ATI Graphics Cards

[nips]

Apparently the 9600/9600 pro is a dream to overclock. It is meant to be simple to get it running over 20% more effective/faster... I can't find a linky yet though.

It may be something worth investigating if you want a good gfx card but have little money!

Shame it gets cained by its older and discontinued brother (9500/9500pro). I have seen some benchmarks of HL2 on the 9500pro and they are almost equal to the 9700 in resolutions up to 1024x768.

But is the 9500 a DX 9 card?

[H-Man]

It sure is - great card for the money .......... getting hard to find these days tho.

[eghamninja]

Apparently the 9600/9600 pro is a dream to overclock. It is meant to be simple to get it running over 20% more effective/faster... I can't find a linky yet though.

It may be something worth investigating if you want a good gfx card but have little money!

Shame it gets cained by its older and discontinued brother (9500/9500pro). I have seen some benchmarks of HL2 on the 9500pro and they are almost equal to the 9700 in resolutions up to 1024x768.

But is the 9500 a DX 9 card?

The 9500pro has exactly the same GPU and the 9700 only difference is that it only has half the memory bandwidth.

[Super Stu]

Will attempt to steer this toward a boring discussion now.

Was just thinking that, for the first time ever, I quite fancy an ATI card. For me, this isn't sleeping with the enemy, it's having his children and providing on-tap fellatio. It got me to thinking how on earth ATI gazumped nVidia, so I'll pose this: are ATI using any technologies or techniques obtained in purchasing ArtX? I'm sure I read quite a while ago that the GF FX would be a completely new core (although I question this, a new core presumably wouldn't be able to share detonators with the remainder of the geforces) based on 3dfx patents. Or perhaps this didn't make it into the FX and is destined for nv40.

Anyway, thoughts?

[eghamninja]

Will attempt to steer this toward a boring discussion now.

Was just thinking that, for the first time ever, I quite fancy an ATI card. For me, this isn't sleeping with the enemy, it's having his children and providing on-tap fellatio. It got me to thinking how on earth ATI gazumped nVidia, so I'll pose this: are ATI using any technologies or techniques obtained in purchasing ArtX? I'm sure I read quite a while ago that the GF FX would be a completely new core (although I question this, a new core presumably wouldn't be able to share detonators with the remainder of the geforces) based on 3dfx patents. Or perhaps this didn't make it into the FX and is destined for nv40.

Anyway, thoughts?

I remember reading somewhere that some of the ArtX guys were working with the team developing the R300 (9700 series chip).

As for nVidia using 3DFX tech in the NV3x series I have no idea but, I do know that ex 3DFX engineers have been integrated into the various engineering groups of nVidia, and they have had plenty of time to integrate their tech.

[Ish]

Just installed that 9800 Pro card. What a beast!

Homeworld 2 - max everything at 1600x1200 and silky silky smooth. And extremely good looking . Very happy!

Shame about the pesky Half Life 2 delay though...

[Spatial]

Just installed that 9800 Pro card. What a beast!

Homeworld 2 - max everything at 1600x1200 and silky silky smooth. And extremely good looking . Very happy!

Yep, got mine on Thursday and its the daddy !

So far its been able to keep up with every single thing I've thrown at it, and I've been ramping the settings up on everything from Tron 2.0 to Tomb Raider AOD (which came free with it by the way - its not like I'd actually go out and buy crap like that )

:hugs Radeon and burns arms :

Have been having a few niggles with it though. For some reason on the occasional boot up, the screen has lines going down it and the icon pictures in the start menu are corrupted. Takes a few reboots to sort this out. Anyone got any ideas as to why ?

Shame about the pesky Half Life 2 delay though...

Now why did you have to go and mention that ???!!!

[hugejeans]

Just installed that 9800 Pro card. What a beast!

Homeworld 2 - max everything at 1600x1200 and silky silky smooth. And extremely good looking . Very happy!

Yep, got mine on Thursday and its the daddy !

So far its been able to keep up with every single thing I've thrown at it, and I've been ramping the settings up on everything from Tron 2.0 to Tomb Raider AOD (which came free with it by the way - its not like I'd actually go out and buy crap like that )

:hugs Radeon and burns arms :

Have been having a few niggles with it though. For some reason on the occasional boot up, the screen has lines going down it and the icon pictures in the start menu are corrupted. Takes a few reboots to sort this out. Anyone got any ideas as to why ?

Shame about the pesky Half Life 2 delay though...

Now why did you have to go and mention that ???!!!

this happened to mine and got worse and worse to the point when windows would not load.Have not got any idea why so wiped harddrive and loaded everything up again hears my set up just in case any of you PC boffins(which i am not)might be able to tell me why?

AMD Athlon3000 xp
MSI K7N2/nvidia nforce2 motherboard
1gb ram
160 maxtor harddrive
Radeon 9800 pro 128
Audigy 2 soundcard

[Adam]

NOOO! That problem sounds too familiar. Like you said when you boot up the screen kinda goes weird and you get lines going down it, and you said you get currupt button images? I had that but it was all over the desktop, like the X button in the top right in every window was sometimes messed up. It used to be ok though after the computer warmed up a bit, but sometimes the screen would blink, as if the monitor went off and on. It only got worse in the end so we took the graphics card back and replaced it, that fixed the problem, it was defanatly a fault with the card. I think maybe when I touched it, I transfered some sort of energy into the chip and that messed it up, as I had took it out quite a few times.

Your's might be a completly different problem though so don't worry just yet but if your monitor blinks...

[Ish]

If you'd taken it in and out a few times maybe you'd static'ed it. Or... cracked the board (or made worse an existing crack) in the board!

[yashiro]

Have been having a few niggles with it though. For some reason on the occasional boot up, the screen has lines going down it and the icon pictures in the start menu are corrupted.

Seen this on Radeons before. In operation its 100% fine but ocasionally on boot you get some screen corruption.

It's either not clearing its vram, a bios issue, an agp problem or something a bit more sinister. Try reading the docs about smartgart.

[Spatial]

I did fit the card myself, but used a mates anti static wrist strap and work bench so hopefully its not that

The card went in easy enough so I don't think I would have cracked it from any excessive force...... but then I'd never be able to tell if there was an existing crack on it

The corrupted icons are only in the Start menu, and only under the `all programs` menu ( I'm using XP ). For some reason they seem to have sorted themselves now and the displays been alright for a day or so (fingers crossed ).

I know XP is a tempremental bastard when it comes to changing some pieces of hardware - I was pre-warned about changing from an Nvidia card to an ATI and the chaos that can cause - so I'm hoping its just that

As for the monitor blinking, I'm not sure if this has happened once or twice. I did have a problem in the beggining trying to run things in full screen but I think that was to do with refresh rate differences between windows and the programmes I was trying to run.

Thanks for the warnings all.

I'm going to put this game through its paces today and install a load of games on my hard drive. I'll be keeping an eye on it very closely from now on. If the problem gets worse or keeps occuring I'll be taking it back !

[replicant]

Glad you guys are happy with your 9800pros.

Coupled with a fast cpu, and fast memory it is an amazing card. Ive not had any issues with the card since I got it couple of months ago. Its been reliable, and steady as a rock. Ive not experienced any of hte corrupted window screens like you guys are talking about.

If you want to double check then go to this site. www.rage3d.com
Its a great Radeon website, and it has very good forums. Members of the catalyst driver team post there so its a host of quality information regarding your new cards.

[Baroque]

Will attempt to steer this toward a boring discussion now.

Was just thinking that, for the first time ever, I quite fancy an ATI card. For me, this isn't sleeping with the enemy, it's having his children and providing on-tap fellatio. It got me to thinking how on earth ATI gazumped nVidia, so I'll pose this: are ATI using any technologies or techniques obtained in purchasing ArtX?
Anyway, thoughts?

Short answer is yes.

Putting ATi and ArtX together was like putting two parts of SGI's late eighties, early nineties R&D team back together. You had two companies who had solid mobile (ATi) and integrated chipset talent (ArtX), but the desktop GPU talent was lacking on both sides.

When they threw their desktop GPU teams together people literally started moving cubes to sit next to their old friends from SGI and the design juices started flowing immediately. One of their first breakthroughs was the Unified Catalyst Driver Set. Any long time ATi user knows how crummy their standalone drivers used to be, Nvidia had been giving them a kicking on drivers alone for years.

This isn't the same ATi that it was five years ago, it's devolved back into the golden age SGI technocracy, and in my opinion the company is better for it.

[Freddo]

your screen curuption issues could be down to power, the r9800 is a power hungry beast and if all you have is a generic el cheapo psu it may just be too much strain, especialy at start up as this is where the most load is placed on the psu, with hd's and optical drives all spinning up.