, as some people have found (Balor, I believe), disabling T&L (i.e. using software T&L) does work around the problem. That would be our proposed short term work-around.

Aside from that, we have not observed problems in Giants or RTCW. We will keep on testing those apps and others to find any problems.

Thank you for your patience.

path0s,
We can repro the Operation Flashpoint: Resistance flashing problem. We are investigating it now. No news yet.

Azzurri,
Medieval Total War problem is identified and under investigation. We don?t have a fix at this point.

NWN workaround for cursor problem:

The HW cursor problem should be fixed in one of the next few driver releases (by 7.78). However, in the mean time, the easy work-around is the following:

> > In nwn.ini, set
> >
> > Enable HardwareMouse=0
> >
> > That is supposed to take care of the problem.

The dark menus problem mentioned below affects other games too:

NWN update:

1) The AA slider: With the 7.77 driver, the internal AA slider will work, but the "Quincuxx" and "4 sample high quality" positions will not do anything (i.e. turn off AA), since those positions use NV proprietary extensions for AA. The other settings will work fine. Our 4xAA is always a "quality" AA.

2) Dark menus & screens, esp. when AA is forced in the control panel: This is also fixed in the 7.77 driver.

3) Low performance: We have not replicated this problem in the released drivers (we haven't tried), but running at 1280x1024 with 4xAA with the latest internal drivers, shows the game frame rate being very smooth. Basically, the problem has been fixed, just not sure which driver will have it (76, 77 or 78). If I find out more, I'll post on this.

Other games with unofficial problems:

NHL 2003 Demo
FS2002
CFS2
Mohaa
Madden 2003
Screamer 4x4
Serious Sam SE (Set the OGLTruformMode to 1 in the registry CurrentControlSet)
WWII Online
Dark Age of Camelot

 

[dszd0g]

Another thing to keep in mind purchasing an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro:

From the ATI website, you will get the ATI labeled box. From large consummer outlets (i.e. BestBuy), you will also get ATI labeled boxes. From channel distributors, such as Ingram Micro, you will get AiB labeled boxes, and the boards inside those boxes will be either manufactured by the AiB or ATI. However, for the 9700Pro, all clock frequencies will be the same, weither manufactured by AiB or ATI.

For now, all 9700 boards sold under any name are effectively built by ATI. There will be AiB partner modified designs being released in the coming weeks from a few manufacturers though.

 

[SCSI]

Mootorks,

So, are you saying that the drivers on the install CD are v7.6/7.7 = Catalyst v.2.2? I guess I'll find out today when my card arrives. Yes, I went to the 3DRage forum and read the known problems with certain games, and I hope I can do a clean install as they mentioned on 3DRage site so the game I wish to play WarCraft III hopefully won't experience these problems. I'll post again in this thread when I have installed and tested the card. Thanks for the reply.

 

[SCSI]

BFG10K,

If you say all drivers in the Catalyst series are unified, why are the downloads segrated by OS's for selective versions of Radeon's? When I hear unified I get the impression that there should be a single download for all Radeons cross-platform OS, but this is not the case. I may be wrong, but this is my impression to what unified drivers should mean.

I never have owned a Nvidia card, but I hear that their drivers are truly unified. A friend told me who owns a Nvidia card that it doesn't matter which card you are using the Detonator drivers are suitiable. I do not know if that is a fact for cross-platform OS's or not. However, one thing I do known is that Nvidia has it going good for driver support, whereas, ATI is scrambling and fumbling around trying to put bandaids on thier disappointing set of drivers.

Maybe it would be a good thing for ATI to truly have a unified set of drivers, then they would have all their eggs in one basket and not look so foolish with a patch every 2-3 weeks. I may not sound like a ATI fan, but I am in fact. This is the reason why I feel that I am justified to criticize the obvious error on ATI's part. I can say now that the reason I purchased the R9700 is because the Radeon 64 DDR VIVO that I currently have is weak, and the Catalyst drivers v.2.1 & v.2.2 has done nothing to make it better. I do hope this is not the case with the R9700, even though my ATI confidence is waning. THIS IS ONLY A PERSONAL OPINION NOT INTENDED TO OFFEND ANY STANCH SUPPORTS OF ATI PRODUCTS, of which I am.

 

[SCSI]

dszd0g,

You seem to be up to speed on the specifics of ATI driver problems and work-arounds, even in specific games. Do you get your information from personal testing, or communiting on 3DRage forum? If there is another information sites, please post it, or else later on if you don't mind if I PM you for a qeustion or two? Thanks for the info.

 

[dszd0g]

Originally posted by: SCSI
You seem to be up to speed on the specifics of ATI driver problems and work-arounds, even in specific games. Do you get your information from personal testing, or communiting on 3DRage forum? If there is another information sites, please post it, or else later on if you don't mind if I PM you for a qeustion or two? Thanks for the info.

I was just summarizing the interesting points I found reading over quite a bit of the Radeon 9700/9000 Rage3D forums so that I could save others some time and that maybe other people would post some of the interesting points they came across that I missed. I would not consider myself an expert about the 9700 Pro at all and I am sorry if I gave the wrong impression. I have just been researching the card pretty heavily because I don't want to buy the card and then regret it. From how ATI is handling those forums, I don't think I will.

why are the downloads segrated by OS's for selective versions of Radeon's

nVidia's drivers are segregated by OS too. They just have the same drivers for all their cards since the Riva TNT; 40 of their chips use the same driver. This means that if I was using a five year old card from nVidia and Microsoft releases a new OS I am not left out in the dark until nVidia feels like releasing a driver. If a bug is fixed it is most likely fixed across the entire product line. It is a very good thing.

[Edit: I should clarify that nVidia does group OSes. They have the following drivers:
Windows XP / 2000
Windows 95 / 98 / ME
Windows NT
Linux
(A Quadro certified version of each of the above)

RIVA 128 / 128ZX drivers for:

Windows 3.11
Windows 9x PCI
Windows 9x AGP
Windows NT 4
OS/2
BeOS

Detonator 40 for Windows XP / 2000

So they still have 14 sets of drivers that they are supporting (8 actively).
/Edit]

It matters a lot to me that ATI take the unified driver approach so that I can hand down my older cards to other systems and extend their useful lifetimes. I don't mind spending $350 on an nVidia card, because that card will most likely go through three or four computers as it is passed down.
ATI users do not currently seem to have that luxury, unless the Radeon 9700 Pro uses the same drivers as their older cards. Otherwise, I can guarentee you those older card drivers are going to be abandoned at some point and the next time MS releases a new OS they will have to wait for stable drivers.

 

[Mootorks]

SCSI,

The drivers on the Radeon 9700 Pro CD are indeed the Catalyst 2.2 drivers marked 7.75.

If you are at all concerned about driver support, then i'd suggest heading over to the Rage3D forums. Many of the problems are being handled quickly from ATI representives, including the ones Dszdog posted above. Almost all new hardware have growing pains, expect the 9700 to be no different. It is still the fastest card on the block, and will likely remain so for quite some time.

-Mootorks

 

[nord1899]

My only problem with ATI is not the cards, not the performance of the drivers, but installing new drivers. You have to manually uninstall the old drivers and then install the new drivers. Why can't they put the two operations inside one?

So frigging annoying. At least WinXP has the system rollback just in case something gets screwed up. Last time I tried upgrading all hell broke lose.

 

[Thor86]

Originally posted by: nord1899
My only problem with ATI is not the cards, not the performance of the drivers, but installing new drivers. You have to manually uninstall the old drivers and then install the new drivers. Why can't they put the two operations inside one?

So frigging annoying. At least WinXP has the system rollback just in case something gets screwed up. Last time I tried upgrading all hell broke lose.

You have to do that with Nvidia Detonators as well.