The anisotropy quality is improved. There are no more stripes around in the open. But RIP mapping is RIP mapping... First of all, if the floor is not even and it has a relief made of polygons, some of them will differ from the others in the way the textures are turned - and this is very noticeable. Secondly, in the 3DMark2001 in the fillrate tests with anisotropy there are two jerks in the beginning (lasting half a second). It's evidently connected with generation of RIP mapping. Although the ANISO16 provides higher sharpness and lower performance hit than the ANISO8 on the GF4Ti, the second looks better.
By the way, I came across one more unpleasant drawback, probably caused by the RIP mapping. In the Morrowind the game hangs up when some monsters get onto the scene or approach at a certain distance. After rebooting the Windows XP complains about the video driver. It seems that when the driver gets new textures and starts generating new RIP maps, the game doesn't understand such a delay. That is why a personage of the 61 level looks quite ridiculous when he escapes from Kagouti like from the Gorgon Medusa... Because when you see it you can "turn into stone". Although the problem can be solved by disabling the anisotropy, I don't feel like playing without it or constantly saving the game and reswitching.
Driver quality. Buggy. There is something wrong with fog - sometimes it's much lighter than it should be, especially in the UT/OpenGL. The same was noticed in the Morrowind. On the west coast when the sun declines into the sea, there is haze hanging over the water. The haze blinks. No other flaws are noticed, which is excellent for the first release.
Dual-monitor support and TV-Out. On loading, the images proceed to both outputs irrespective of settings. In the games the TV quality is far from being perfect - in the UT the fog gets banding artefacts, it seems that it's 16 bpp. But it can be caused by problems with fog in the drivers. The geometry looks better on the desktop monitor than on the GF4Ti/Philips 7108, but there are shadows of bright color spots to some reason. That is possibly a problem of the TV set, but the Philips 7108 didn't had that trouble. Movies can be viewed on the full screen on the second head in the theater mode irrespective of resolution, but in case of the Windows Media Player the image disappears when you minimize it or bring something onto the screen above it (even in the extended overlay mode). The ATI's player doesn't have such a problem. DVD can be played perfectly on TV, the colors are much better than on the Philips 7108. It seems that the integrated encoder can't output an interlace signal as interlaced in its own resolution.
I hope that in our next review on the RADEON 9700 I will look into the problems our readers bring forward. I also hope the experts from ATI will do their best to eliminate all of them.
some have problems... some don't... if you were to get a 9700 now... try to get the latest revision.... seems to have cured what the first revision was having problems with.
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