Tom’s Hardware has setuped a match between the two most powerful 3D graphics card models, the ATi Radeon 8500 and the nVidia GeForce3 Ti500. To cut the (long) story short, ATi shows that it has a much more impressive hardware than nVidia has, but also much (also impressively) worse drivers. So, while it takes a small lead to only some tests under Win98, under WindowsXP, the ATi card completely fails to perform adequately, plus the drivers are unstable and even exiting or crashing randomly some of Tom’s tests.
Radeon 8500 vs. Ti500 – Overclocked Graphics
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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This seems to be in line with what a friend of mine (a QNX developer ‘in the know’ – also Canadian as ATi’s homeland is), told me once: “Even the monkeys can write better code than the ATi programmers. They got super-intelligent hardware engineers and completely dumb programmers.”
So What if the Windows drivers suck, doesn’t ATI support Linux and open source? We need a forward motion, not a backward motion.
Eugenia I agree with you about the low quality of the first releases of win32 drivers…
But is strange as behaviour=/
Did you heard any rumor about r200 Linux (or QNX or BeOS….) drivers?
btw Did you finally get back your mighty PC with the 7Oses?
please spell check
>Did you heard any rumor about r200 Linux (or QNX or BeOS….) drivers?
<P>
Nope.
<P>
>btw Did you finally get back your mighty PC with the 7Oses?
<P>
Nope. Not yet.
<P>
>please spell check
<P>
I just did. The Gobe Productive 3 spell checker can not find anything wrong with my news post spelling. The words “ATi” and “nVidia” are written this way, as these are their marketing names. If you are talking about grammar, then, that’s the best I can do pal.
> Nope. Not yet.
=/ =/ =/ =/ =/
I’ve been holding onto my Voodoo 3000 for over 3 years now and my mind is made up concerning my next video card – I’m still going for the Radeon 8500. Drivers will eventually arive (W2K/*nix/maybe even BeOS), and the Win98 benchmarks look great. The added hardware (mpeg decoder, dual monitor etc) plus excellent 2D image quality just edges this card over the nVidia GF3Ti in my book. The price looks promising too. Although nVidia drivers are 1st class, their support for alternative OS’s isn’t great (FreeBSD/BeOS). I’d expect ATI drivers to be open-source eventually.
The inconsiderate native English speakers are ruining this site for everyone else (malakas). Give Eugenia a break.
Give it a rest, people! How many so-called native English speakers can speak *or* spell anything in any other language? Eugenia does wonderfully well, and until you start posting in Greek, better than she does in English, then you have no reason to be nitpicking!
I’m not holding my breath waiting for ATI to get their drivers right. They have a long history of proving themselves to be complete monkeys not to be trusted. From the old cards to the first Radeon to now..
I’ll believe it when I see it.
I just bought (and returned) an ati xpert 128 pci for my w2k partition. The box claimed a rage128pro chipset. Lie. It’s the rage128. It also claimed w2k support. Lie. No such support. (Sidenote: did however get the card working in BeOS). Not sure what the deal is — if they’re the only real competition for nV, I hope they get on the ball…
I just bought a Radeon 8500 to replace a Diamond MOnster Fusion (Banshee chipset… -OLD-) … Out of the games I play frequently (The Sims, Deus Ex, Max Payne, Unreal Tournament), only the Sims would work correctly (meaning no random desktop drops, software rendering only, opengl errors, d3d errors, etc…) … Once ATI gets the drivers right, I’ll have a nice card. I think it will be worth the wait. Everyone has to remember that the 8500 is truely ‘bleeding edge’ ….
I can’t get a Geforce cause most TV Outs on those cards suck. Matrox and ATi is the only ones which make good TV outputs.
> If you are talking about grammar, then, that’s the best I can do pal.
Well said — would those unable to comprehend that a non-native English speaker may make the odd mistake please FO & D? We’ve yet to see any of your Greek output… I know my sum total of Greek knowledge is “Acropolis”…
On another topic, I thought Eugenia was a guy all this time, despite the name, but, nope, out esteemed editor is “not exactly your average OS geek” (http://www.eugenia.co.uk/)… ooh la la…
I tentatively tried ATI for the first time with the Radeon DDR (I think they’re calling that the 7200 now). I got burned on several issues. Firstly they released ‘special purpose’ drivers (this is nothing to do with this Quake crap in the 8500 drivers) for games. However this wouldn’t recognise my European OEM Radeon DDR. So I was stuck with the rubbish slow ones for months.
Now with XP, I find that the official drivers work on my card but all games run at about a quarter of the speed. No really, you can’t make this stuff up. So I loaded the 2K ‘special purpose’ drivers. Games went back to full speed but every 2 hours the textures crap out – notable in Dark Age of Camelot. So I’m having to use the official XP drivers and I get single digit FPS.
Enough is enough. On paper the 8500 is indeed a better peice of hardware than the GeForce 3. However ATI has proved over the course of many products and a number of years that when it comes to drives they’re a useless shower of bastards.
I ordered an nVidia GeForce 3 TI500 yesterday. Death to ATI.
What can ATI do? They ought to sack their driver team and post a press release apologising for the quality of drivers in the past and put out the call for new competent driver programmers.
Chances of that? Not much.