What was ATI thinking??

[Guest]

Why would they release the product for reviews when they KNEW the drivers were immature? Yes, the 8500 beats the GF3 in '98/athlon, but a significant percent of the market uses Intel, and certainly XP (soon).
The bad reviews will only put off potential sales...
I do believe this was a huge mistake on ATI's part.

<font color=blue>Jesus saves...</font color=blue><font color=red>and takes half damage!</font color=red>

 

[noko]

Well they got snowed balled for one by Nvidia superior driver division and sunk somewhat by their own. Plus they can't wait forever to release a card. The Radeon was just to old to compete. The Radeon 7500 as a gaming card is good but compared to a TI200 it doesn't stand a chance. The Radeon 7500 does have features that some people may really want more then just a game card as in better 2d (apparently not that much now) better video/DVD plus dual monitor support from the get go, mature drivers but still not as good as the game performance or 3d features of the TI200. So ATI will have to down the price on a feature rich card meaning I can't see how they will make much money from the Radeon 7500. The Radeon 8500 is like a lion in a cage voracious but trapped ready to pounch on the TI500 but locked by ATI's key master. ATI did do much better on the Radeon then the Rage128 in the driver department, now they really have to show something in the drivers department otherwise they will even have a harder time against Nvidia. Hopefully the Gamecube will help ATI out from loosing to much money and who knows maybe they will show a profit even if it is a little would be better then nothing. I will give them about 2 months to show major improvement otherwise I will probably upgrade to a Nvidia card.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by noko on 10/18/01 12:20 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[arsend]

One important thing to not is that the missing items on the ATI card, and the problems with XP may not be entirely ATI's fault. Direct X 8.1 is still not out and neither is Windows XP, we still have about 7 days to go before these items go mainstream. Also, understand that XP is a new OS and to my knowledge, a Microsoft OS has never preformed perfectly right out of the box. let us wait a few more week until XP goes mainstream, along with Direct X 8.1, then, I bet all those features will start working just like magic.

If it works for you then don't fix it.

 

[noko]

I hope so, except ATI has been pretty quiet about it if that is the case. Actually I think by Christmass ATI will have a significant improvement in the Drivers, but we will see.

 

[Sihs]

If only ATI had one half of Nvidia's driver team, they'd work magic. There's one thing that got my attention about the new official drivers. They do have better performance in q3a and 3dmark for me. But in the detail section, the point sprites scores really weird:
.9MSprites/sec on my 148MHz Radeon LE win98
.3MSprites/sec on Tom's Radeon 8500 review
.3Msprites/sec on my LE with the new driver set.

I forgot to mention that the .9 score was not on the official drivers for win98 and it used some tweaking by the raid on tweaker.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by sihs on 10/18/01 10:55 PM.</EM></FONT></P>