Im looking for a new card, is RADEON right for me?

[Canuck]

I have been doing alot of research about video cards the past year and have come to the conclusion that the ATi RADEON offeres the best:

technology
performance
image quality
3D & 2D
etc.

Im a hardcore gamer, pure and simple, so my main concern is compatibility and stability, more specically, if its not too much of a hassle, could you post some problems that any of you RADEON users have encountered that might not be fixed, when compared to the Geforce, is the RADEON really that bad for game incompatibilities?

thx alot guys,
Conor

 

[Taz4158]

The Radeon has blown away in every area any nVidia I've owned.

 

[UsandThem]

Well, I ordered a Radeon, but one thing is for sure, the ATI drivers are no where near NVIDIA.

ATI has always been known to have driver issues, and very slow to fix them. Just take a look at their Windows 2000 scores. Very, very bad.

 

[Comp10]

I would not let ATI's reputation for bad drivers scare you away from the Radeon. I have yet to have any compatability problems with the Radeon and ATI has been very good about releasing driver updates. It would seem the days of bad driver support from ATI are over.

 

[Dark4ng3l]

People tat say ati has driver problems dont own radeons so I wouldnt jump to any conclusions. They did have problems with the rage cards though. I dont remember seeing any posts about any driver related radeon problems.

 

[ahfung]

I dunno how the new beta Radeon w2k driver does. However from Anand's review on Radeon SDR it showed under w2k it is only 50-75% as fast in w98. This may mor may not matter to hardcore gamers as w98 will be 99% their primary OS.

 

[Ziggyman]

PC World had a review in August.
"PC World Top Ten Boards"
I know it was a few months ago but it does have many boards that are spoken of
recently.

 

[Ziggyman]

Here's the more recent review. I'm
tring to decide on a new card myself. It looks like a lot of you are bent
on the Radeon board but, most of the reviews I've read favor the GeForce2 GTS boards.

 

[cybercham]

I love my Radeon. One of the things people keep talking about are bad drivers. IMO thats a thing of the past with ATi.

Here's a little story to show you what happens and how people blame "driver problems" for everything.

I have Homeworld: Cataclysm. From day one I was unable to choose D3D as my renderer (it would only show software and OGL mode). I emailed Sierra about this and they replied that it "must be a driver problem" (ever heard that before?) LOL!

Anyway after checking around I found out that it was actually the game that disabled the D3D option and after "tweaking" a configuration file in the game I had the D3D option "mysteriously" appear. Not bad for a "driver" problem huh?

 

[Looney]

Well, like many have said, drivers and compatibilities on the Radeon are a bit worst than the competition, but it's no where as bad as some people make it out to be. Infact, the only game i've had a problem with was in Everquest, and that's all been fixed with the recent beta drivers.

As for Win2k performance, go to rage3d.com and see what the consensus is with the new beta drivers. I haven't had time to benchmark them myself, so i don't know what the numbers would be.

And i would agree that ATI bad driver support is a thing of the past... they've been consistently releasing new drivers every few weeks.

 

[pidge]

As a die hard game, I would pick the GTS. Reasons are the following:

1)Geforce 2 GTS much faster than the Radeon
2)Drivers - With OpenGL games, I have not experienced any problems with my ATI Radeon. But when you get to Direct 3D games, I have experienced many problems.
3)DX8. I am experiencing problems with a DX8 app with ATI DX8 drivers. I am not sure whether their newer drivers will be fully DX8 compatible. Of course, NVIDIA hasn't released their DX8 drivers yet but I am sure they will be much better than ATI's.
4)HyperZ - As a gamer, I play a lot of D3D games. Unfortunately, ATI couldn't come up with a stable drivers to support HyperZ in Direct 3D so they disabled it. This creates alot of choppy gameplay under intense scenes, especially on Unreal Tournament, a problem I did not experience with my Geforce 2 GTS. If you enabled it in the registry, it improves performance but also causes a lot of image corruption in D3D games.
5)Overclocking - If you are an overclocker, then you will want the Geforce 2 GTS. With the ATI's Radeon, once you get to around 193MHz, it runs out of gas. No matter how much higher you overlock it, it won't make hardly any difference. There is a big difference between 166 and 183 but barely any difference between 183 and 200MHz. The Geforce 2 GTS I have been able to overclock to 250MHz core/400MHz memory and the performance keeps on increasing significantly. You get much more bang from overclocking a Geforce 2 GTS than you do ATI Radeon.
6)Customer Support - I don't know if I should be posting this since I do not have any experience with Creative Labs or Asus as far as Customer Support is invloved but I have had problems with ATI drivers and ATI's customer support is horrible. If you are having problems with ATI's card, don't expect good customer support from ATI.

I can go on with other reasons but the above reasons are just things that would interest die hard gamers.

 

[cybercham]

I play UT without any problems on my Radeon and I've got the large texture patch installed.

The only feature of hyper-z that's not fully supported yet is hierarchical z and that should be fixed shortly. It causes corruption in certain games at this point.