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Thinking about going Radeon...

misle

misle

Diamond Member
I have a GeForce2 MX that is awesome. It is my first nVidia card. Before I used the Rage Fury and Rage Fury Pro cards, but they really suck under Win2k. But now I'm thinking about going to the Radeon 64DDR VIVO, for a couple reasons. It will surely be faster than my MX, and it has a TV-out which I'll need for the DVD drive I recently purchased. BUT I'm worried about driver support. The Rage cards have been left out to die now, and I don't want the samething to happen with the Radeon. I like the Detenator system where every card is supported and updated.

Am I paranoid? What should I do? Pro's, Con's?

Thanks,
Matt
 
well personally i like the Radeon..but for me...even though they introduced such a breakthru product ATI still hasnt improved its history of crappy ass drivers....and i dont think they ever will....their drivers are acceptable at best....especially their win2k ones...but if ur not much into gaming then by all means go Radeon...u wont be sorry
 
Get the Radeon, even if you're into gaming. Driver support for the Radeon cards even in win2k has actually been good. My card performs excellent for games and the TV out for DVD and Divx looks great.
 
The Rage days are long behind ATI. There's been 10 leaked drivers over the last month and a half and most have been better than the one before. With Radeon as their core for the foreseeable future and unified drivers supposedly coming you won't get shutout like you did with the Rage. They claimed to have learned their lesson and so far things look like they have.
 
A unified driver is just a convenience issue -the company manages one package and the consumer does not become disoriented and confused over which one to download. The disadvantages are more time required to download and the chance that no actual changes have been made for your particular model -no longer can you assume the latest version is even worth getting and messing with.

That said, I hope ATI does get their finger out, particularly in regards to NT drivers. As far as Radeon vs Geforce I see it like this: the Radeon outperforms in 9x and at least matches in NT so if they do learn how to write drivers it will only get better. The Geforce is already optimized and maxxed out. It has no potential to improve.
 


<< . As far as Radeon vs Geforce I see it like this: the Radeon outperforms in 9x and at least matches in NT >>



Link

GTS outperformed Radeon in every game they threw at it, and performed miserably in Win2k.





<< The Geforce is already optimized and maxxed out. It has no potential to improve >>



I remember people saying the same before Detonator 3 came out.

Detonator 10.1 introduces a lot of new OGL extensions....including support for vertex shaders nv_vertex_porgram. ATI, on the other hand, is too busy fixing bugs, and don't have anything close to OGL combiners on NVIDIA hardware.

Leon
 


<< GTS outperformed Radeon in every game they threw at it, and performed miserably in Win2k. >>


Read this instead, by consensus here it seems more in touch with how things are.

Comparison here.
 
Sorry, I'd rather trust benches from proven, unbiased hardware site. Fullon3d means nothing to me.

Their review is biased, and full of errors. The fact that they used Unreal (totally cpu limited game with extremely inefficient texture management) to &quot;measure&quot; performance of third texture unit just makes me laugh.

Leon

 
Yes I am sure that Tom from Fullon3D is more qualified and &quot;more in touch with how things are&quot; than Anand. 😀

Also, Tom is more qualified than John Carmack so this quote won't matter to much:

&quot;While the Radeon is a good effort in many ways, it has enough shortfalls
that I still generally call the GeForce 2 ultra the best card you can buy
right now&quot;
 


<< Yes I am sure that Tom from Fullon3D is more qualified and &quot;more in touch with how things are&quot; than Anand. 😀 >>


Pidge you misunderstood. I meant well rounded in that they compared more games and more importantly to people here the results of OVERCLOCKING. Anyone can benchmark, it doesn't take special skills and I don't see anyone questioning Anand's results do you?
As for Leon, I wouldn't normally respond to a person that I don't have a clue who they are, but there's a seperate discussion on the Fullon3d results from people who I recognize and who I respect and the consensus has been it's a well rounded review. Until you've earned the same respect from posting and showing that your viewpoint has validity I'll refer you to the other thread.
 


<< Until you've earned the same respect from posting and showing that your viewpoint has validity I'll refer you to the other thread. >>

Ouch! That must have hurt.. 😉

Since you say your MX is great, I would hold off a few weeks if possible. After the next series of cards are released, all other cards should drop in price. With W2K, the Radeon will not be as much of a boost (if any) over the MX, that it would be if you were using a Win9x system. Price Vs performance gain would probably not be worth it at this time. You need to look at the whole picture. What CPU do you have? What size monitor? What resolutions will you mainly be using it at? If it's 1024x768x32, and a system with less than 800MHz CPU, stick with the MX.
 
Oh, well if that's the case, then sure. But I thought we were on the subject of Win2K drivers and therefore I thought your comment of &quot;Read this instead, by consensus here it seems more in touch with how things are&quot; referred to Win2K drivers.
 
There's a pretty good review of the Radeon here:

Review

There's some good screen shot comparisons between the Radeon, GeForce 2 GTS, and Voodoo 5. I found the review unbiased, as they point out the weaknesses of all three video cards.
 
My radeon 64mb vivo is in the mail. i ordered it through the trade-up program. I was considering an MX. But for $20 more than an MX i thought the Radeon would be a way better deal.
 


<< There's some good screen shot comparisons between the Radeon, GeForce 2 GTS, and Voodoo 5. I found the review unbiased, as they point out the weaknesses of all three video cards. >>

Thanks Compellor, I hadn't seen that one.
 
Okay guys, I didn't mean for this to turn into a &quot;my video card can beat up your video card&quot; thread.

Yes my MX is great compared to a Rage Fury Pro 32 card.
Yes I do play a lot of games: BG, BG2, Deus Ex, Hitman, Alice, Half-Life, Thief2, etc.
I use a 19in Optiquest Monitor at 1024x768.
System: KT7A-RAiD 900@1000, 256 Crucial PC133 CL=2.
The review posted was a good comparison, thanks Compellor!!

I think my choice is between a Radeon 64DDR VIVO($150 trading in a Rage Fury) and the ASUS V7700 Deluxe($200).

How about comparing these two cards, especially gaming and driver support. How much &quot;Prettier&quot; is the Radeon... really?

How much do you think the V7700 will go down once the GF3's hit the market?

Thanks!!

Matt
 
Leon, if the Radeon does not consistently outperform the GTS, you must at least admit it does the MX which is what the question was. On a price/performance basis the Radeon is surely the hands down winner.

From what I read the release of the Detonator 3 drivers resulted in a significant boost at that time which finally made the MX a worthwhile alternative to the much cheaper S2K since the MX was lackluster in full color. While NVIDIA may add some software features I doubt anything like that kind of performance gain is possible again.
 


<< How about comparing these two cards, especially gaming and driver support. How much &quot;Prettier&quot; is the Radeon... really? >>


Matt do some searches and read some of the ongoing threads and the reviews they talk about. You have to do the homework to decide which one suits you.
 
What?! Research?!? Are you crazy? 😉

No, I have read a lot about these cards, but it seems like half the reviews are biased one way and the other half are biased the other way. I didn't count on everyone in the forum being the same way. All I've really gathered is that ATi needs to work on drivers, GF2's are faster, and the Radeon's have really pretty 2D.

Is that really all there is to know about these cards?

Matt
 
The Radeon is a very fast card and can only get faster. I get 103FPS in Timedemo 1 high quality 1024X768. Fast enough eh?
 


<< All I've really gathered is that ATi needs to work on drivers, GF2's are faster, and the Radeon's have really pretty 2D. >>


I think it's just a matter of preference anymore. If you've used ATi or nVidia products in the past, and were disappointed with either one, you're going to go with a different brand of video card. I used Matrox for several years until I bought a G200. It had excellent 2D and the 3D wasn't bad, but their OpenGL support wasn't fully implemented in their drivers, so, I sold it and bought a nVidia TNT. Later on I tried an ATi Rage Fury (only had it for about a week), and thought it had good 2D but the 3D left a lot to be desired, so, I went back to using my TNT. At the time for my next upgrade, I was leaning heavily on a GeForce DDR, but waited awhile longer for the prices of the GeForce 2 GTS to come down. I had read up on ATi's Radeon and even 3Dfx's Voodoo 5, but decided to buy a GeForce 2 GTS because I had such good luck with my TNT, and almost every review I read gave it good marks.

All I can say is try the Radeon out for a week, and then if you find out that you don't like it, send or take it back and get something else. There are other choices out there, and only YOU can decide which one is right for you.
 
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