Nexuiz 2.4.2 and ATI Radeon 48XX - WARNING, Avoid this Card

[Barfly]

I don't see Nvidia in a difficult position at all, the "Bang for the buck' that you speak about is killing ATI / AMD financially with all the setup and R&D they do costs big bucks and they just don't have it. Lets face it, they lost their ass to Intel in the CPU market, shame on them.
We need the competition to keep prices low, no doubt about that.
Remember when there where 4 big players in the vid card market, now there are only 2 ? (for gaming anyway) with ATI's debt they are just moving product for a bit over cost..and I'm sure Nvidia will counter with a new card..
I say fire all the idiots that write the drivers for ATI, start fresh and get rid of the Catalyst name for the drivers, they make good cards..but support has been sub par for MANY years.

[Ed]

Remember when there where 4 big players in the vid card market, now there are only 2 ?

Intel will reenter the discrete graphics card market with Larabee. That may shake things up a bit. Or it could be the next S3 Volare. Intel is still the leader in graphics chipsets my miles just because most PC's don't have graphics cards, they use on board graphics.

support has been sub par for MANY years.

A point I've just been testing today with a Radeon 9000 in Nexuiz. The last Windows 9x driver managed 5.29 fps. Under Linux with the opensource Radeon driver which uses mesa, 9.24 fps.

[SavageX]

I don't see Nvidia in a difficult position at all, the "Bang for the buck' that you speak about is killing ATI / AMD financially with all the setup and R&D they do costs big bucks and they just don't have it.

The Radeon 48xx series is cheaper to produce than mostly-equivalent offerings from Nvidia (smaller chips, simpler boards). I'd say that business-wise the ATI business may be amongst the healthiest within AMD (doesn't mean much currently). The R&D for Radeon 48xx for sure was lower than the R&D for the GeForce GTX 260/280, which fail to impress compared to how cutting-edge and expensive their technology is.

Lets face it, they lost their ass to Intel in the CPU market, shame on them.

Actually, with 45nm AMD may offer compelling mainstream chips again with production cost being more in line with what they can afford. The current 65nm offerings indeed looks rather pale (lowish clock-speeds, high power consumption).

I say fire all the idiots that write the drivers for ATI, start fresh and get rid of the Catalyst name for the drivers, they make good cards..but support has been sub par for MANY years.

Actually given I up to now had no problems at all with the Windows-flavor of Catalyst I'd say things may not actually be in such a bad shape (keep in mind I deliberately went for ATI to serve as driver guinea pig). I'm hearing bad things about Nvidia drivers, too (to the point of some driver releases also breaking Nexuiz - and this statistic is also interesting http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvid ... hes-in-20/ ), so things are not always as easy as they seem.

Now, of course the question remains why some people seem to have massive OpenGL trouble. The OpenGL driver in general for sure is functional (given that review-sites do have scores for e.g. Prey and Quake 4), so this may be specific to some setups.

[Urmel]

Now, of course the question remains why some people seem to have massive OpenGL trouble. The OpenGL driver in general for sure is functional (given that review-sites do have scores for e.g. Prey and Quake 4), so this may be specific to some setups.

No, not specific to some setups. My company's also been in big trouble with ATi drivers for years now. We produce CAD/CAM software, where a special module allows processing units directly in an openGL visualized workspace.

At times when the X800 was current, this module was running fine on every ATi (both Radeon and FireGL). When they changed to the X1xxx generation, and built up drivers for them, our application began to commonly crash on WXP and throughoutly when running it on Vista.

So it's definately the ATi drivers that cannot handle certain openGL instructions properly.

[Barfly]

I have no clue how you think ATI / AMD is financially stable, the stockholders are not very happy thats for sure.
http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:AMD

Anyway, I say its all this guys fault.


Terry Makedon
"Mr. Catalyst" - head of the
Catalyst development department



And as far as this link that you posted
http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvid ... hes-in-20/

Its Vista, who cares anyway, ya gotta be a nutcase to run Vista and damn near EVERY hardware manufacturer has had driver issues with Vista.

I'm not saying that Nvidia is doing that well financially either, but look at the market cap on both,

[SavageX]

I have no clue how you think ATI / AMD is financially stable, the stockholders are not very happy thats for sure.
http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NYSE:AMD

I'm not saying AMD is financially stable, just that from all divisions over at AMD I'd guess ATI may be the "most stable one". Their current lineup is designed to be more cost-effective than competing Nvidia products, which is why they can do some pretty aggressive pricing to win back market share from Nvidia.

(Plus also note that stocks in general are currently under pressure.)

[Barfly]

My point really is that AMD /ATI is selling stuff so cheap the profit margin is next to nil.
In the short term its great for consumers but in the mid run it's gonna kill them.
I run 6 computers at home, 2 have ATI cards and the rest Nvidia including my laptop, My OS of choice is Linux, but I do run XP and 2 K as well on 3 of them and over the years I detest the ATI driver support for Linux, and lets face it, for gaming in Nex ya don't really need a Direct X 10 card and since I play mostly OpenGL games and my OS of choice is Linux my choice is obvious.

[Ed]

Phoronix has a review of the 4670 with a Nexuiz benchmark that includes the 4850 and it seems to work OK for them:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... 4670&num=6

[avanderveen]

Sorry if I trolled a little bit there,

I didn't mean that AMD has performed better financially since purchasing ATI, since they obviously have been getting their asses kicked by Intel in the CPU market. ATI is starting to gain ground and is keeping AMD afloat, especially with discreet graphics.

As for the driver issues, I think you'll realize that with linux if you use the official ATI driver it works very well. It's especially impressive how open ATI is to open source by releasing a complete open spec for their driver and providing support for the community and linux in general with their drivers. With Windows driver issues regarding OpenGL, I have to say that your experience with Nexuiz seems to be an exception to the norm. Or maybe it's just that non-commercial projects don't have the public requirements or resources to ensure that they will work with all combinations of ATI/nVidia cards and DirectX/OpenGL (which is more a fault of the public not being aware of these projects, and not the fault of the developers). For the review that Phoronix conducted they used the official Catalyst 8.9 linux driver and got 113 FPS at 2560x1600 with HDR enabled. That is impressive (the GeForce 9600GT got 105). So I don't really see an issue with ATI's official driver or with OpenGL and Nexuiz in general. On a final note, mainstream OpenGL games run just fine on Radeon cards.

[esteel]

Phoronix has a review of the 4670 with a Nexuiz benchmark that includes the 4850 and it seems to work OK for them:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=a ... 4670&num=6

I think the opengl problems exist for the windows drivers.. but maybe i misunderstood something, as i do not own a ati card