Originally posted by: Mats
jima: You asked what "everyone thinks" of the new Radeon - I simply posted my opinion. Whether I have one or not is immaterial, I prefer to do some research before buying a new card, don't you? Because it gets a higher fps in games, doesn't mean it "must be good". There are many other factors to judge a card by, one of the most important being the drivers. Orbius: OK that's what you think or would like to believe, but the fact is that ATi drivers are broken in certain circumstances. Their drivers are bad, believe it. Even John Carmack has said that nVidia dirvers are the "golden standard". When ATi release a new card or drivers, many devs have to come up with workarounds or release patches to get their games to work. These issues never appear with nVidia or even Matrox. Electric Amish: The card is powerful (however 'brute' and unrefined that it is) but I believe a card and it's drivers go hand in hand, therefore the card was a let down and unless ATi sort out there drivers, it's a waste of hardware. So you have no issues, nice, but this still does not detract from the fact that ATi does have serious driver issues that need to be resolved. The card required patches for games from ATi aswell as from game devs themselves. So no, the card was not ready. The release was all marketing and publicity, nothing more.
IMO, I tend to like opinions from someone that has been around on the forums more so than some lesser known guy. With this in mind, here is what BFG10K had to say about the 9700 pro in this thread:
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But not becausse the image quality is considrably superior to any nvidia based card; that is in both 2d and 3d, colors are richer details are more defined . **CRAP**
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It's not crap at all. The image quality of the 9700 is absolutely superb - from anisotropic filtering to FSAA to colour richness it blows the Ti4600 away. I have never seen a video card exhibit such high image quality and rendering quality in all my years of using them.
After seeing a 9700 the Ti4600 can perhaps be described as having a dull plastic look when performing 3D rendering.
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another:
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If you don't mind flaky drivers and GF3 level perf the over-priced Matrox Parhelia is the king of IQ, I would expect the Rad9700 to be the second best with the Rad8500/9000 and GF4TI cards pretty close behind,
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There is nothing that can touch a Radeon 9700's anisotropic filtering and FSAA image quality, especially not the Parhelia with its half-baked implementations. Once you see the image quality of the 9700 with respect to anisotropic filtering and FSAA there is just no going back to any card.
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After reading what he says, i tend to feel more enthusiastic about the 9700 more so than someone that doesnt own an ATi card. his opinions hold more water and come from someone that has actually tried the card. he also has tried an Nvidia too so that makes it even more worthwhile to read what he says. That is what makes it more informative than your propaganda that you got off the web from other people.
btw, i own a 8500 and will testify to the problems i had with drivers when the 8500 first came out. in fact, i got it around Nov and i think the card actually came out in sept or oct, but the drivers were still an issue back then. Ati was really slow with updates. However, my issues were mainly in the desktop (the notorious transparent shadow problem). After a few upgrades, im sure ATi hired a few more guys to the driver team cuz my problems were diminishing quite rapidly. Even now, i havent really had a problem. The last one was with Warcraft 3 and some minor texture problems. Jedi 2 played nicely and the UT demo was great too. so, from my standpoint, ATi has fixed their drivers and have done a good job and have earned my loyalty with future products. It was also nice to get something that performed like product 'X' only to have it transform into product 'Y' for less $$ with a few drivers. reminds me of Nvidia cards.