ATI's Marketing

[cmdrdredd]

I'm a bit upset by ATI's marketing of midrange and budget cards. The Radeon 7000 was slower than the original radeon and basically was a Radeon VE that was repackaged. Now the Radeon 9000 is SLOWER than a Radeon 8500LE! Anyone else see something odd here? Is that because they hope to drop the 8500 for the 9500 which will be in the $200 range? If so then wouldn't the smart buyer just grab an 8500 now and have the same performance for $130less?

 

[rbV5]

The 8500 is already discontinued, when the chips are gone they're gone. The 9500 will be DX9 card and much faster than the 8500. The 9000 is aimed at the budget market and to compete with the GF4 MX cards. Myself, I would rather they stayed with the number scheme where the first # represents the hardware DX support, and the following numbers indicated its relative performance (IE a 7200 would be faster than a 7000, and slower than a 7500), it made sense to me, unfortunately, market forces being what they are, 9000 sells better than 8300 (my guess as to where it "should" have fit)

Its not just ATI, its everybody, and yes, a smart buyer would get an 8500, but not because it will be as fast as the 9500 (it won't be) because its faster than the 9000...at least untill we see some faster ram on the 9000 (they're selling 290/290 cards now so...?)

 

[AnAndAustin]

Yup, for marketing blurb nVidia really take the cake IMHO. GF4MX is totally inferior to all GF3 cards and even GF3MX would have been nasty, GF4MX doesn't even have DX8, at least ATI chose to give the Rad9000/PRO full DX8 AND much better perf than GF4MX cards!

I do dislike the Rad9000 label but have always found the under-handed methods of skimping on speed, quality and features between the RADEON manus and also the very quietly lower clocked oem versions of cards!

Lets also consider AGP8x and ATA133, unlike USB2 they offer no real world benefits and are largely marketing ... esp since all AGP8x gfx cards currently available seem to have big pcompatability probs.

Then of course there's M$ with there 'wonderful' WinME, monopoly, anti-competative tactics and nasty short product support.

Finally Gainward. The main beef I have with Gainward is their 'Golden Sample' branding which in the GF3TI200 days meant a whole lot more. Now their cards use the same speed RAM as almost every other GF4TI card and as such they don't o/c any better. Of course Gainward cards are great, but their badging is certainly mis-leading. And while we're at it's Gainward who use the very mis-leading names like 'GF4 PowerPack Ultra 650 TV GS' for their GF4MX440 (LOL), 'GF3 PowerPack TI 450 Golden Sample' for their GF3TI200 64MB and finally 'GF2 TI 450' for their GF2PRO (now that is blatently mis-leading).

 

[sash1]

They're just trying to get sales. Dumba$$es will see the 9000, and say "oh, it's a higher number than this 8500, so it must be better." And when they check out nVidia they'll say, "hmm, what does this 'MX' mean? Oh well, its a GeForce 4, and because 4 is higher than 3, it must be better..."

There is no reason to be upset about them trying to get sales. There is nothing wrong. Sure, it may be decieving (I hate AMD's naming system that they have, but oh well, not like I can do anything about it, and it's not like it effects me at all), but most don't know which is better. As long as you know which card is better, it's not like you should care about how ATi chooses to name their products.

Everything is marketing. You can whine all you want, but you can't change it. I'm sure if you were in their shoes, you'd do the same thing. They aren't trying to impress the knowledgeable people who know the differences, they are trying to sell products.

 

[AnAndAustin]

I wouldn't so much say dumba$$es but those with little time to explore or lack the technical knowledge, users like these are becoming more and more common and this is the main reason for marketing schemes.

I don't consider AMD's AthlonXP rating to be marketing blurb nor deceitful. An AthlonXP2000+ beats a P4 2.0ghz and can even take on a P4 2.2ghz for gaming. With the P4's introduction of 533FSB and ability to truly exploit DDR333/PC2700 AMD have alterred their XP rating system accordingly which I certainly admire as it would have been very easy for them to keep the current rating despite no longer offering equivilent perf to the relevant P4. Of course AMD's official line on the rating is that it relates to the original Athlon but informed people know better. It is important to remember how much better the Athlon was to the PIII, not only first to 1ghz but also a good 10% faster too. IMHO it was this which made Intel rethink it's CPU design and go for mhz/ghz over true perf, if anything it is Intel who are more deceitful than AMD for marketing.

Just me knowing that Rad8500 is superior to Rad9000 and that GF3 is superior to GF4MX etc doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk about it and inform other users of it. If enough people know then we can change these things, of course if I was in their shoes I would most likely follow suit (you have to keep up with the competition) but then that doesn't make it right nor change the fact that so many people are buying big brand PCs with super fast CPUs crippled by a GF4MX now does it?

 

[Mingon]

The 9500 will be DX9 card and much faster than the 8500

I wouldnt bet on it being that much quicker on release. As its a 4 x 2 card as per the radeon 8500 the only difference should be core speed as I doubt it will have 256bit memory bus. With its programmable nature some programs will in fact run quicker on a more fixed tnl card.

 

[AnAndAustin]

The Rad9500 certainly looks inviting from what little we know or can guess about it. I would expect it to give about GF4TI4400 level perf which is a fair bit above a Rad8500, I doubt ATI would produce a card which 'only' gives Rad8500 perf even when the Rad8500 cards are no longer available. IIMHO it does depend largely upon what nVidia do, it would make sense to wait for nVidia to release the NV28 before ATI finalise a competing card, but then ATI are missing a card in the mid-sector of the market. In any case Rad9500 should be a very good performer esp for AA and Aniso and of course DX9, not that DX9 is really going to prove very useful for at least another year. It's certainly going to be interesting that's for damn sure

 

[Auric]

Y'all are trying to make it seem more than it is. It is normal for value chips to be cut down versions of the last high performance generation.

First came the Radeon 256. The VE was based upon the same core by removing the Charisma Engine (HTL) and adding an additional RAMDAC. This made it much smaller and cheaper and perfectly suited to the primary non-gaming market. When switching to a numeric naming system these became the 7200 and 7000 respectively.

When it comes to the 9000 versus 8500, sure the naming is queer but the 9000 is still incredible value, generally performing almost as well (sometimes better) and adding new features for significantly less cost (about 25% less for retail Pro 64MB). Additionally, when you consider the feature and performance improvement over the 7500 it replaces at the same price point there is really nothing to complain about. Compared to the competition's deliberately deceitful naming schemes this is nothing as you still get what you pay for.

 

[rbV5]

I wouldnt bet on it being that much quicker on release. As its a 4 x 2 card as per the radeon 8500 the only difference should be core speed

Methinks there will be more to the 9500 than core speed over the 8500. In fact, It wouldn't suprise me that there is more to the 9000 than meets the eye

Remember, the Le Radeon had hyper-z turned off in software....The 7000 didn't have the TL engine...but new drivers enabled it (didn't make up for the 64bit memory bus, but certainly increased the performance of that card), the 7500 shared a paired down core with the original Radeon...which allowed it to increase the core speed over 100MHz and with the improved memory controller, dramatically improved its performance. The 9000 is showing to be perhaps a very good overclocker as well, paired with some faster ram, and perhaps enabling some disabled features...could be a great value performer, akin to the other value series Radeon's. I'm not sure if its true or not, but I did hear that ATI is going to perhaps use rejected 9700 cores for the 9500 to improve the yield (there must be quite a pile of those cores stacking up by now...hmmmm), disable a rendering pipeline or 2 (or 4 actually)in software...downclock the core a little, and now you have a highly performing mid level card which would use the more mature (by then) 9700 drivers, and perform at near 9700 levels with todays games, and only tailing off by comparison as more complex shader routines and features are actually are implemented (and we're quite aways from that presently) makes sense to me, but could easily be pure BS as well.
It should be fun to watch the next few months unfold though.........