Radeon Drivers in Win2k. Better these days?

[shiner]

I'm building a new system for a friend and was wondering about the driver issue for the Radeon LE under Win2k. The system will be an ASUS A7M266, Athlon 1.33, and 256mb RAM. He mostly spends his time in 2d doing things like surfing the net, web page design, some office type work, and the occasional game of Baldur's Gate II, Everquest, Crimson Skies, and now WWII Online. I think the Radeon would be his best bet since he is in 2d 85% of the time but I still have some concerns over it's Win2k drivers since originally they were pretty bad. Have they gotten any better?

Thanks for your help....

 

[Yoshi]

I have never had problems with the Win2k drivers for Radeon. I have been using my Radeon since early this year.

It should more than meets your friends need.

 

[SpeedTrap]

HAHAHA HAHAHA HAHAHA HAHAHA radeon in W2k HAHAHA HAHAHA HAHAHA HAHAHA

thanks i got rid of mine

 

[aznmist]

teh drivers have matured and are fine now

 

[shiner]

<< HAHAHA HAHAHA HAHAHA HAHAHA radeon in W2k HAHAHA HAHAHA HAHAHA HAHAHA >>



Care to elaborate?

 

[pay]

How old are you? Like 12?

 

[GL]

Actually they're fairly good. I was hesitent to get a Radeon but eventually got an AIW Radeon in late March. Seems I missed the bad drivers. On my PIII960 my AIW Radeon is pulling just slightly less than 3000 in 3dmark 2001 - D3D has traditionally been the sorepoint of the radeon in win2k. OpenGL is absolutely fine performance wise although some of the later beta drivers have a broken implementation of Heirarchical Z (Hyper Z works fine). There should be a release of new official win2k drivers soon. Keep in mind I've never used my card under win98.

 

[Shudder]

The card rocks these days. The QUALITY is so amazing, if there is a tiny difference in framerate, I'll gladly keep the great looks of it. You won't find a Geforce 2 line of cards that will look this great.

 

[NicColt]

LOL Trooper is the thread nef.

Actually what good does it do to have a card that can do 200 FPS when your monitor's refresh rate is at 60 ??? The quality of the Radeon is much better than GForce. I prefer Quality over Quantity any day.

Also look at the First page of the Video forum, between the Radeon and Gforce, only Nvidiots seem to be having problems now and hardly any for the Radeon. I'm starting to feel like the Maytag man.

Someone please post Radeon problems... please...

 

[AtomSmasher]

Agreed. I've got a Herc 64 Meg GF2 GTS &amp; a Radeon 64Meg Vivo &amp; have run both on my T-Bird 1.33 in Win2K. The visual quality of the Radeon is much better than the Herc, quite fast &amp; extremely stable with the latest drivers (get them from Rage3d.com). Unreal Tournament is really fast &amp; smooth. Looks great. I wouldn't hesitate to go ATI at all.

 

[shiner]

I'm assuming that enabling Hyper Z through the registry hacks still work on the LE. Is that the case?

Thanks for all the input so far. I think I will go ahead and tell my friend to order the card.

 

[SpeedTrap]

haha well geforce 3 smokes the radeon the same as the radeon smokes the regualr GF2.

thats cause the radeon 2 is a newer card than the gf2 the same as the gf3 over the radeon. i have yet to find a radeon driver that can run in w2k stable, thats the main reason i got rid of mine.

and the extra 150 youd spend getting a gf3 is way worth it. the 2d is the same as a radeon

 

[SpeedTrap]

oh and 5 out of 60204 users makes it like 8.30509600690983987774898677828716e-5% success rate

 

[jobberd]

radeon only &quot;smoked&quot; the geforce2 gts when it first came out, offering a bit higher framerates in 32bit mode. once the new geforce2 drivers came out, the geforce was pretty much even with the radeon, even beating it on occasion in 32 bit

 

[shiner]

Well...like I said he primarily cares about 2D graphics and doesn't play a lot of games. I think the Radeon will fit his needs quite well. I've read several old threads, forums at other sites, and a few newsgroups and the consensus view is that the new Radeon drivers are very stable and with a few registry tweaks the LE can be turned into the DDR version quite simply. Add that to the fact that he didn't want to spend over $100 on a video card and I think the Radeon is the clear choice.

I have a Geforce2 Pro and it's a good card but I do have to admit that Nvidia based cards are far more pricey than they should be.