just got radeon LE-nice alternative to nvidia

[crapyking]

I took out my geforce 2 mx 400 & put in a radeon LE.Ran bout same score on 3d mark 2k but went from 2100 to 2600 on 3d mark 2K1.I put in the hyper Z patch to registry & eeked out another 100 pts or so.I'm running default clock/core.Got card for $58 I think from newegg.A pretty good deal.I only got 3100 in 3dmark 2K1 w/ a radeon 7500.I had problems w/ that card so I sent it back.For 1/3 the price you cant beat it!.

 

[DClark]

I like my LE as well. If you're using the 9005 or 6006 (or newer) drivers, go back into your registry and enter "AnisoDegree" (no quotes)and enter a value of 4 or 16. After rebooting, you'll have Anisotropic filtering in D3D games. It works great for me in EverQuest; with the new Luclin textures, it looks almost like a brand new game.

 

[Menacer]

I had a Radeon LE before I switched to my 8500. I absolutely loved that card. Got it for $73 shipped from newegg in July, unlocked it and overclocked it to retail speeds, and BAM, I had an asskicking card for very cheap. I'd highly recommend that you try overclocking your card. Mine went up to retail SO easily, and that gave me another 200 or 300(if I remember correctly) 3dmark 2K1 points.

 

[dbal]

I have the Radeon VE and it's a hell of an alternative over the MX400:disgust: With built in FSAA and anisotropic filtering plus the DDR memory I don't even want to compare them - and the latest drivers that are on ATi's web site work smoothly under my WinXP. Welcome to the ATi club man!

PS: What are the brief specs of the LE guys? I ve never seen it in a shop here in Greece......

 

[aswedc]

<< I have the Radeon VE and it's a hell of an alternative over the MX400:disgust: With built in FSAA and anisotropic filtering plus the DDR memory I don't even want to compare them - and the latest drivers that are on ATi's web site work smoothly under my WinXP. Welcome to the ATi club man!

PS: What are the brief specs of the LE guys? I ve never seen it in a shop here in Greece...... >>



The LE is a low cost version of the regular Radeon DDR that is easily overclocked to run just like the DDR which is of course a good alternative to the MX. However, I doubt your VE without a T/L unit could match a regular MX much less a MX400...

 

[DClark]

Yeah; amazingly, it's already been about 10 months since I bought my LE ($130cdn - about $80usd at the time). My highest 3DMark2001 score is 3239 (P3 700@980, Radeon LE @198/198); day to day trim I get around 2700 marks (P3 700@933, Radeon LE stock).

I've just started to overclock it a bit (to around 165 to 170mhz) in some games; with Dx9 just a couple months away at most, I want to see how the Radeon 8500 will hold up, and how the upcoming graphics cards will perform with Dx9. If the Radeon 8500 can do Dx9 in hardware (the Radeon 8500 is Microsoft's reference platform for Dx9 development), then I'll probably get a Radeon 8500 (Gigabyte's red PCBed 8500 looks great, and I really want to see Hercules' non-AIW Radeon 8500 offering). If not, then I may decide to wait until ATi's next core is released.

 

[dbal]

[q However, I doubt your VE without a T/L unit could match a regular MX much less a MX400...[/i] >>



Do you think that good drivers can get mx400 playable at 1024x768x32.....???MX400 lack bandwidth to do REAL T&L... T&L needs lots of bandwidth power and mx400 doesn't have any of those and it lacks enough bandwidth to get playable fps at resolutions high as1024x768x32...
That's the simple truth about the worst chipset nVidia has ever made for the low budget segment.....No need to say that I totally respect the rest of the GeForce2 & 3 family ok?....

 

[aswedc]

<< [q However, I doubt your VE without a T/L unit could match a regular MX much less a MX400... >>



Do you think that good drivers can get mx400 playable at 1024x768x32.....???MX400 lack bandwidth to do REAL T&L... T&L needs lots of bandwidth power and mx400 doesn't have any of those and it lacks enough bandwidth to get playable fps at resolutions high as1024x768x32...
That's the simple truth about the worst chipset nVidia has ever made for the low budget segment.....No need to say that I totally respect the rest of the GeForce2 & 3 family ok?....[/i] >>



Check out Anand's VE review. It gets crushed by the regular MX. Perhaps you're thinking of the horrible MX200?

 

[dbal]

No I am talking about the horrible MX400 with the unbelievable percenteage drop at high frequencies.....It's nice to beat the VE@ 640x480 if u wanna play games there....
And sth else....Where are the FSAA settings at your Direct3D tab of "nVidia's Superb drivers?". Are you still trying to find it searching the registry?? And of course u never dare to activate it cuz bye bye fps then......
Admit it or not the drivers' issue for the 90% of Ati's cards is a myth after the end of 2001 and on, and quality DOES go to ATi....Learn to look behind Anandtech's simple numbers man - things change fast....

 

[TrueBlueLS]

I want to get rid of my TNT2 so badly for a Radeon LE. The only thing holding me back is having to pay for college books next Monday.

 

[merlocka]

I have the Radeon VE and it's a hell of an alternative over the MX400 With built in FSAA and anisotropic filtering plus the DDR

Try reading.

The VE has only 1 rendering pipleline and although you are correct about the card having DDR, the memory bus is only 64bit, so the card has approximatly the same memory bandwidth as the MX400. The lack of T&L is the least of the RV100's problems.

I am talking about the horrible MX400 with the unbelievable percenteage drop at high frequencies

The MX400 is much faster that the Radeon VE in just about every popular benchmark, low and high resolutions. At resolutions below 1024x768 it is coming close to a (unmodified) Radeon LE.

It's nice to beat the VE@ 640x480 if u wanna play games there....

The VE is horrible at high resolutions. Horrible. That means "bad".

....Where are the FSAA settings at your Direct3D tab of "nVidia's Superb drivers?".

I agree, they are really hard to find. The idiots at nVidia hid them in the tab labeled "Anti-aliasing". How dumb.

 

[imported_BeeVo]

Quick question. How do I enable hyper z under Windows XP? If you have to use a tweaker program to do this what settings do I need to enable?

 

[masterc]

enter "AnisoDegree" (no quotes)and enter a value of 4 or 16

Where exactly would you add this?

 

[Soccerman]

Quick question. How do I enable hyper z under Windows XP? If you have to use a tweaker program to do this what settings do I need to enable?

you might want to try flashing the BIOS to a retail Radeon 32 DDR BIOS.. or get a BIOS editor.. check out www.rage3d.com for that.

according to Budman, this doesn't enable HyperZ, but for some reason if I install a tweaker program that enables HyperZ, I don't seem to get an increase in 3DMark2K or 2K1.. I don't have many other DirectX programs that I could try this out on.. but anywho, I get 2750 in 3DMark2K1 with a Duron @ 866mhz, 256 megs PC133@133mhz Cas3, and the Radeon LE with the BIOS flashed with the retail Radeon 32 DDR BIOS, running the 9008 drivers in windows 98.

 

[dbal]

<< I agree, they are really hard to find. The idiots at nVidia hid them in the tab labeled "Anti-aliasing >>



In a friend's (unmodified) GeForce2MX 400 running under the latest DetonatorXP there is no such tab anywhere in the advanced display options..... After all even if u have it in a way, it's of no practical use with SDRAM isn't it?
And of course everyone knows the technical specs of both cards....It's just that the VE is much closer to them in real world performance under different configurations. Not to mention the horrible OEM products that nVidia allows being marketed to people just for the money....Do names like Palit, Pine, Xalo say anything to you? They are all "Certified nVidia vendors" on their boxes.....and their cards run like TNTs....
Eventually, for the drivers issue search for yesterday's topic for a guy trying to enable FSAA in a GeForce3 with Detonators...He has tried 2 versions and still trying.....

 

[merlocka]

In a friend's (unmodified) GeForce2MX 400 running under the latest DetonatorXP there is no such tab anywhere in the advanced display options

Your friend failed to install drivers properly. It's really not that hard. Perhaps a pre-built system from Dell might suit him better.

After all even if u have it in a way, it's of no practical use with SDRAM isn't it?

About as practical as the Radeon VE's built in FSAA and anisotropic filtering plus the DDR memory.

And of course everyone knows the technical specs of both cards

Are you sure that you understand them? Which do you think is better, 128bit SDRAM or 64bit DDR?

Not to mention the horrible OEM products that nVidia allows being marketed to people just for the money

You get what you pay for. These cards can be had for about $50 US. I don't expect much from $50... and Radeon VE's are $40.

a guy trying to enable FSAA in a GeForce3 with Detonators...He has tried 2 versions and still trying.....

This guy and your "friend" with the MX400 must install drivers the same way.

 

[Menacer]

Well, aren't we feeling inflamitory today.

 

[merlocka]

Well, aren't we feeling inflamitory today.

Actually, I have a sore neck from sleeping on a couch, not recommended. But thanks for caring

Inflamitory? No, just a bit argumentative. I got a bit sidetracked with all the talk about the VE. The LE is a fine card. I've set up a bunch of my friends with them. My only 2 complaints have been that the RA3 mod for Q3 runs poorly in most of the maps, and Pool of Radience scrolls choppy with the LE. Oh yeah, and one of them broke while overclocking, but that was the dudes fault, he didn't have any extra cooling on it and was running it at 200/200 for about 10 hours during a lanparty. It has artifacts at anything higher than 130 core now.

 

[DClark]

For masterc:

I'm using Win98, so 'm not sure about other OSes, but you have to put the entry in the "atidxhal" folder of your registry.

The location of it on my computer is ""HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE> Software> ATI Technologies> Driver> 0000> atidxhal"


For those of you unfamiliar with the Win9x/Me D3D HyperZ reg hack for the LE, the entries into the same (atidxhal) folder should be:

DisableHierarchicalZ "0"
DisableHyperZ "0"
FastZClearEnable "1"

 

[Rand]

<< However, I doubt your VE without a T/L unit could match a regular MX much less a MX400...

Do you think that good drivers can get mx400 playable at 1024x768x32.....???MX400 lack bandwidth to do REAL T&L... T&L needs lots of bandwidth power and mx400 doesn't have any of those and it lacks enough bandwidth to get playable fps at resolutions high as1024x768x32...
That's the simple truth about the worst chipset nVidia has ever made for the low budget segment.....No need to say that I totally respect the rest of the GeForce2 & 3 family ok?.... >>



In virtually any older game the MX400 is quite capable of maintaining playable frame rates at1034x768x32bpp, and some of the less stressful recent games as well. So depending upon ones gaming habits the MX400 is still capable of 1024x768x32bpp at decent frame rates unless one is playing fairly recent games that are decently stressful on the graphics card.
And while T&L isnt as beneficial as one might hope for it's still certainly preferable to have it and you can gain at least a small performance boost via T&L with the MX400.

It's not a card I would honestly recommend anymore, as there are better cards available at a similar price point but it's still reasonably capable. When the MX line was initially released it offered unparallelled performance at a very attractive price point, and for that I still respect the card.

Were we talking about the MX200 I might agree with many of your comments, but the MX400 isnt that bad.



<<
No I am talking about the horrible MX400 with the unbelievable percenteage drop at high frequencies.....It's nice to beat the VE@ 640x480 if u wanna play games there....
And sth else....Where are the FSAA settings at your Direct3D tab of "nVidia's Superb drivers?". Are you still trying to find it searching the registry?? And of course u never dare to activate it cuz bye bye fps then......
Admit it or not the drivers' issue for the 90% of Ati's cards is a myth after the end of 2001 and on, and quality DOES go to ATi....Learn to look behind Anandtech's simple numbers man - things change fast.... >>



While I tend to think quite highly of the Radeon VE as it offers an excellent Dual-Monitor implementation in HydraVision at a cheap price point along with good 2D, and excellent DVD... it's not much of a gamers card, less so then the MX400.

At almost any resolution/color depth the MX400 is quite capable of outperforming the Radeon VE with little difficulty.
FSAA isnt completely a waste with the MX400, if your playing a Q3 era game or older then 2X FSAA is certainly viable.
In a proper install of nVidia's reference drivers of 6.XX or later the FSAA options should be available in a tab labeled "3D AntiAliasing Settings" in the MX Driver Properties of the display panel.
You can also access it via the taskbar if you enable nVidia's "QuickTweak" icon, which is available under the "Desktop Utilities" tab.

I would most definitely agree ATi's driver ptoblems are WAAAY over hyped, and their recent drivers arent too bad at all. Most remaining problems are fairly minor, and ATi seems to be doing a good job of attaining small performance increases with each newer driver revision. That said, you'll find few that debate the fact that nVidia's drivers are extremely good in most manners.... while they also are far from perfect I'd unhesitatingly say nV's driver support is definitely superior to ATi's support of their cinsumer graphics cards.

With only one of the Radeon cores typical two rendering pipelines, and bing limited to the 64bit DDR memory bus the VE just isnt much of a gaming card.
Real world memory bandwidth is similar to that of the MX/MX400. The VE has the distinct advntage of having a more efficient memory controller then the MX thanks to HyperZ. But on the other hand a 128bit SDR memory bus offers slightly more real world memory bandwidththen a 64bit DDR memory bus as SDR memory is approximately 10% more efficient per it's theoretical capabilities then DDR memory.



<< Not to mention the horrible OEM products that nVidia allows being marketed to people just for the money....Do names like Palit, Pine, Xalo say anything to you? They are all "Certified nVidia vendors" on their boxes.....and their cards run like TNTs.... >>



Palit/Pine/Xalo MX400 cards run exactly as what they are... MX400's, not TNT's. I don't debate that there are a large number of relatively poor and low quality nVidia board manufacturers, and I can't say I would personally purchase one but at default core/memory clockspeed their gaming performance will be identical to any other MX400.
nVidia isnt alone in having sub rather disreputable vendors manufacturing boards though. Remember, ATi also allows third party manufacturers to produce cards now, and they also have more then their fair share of somewhat poor maufacturers selling ATi based boards. Albeit as ATi still manufactures all third party boards in house and then re-sells then to the third party for resale and addition of any extraneous features the quality is identical to ATi's own boards.



<< About as practical as the Radeon VE's built in FSAA and anisotropic filtering plus the DDR memory. >>



The original Radeon core only takes a very minimal performance hit from anisotropic filtering, so in that respect I'd say anisotropic filtering is a more realistic option for the VE then it is for the MX400 which tends to take a larger performance hit from anisotropic filtering.

 

[EdipisReks]

i don't have any problems with enabling FSAA with my geforce3. drivers aren't that hard to install, people. about the RADEON VE vs GeForce2 MX, a friend of mine has a dell 8100 with a 32 MB geforce2go (basically the same as an mx200) attached to a 1.13 gHz tualitan processor and he can still enable 2x FSAA at 800x600x32 in most games and get playable results. half-life runs alright with 2x FSAA at 8x6 (though it gets chunky at times. i wouldn't want to use it in multiplayer, but the single player was acceptable). i was pretty surprised by that. another friend of mine has a radeon VE installed in a 1 gHz coppermine p3 at work . just for kicks, we installed half-life on the system after hours, and FSAA wasn't very playable at any resolution. yes, the 1 gHz coppermine is somewhat slower than a 1.13 gHz tualitan, but there shouldn't have been that much difference between the two (the work system also had a faster hard drive and more ram than my friend's laptop). both systems were running windows 2000. it's possible that there was something on the work machine that was creating a bottleneck, and it's hard to make a decision based on one machine, but based on what i saw i wasn't impressed with the 3d performance of the radeon VE (though the 2d is great, and the dual monitor support was nice on the 2 19inch sony trinitrons that were hooked up to it).

--jacob

p.s. is it just me, or does dbal sound an awful lot like powervr?

 

[BD231]

I went from a Elsa Gladiac 920 GF3 to a Radeon 64mb DDR VIVO* and the 2D quality is much better!. I'm starting to love my Radeon, something I NEVER thought would happen.

 

[dbal]

Two last words to shut that argue:
1. I absolutely respect Rand's post. This is what all "elite members" should be....He really honors our forum
2. I have nothing in personal with nVidia-I used to own a Diamond Viper 770 (Riva TNT2) and I really respected her overclocking stability and performance. It's just that, the theoretically better in specs MX400, had the same fps in Quake and 3D Winbench on a P41,5 Ghz with my older RivaTNT2 on a P3@733Mhz (!!) and now my VE has exactly the same performance with an MX400 on a P3@1 Ghz while I am still running 733. That's why I stick on real world performance rating of this card so much though I ve read and totally understood (I might be a new member-not new in computer tech) all relative Anandtech articles which clearly show the performance difference of the 2 cards.

PS: For a foolish think I read in a post-No I am not powervr.....:disgust:

 

[EdipisReks]

i didn't say you WERE powervr, i simply said that you SOUNDED LIKE powervr. big difference, there bud. and i don't think that i was the one who made foolish statements. if you are getting the same speeds on a 733 P3 with your radeon VE that someone else is getting with a 1 gHz p3 and a geforce2 MX then there can be only one conclusion: there is something wrong with the 1 gHz p3/geforce2MX system.

--jacob

 

[merlocka]

2. I have nothing in personal with nVidia-I used to own a Diamond Viper 770 (Riva TNT2) and I really respected her overclocking stability and performance. It's just that, the theoretically better in specs MX400, had the same fps in Quake and 3D Winbench on a P41,5 Ghz with my older RivaTNT2 on a P3@733Mhz (!!) and now my VE has exactly the same performance with an MX400 on a P3@1 Ghz while I am still running 733. That's why I stick on real world performance rating of this card so much though I ve read and totally understood (I might be a new member-not new in computer tech) all relative Anandtech articles which clearly show the performance difference of the 2 cards.

The point of Anandtech (and many other good video card review sites) is to place the cards in comparable systems and test them with both synthetic and real-world benchmarks.

If you look at reviews from even just the popular sites like Tom's HW guide, HardOCP, Anandtech, Digit-Life, Firingsquad, etc... you would see that they test these cards using synthetic (non-real-world) benchmarks like 3dMark, 3dmax, 3dwinbench, etc as well as real world applications (mainly games).

Every one of these sites has fairly comparable data. Some sites do produce questionable data once in a while (some more than others).

You state that your old TnT2 with a p3 733 is as fast as a MX400 on a P4 1.5 which someone reviewed, in Quake and 3D Winbench.

First of all, 3D Winbench is not a "real-world" benchmark. It's a synthetic.

Second of all, if the GeForce2 MX performed the same as a TnT2 dontcha think there would be alot of people who owned Geforce2 MX's talking about that? Wouldn't the forums be filled with people saying, "hey, I got ripped off! this is just a TnT2"

Instead, when the MX came out it sold like crazy among the overclockers / tweakers because it provided excellent performance for the money (back then). Now it's not such a steal because there are other strong budget cards like the Kyro2, Radeon LE, and even Geforce2 GTS-V to compete with.

You never answered my earlier question about memory, but I'll ask a new question.

If 10 reputable web sites show a Geforce2MX doing Benchmark X at about 50fps and a TnT2 doing bechmark X at 30fps, but your system at home (with a TnT2) will do Benchmark X at 50fps... does that mean your TnT2 is as fast as a Geforce2 MX?

Or does it mean that perhaps your settings for the benchmark / drivers / resolution are different that those used in the review?