I wonder how much money ATI spends on R&D?

[mikef208]

I mean, don't get me wrong, I like ATI and they have some promise in them. I actually wish they would get in gear and start giving Nvidia a little pressure. I understand in Anands review of the R200 that it was just a preview and the drivers were not final. But i mean the geforce 3 beat it as well as severl other cards in some tests. yet when it comes out Nvidia will be close behind with something even better then the GF3. So how does ATI ever plan to catch up if they keep producing cards that are slower then what is already out. also what happened to them just selling there GPU's? they would be much better off if they put more time into research and development and let other people actually put the cards together. Please don't blast me for this, as I said, i do like ATI. I just wonder what they are thinking?

 

[ragiepew]

not sure as to the amount of $ they spend... but from a technology standpoint (feature wise) the Radeon 8500 outclasses the GeForce 3. That said, it still manages to lose. This may be partly due to using beta silicon, anand and tom both state that some of the most interesting aspects of the r200 were disabled in their unig, or beta drivers. Remember, this is a new architecture and although the drivers worked well on the Radeon 7500 (radeon 1 architecture) they do need to be optimized for the Radeon 8500 (r200). In any case, i'm not sure if any of these will be any better by the time it launches.

But like I said, the r200 has more muscle (fill rate, t&l unit) and more finesse (truform, smartshader, smoothvision, dvd, 400mhz dac...) so there is no reason it should lose in every test like it did in anands review...

get it in gear driver folk. 😉

 

[m2super]

The r200 is a nice looking card, it has great features and has promise!
However, ATI is notorious for not delivering on drivers that deliver better performance!
To me that is enough I will not buy a ATI product because their support as far as Im concerned sucks!