is ATI going to get their drivers in order?

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Author	Thread : is ATI going to get their drivers in order?

bfellow

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03-06-2008 at 06:15:47 PM

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For my HD3870, I've finally upgraded my Catalyst drivers from 7.11 to 8.2. 7.12 was absolute crap for me and I was scared off of 8.1 because of that. I'm afraid for 2900 users AMD are just gonna ignore them and focus on the 3xxx series.

Sure with AA the 3800s or 2900s suck, but thats what Crossfire is for (or so I was told by a sales rep)!

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pauldh

Profile: Honorary Veteran of THGC

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03-06-2008 at 06:22:02 PM

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I tell ya, I had a customer go to play Portal and Steam told him his drivers were out of date. SO he clicked yes to grab new drivers (Cat 8.2) which were installed on top of his current drivers. Not to mention dot net 2.0 was not on his system either. It's an X800 series VIVO card, which the new drivers don't seem to support. What an unexpected mess this became to try and fix. Good to know; I'm not going to mess with new drivers on my AIW X800XT.

Message edited by pauldh on 03-06-2008 at 06:24:54 PM

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homerdog

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03-06-2008 at 06:26:59 PM

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bfellow wrote :

Sure with AA the 3800s or 2900s suck, but thats what Crossfire is for (or so I was told by a sales rep)!

Awesome

jimmysmitty

Profile: Ancient Poster

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03-06-2008 at 11:24:05 PM

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pauldh wrote :

Yes, the X1800XT did very well at 12x10 with HDR and 2xaa. I probably played a good 150 hours of Oblivion on that card before getting an X1950XT. The X1950XT obviously did better in Oblivion, and also much better in NFS:Carbon.

edit: Remeber, you aren't running HDR with that X850XTpe, so Oblivion will look better with the HD2900.

I am sure. The game impressed me with graphics without HDR, as did HL2 Episode 1+. But I did replay Episode 1 on my 2900Pro and it looks fan-freakin-tastic with HDR enabled. And I still get like 150-200FPS average. Will probably try Oblivion this weekend if I can find my disc.

spoonboy wrote :

Thats pretty unfair, the 2900 cards came a huge way since when they were released back in last may, and even me as a die-hard fan (ive got a 2900pro, oc project) I'd say at least in xp they've gone as far as they will go, but according to the tweaktown monthly new catalyst analysis, which sadly as of 8.2 has no 2900s in the results, vista performance creaps up with every release, plus newer games take a few driver releases to get profiled properly for the cards. The 2900s and 3870s have some impressive specs, and performance without AA or AF applied is stronger than some might think, especially 2900s with modern drivers (sadly, despite my best efforts, I havent seen any in benchmarks with drivers later than 7.11), but the one glaring flaw in them is having just 16 texture units. Individually theyre more powerful than nvidia units, but even so in these small numbers they bottleneck the cards performance. A system is only as good as the weakest link, and the TMUs in DX10 ATI cards are just not up to much. These gpus are a lop-sided design, and we'll have to wait until rv770 to see some really hefty single gpu performance from ATI.

Yes they did come a long way since May. But my reasoning to this is that when you jump from a 128bit memory bus to a 256bit, like the 9500Pro to 9700Pro, there is a large difference in the performance. The reason why the 9700Pro whomped the crap out of the Gefore 4 series was mainly due to the fact that they had a 256bit bus instead. So in all terms I think that the 512bit bus is not being fully utilized and should still have more performance to push out.

I don't think the 2900 series has seen its end yet. Yea it has lower amount of TMUs but it does have vastly more shaders, whcih DX10 utilizes more than TMUs thus why when DX10 features are enabled a 2900 series can stay near most 8800's. Once DX10 becomes the main API for developers I think that the 2900 and 3800 series will be able to still give good FPS due to its large amount(320) of shaders and its 512bit ring bus system.

But we will have to wait and see. I am excited to see what the RV770 can do. I have been woundering something though, is PCIe 2.0 backwards compatable with PCIe1.0? I would think so as AGP8X was backwards compatible with 4x and 2x. If the RV770 doe good enough and is priced right I might just pick one up to relace my 2900Pro and use the 2900Pro to make a Ebay selling system cuz its not a half bad card, in fact I love it to death and hold it tightly in my sleep.

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pauldh

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03-07-2008 at 12:02:53 AM

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Well, HL2 uses a different type of HDR so your X850XTPE could have done HDR in HL2 ep1. But Farcry and Oblivion, you need an SM3.0 Card.

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