Need opinions - Best video card in terms of support for 2k(a

[Pythagoras 0]

So ATI is annoying me. I love the All in Wonder 128 32meg I have, but Ive concluded ATI will never get off there duffs and give me drivers worth their name. But Id like your opinion on who will give the best support for 2000 (and XP in the future). Does ATI give decent support to the Radeon All in Wonders? I noticed they supported 2k on release...

 

Opinions?

Recomendations?

Grievances?

[DosFreak 2]

What are you looking for in a video card?

 

Yes currently ATI supports their Radeon very well (for once in their lives) but that's only because it's their flagship product. Many are waiting to see what happens witht teh Radeon 1 situation when the Radeon 2 comes out.

 

Currently the video card with the best DRIVERS is the Nvidia line of products with the Geforce 2 + cards being the main focus. Some say this line as 2D that doesn't work for them, others say it works fine (I'm on of those ). So currently Nvidia is the best card for XP/2K.

 

Of course considering how old your card is you might just be happy with a Matrox G400 which while veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrryyy slow by today's standard can still hold it's own in 800X600 in the latest games. (HAHAHAHAH! )

[Brian Frank 0]

Best driver support is Nvidia, from the graphics I've used. I've had bad experiences running ATI cards, so I'm biased against them.

However, it seems that almost every month,or two, we see a new detonator driver out. And they work well.

For pure gaming, you can't beat Nvidia. If you're more inclined along 2D apps, Matrox will serve you better. May look at the G450, or 550, but as stated earlier, Matrox is not the best for gaming, but it's playable, in lower resolutions.

Nvidia and Matrox are your best bets right now, other's I can't say.

[Pythagoras 0]

Well I really like the All in Wonder, but it stinks that ATI is the only people to come out with an all-in-one card. I may look into the Radeon 2 I suppose, Ill probably wait till XP comes out and see what happens. The Radeon 2 All in Wonder will prolly be fairly pricy though.... (anyone know a release date) I guess its a wait and see kinda thing.

 

(What the heck does ATI stand for anyway? Annoying Technology Inyourcomputer?)

[Brian Frank 0]

How 'bout Acute Technical Ignorance ?

[Ant -|- One 0]

I personally love ATI video cards ! Why do some of you puck on it ? This I don't understand... I began with the RagePro, then Rage128 and Rage128Pro, and I plan to install the Radeon 64 as soon as I have the bucks for it ! I can play DVD's whitout a glitch, and the latest games at 1024* or 1152* res, why ask for more ? Of course, I crave for the latest 3D effects (hardware antialiasing, pixel shading,...); be patient is my rule, I can wait for top notch products to lower their prices !...

 

Show me someone flawless...?! ATI always comes with a solution; sooner or later might be their real problem... but why blame them so loud ?!

 

I don't want to spit at Nvidia, in spite of the fact they're doing their best to gain access to a monopoly position just like some other Big Brother(s)

 

Stay cool !

[Pythagoras 0]

Quote:

I personally love ATI video cards ! Why do some of you puck on it ? This I don't understand... I began with the RagePro, then Rage128 and Rage128Pro, and I plan to install the Radeon 64 as soon as I have the bucks for it ! I can play DVD's whitout a glitch, and the latest games at 1024* or 1152* res, why ask for more ? Of course, I crave for the latest 3D effects (hardware antialiasing, pixel shading,...); be patient is my rule, I can wait for top notch products to lower their prices !...

Show me someone flawless...?! ATI always comes with a solution; sooner or later might be their real problem... but why blame them so loud ?!

I don't want to spit at Nvidia, in spite of the fact they're doing their best to gain access to a monopoly position just like some other Big Brother(s)

Stay cool !

I think most of us would agree that there hardware seems to be good quality. However, the support and drivers just plain SUCK. I have a love/hate relationship with ATI its like "hey All in wonder, cool idea, what! no drivers! Ihate you!"

[DosFreak 2]

Yes everyone agrees that the ATI hardware is good but throughout their entire history it's always been drivers drivers drivers. Without the drivers it's just another piece of silicon. It's like a BMW without gas or battery. Yeppe!

[Brian Frank 0]

That nailed it.

[Ali 0]

Does anybody remember ATI fury 3D MAX that has 2 Rage 128 pro chips and 64 Mb of VRAM? It is gone now. It is a great card. It looks neat too! but they are all on the return shelves back in the stores! Because ATI was too lazy to actually build a driver that works with the card and the system doesn't freeze!

[Pythagoras 0]

Quote:

Yes everyone agrees that the ATI hardware is good but throughout their entire history it's always been drivers drivers drivers. Without the drivers it's just another piece of silicon. It's like a BMW without gas or battery. Yeppe!

I guess that you can patch crappy drivers later, but you cant patch bad hardware, so getting the hardware built is ATIs priority.

[Brian Frank 0]

But that's all worthless without good drivers. It doesn't matter how good the hardware is if the driver's are bad. I think ATI could absolutely blast the GeForce 3 off the map if they get their drivers down pat. Nvidia may not necessarily have the best hardware, but they do write drivers that are good to begin with and then continue to tweak them to get the most out of the card. I'm not saying Nvidia makes bad hardware, because crappy hardware is not always salvagable by drivers--no matter how good. Nvidia is not perfect, however the solid support and performance is the reason they are top dog in consumer video cards.

I hope that ATI does improve their drivers, because that would up the competition, and a war in graphics like the Intel/AMD one wouldn't be a bad thing.

[euankirkhope 0]

Quote:

Does anybody remember ATI fury 3D MAX that has 2 Rage 128 pro chips and 64 Mb of VRAM? It is gone now. It is a great card. It looks neat too! but they are all on the return shelves back in the stores! Because ATI was too lazy to actually build a driver that works with the card and the system doesn't freeze!

Lazy is the wrong word. Tecnically Impossible is more fitting. bascially they needed MS to make a patched version of some system drivers to make win2k see the PCI bridge correctly on the Fury MAXX. MS couldn't make it work either, so a Win2k driver never emerged, although a driver appeared that simply used the 1 chip, ignoring the other.

As for drivers, I can personally say that the drivers at ATI have improved massively since the rage pro days. Except for the DVD player has never worked for me in win2k (but ATI didn't write that). Seems to be an incompatiblity with my mobo, win2k, and the DMA mode used by the player. It works in 9X and XP

The only point to note is that the drivers have been fairly solid, Most of my scene demos work, except for those hardcoded to the Nvidia versions of OGL and D3D The performace is always the exact same with new releases. No Detonator style injections. However rumour has it the Radeon 2 will ship with Unified Radeon drivers. Ditching the legacy Rage128 code. Although I doubt it will happen to be honest. Or it will just be the current drivers that happen to be compatible with the Radeon 1, so that makes them "unified".

[Pythagoras 0]

Quote:

Lazy is the wrong word. Tecnically Impossible is more fitting. bascially they needed MS to make a patched version of some system drivers to make win2k see the PCI bridge correctly on the Fury MAXX. MS couldn't make it work either, so a Win2k driver never emerged, although a driver appeared that simply used the 1 chip, ignoring the other.

As for drivers, I can personally say that the drivers at ATI have improved massively since the rage pro days. Except for the DVD player has never worked for me in win2k (but ATI didn't write that). Seems to be an incompatiblity with my mobo, win2k, and the DMA mode used by the player. It works in 9X and XP

The only point to note is that the drivers have been fairly solid, Most of my scene demos work, except for those hardcoded to the Nvidia versions of OGL and D3D The performace is always the exact same with new releases. No Detonator style injections. However rumour has it the Radeon 2 will ship with Unified Radeon drivers. Ditching the legacy Rage128 code. Although I doubt it will happen to be honest. Or it will just be the current drivers that happen to be compatible with the Radeon 1, so that makes them "unified".

Perhaps another part of it is the fact that ATI makes both the chip and the card. So if you buy a matrox card w/ nvidia chipset, you got two companys and the labor gets divided, but ATI makes cards and chips so its harder to have to work on both... Maybe its a half baked idea. 3dfx made cards and chips, how was there support?

[Brian Frank 0]

3dfx had good drivers out, however, the hardware needed more muscle to really threaten Nvidia. In some cases a GF2 MX card would peform on par with a Voodoo 5, quite sad considering that was when the V5 was $200 and an MX was $100.

3dfx had the exact opposite problem of ATI: Good drivers, sorry hardware. However, my Voodoo 3 performs rather well, considering its age.

[oaydin 0]

yeah ati has some driver problems here too,

but until nvidia gives good quality @ 2D , I won't leave using ATI

if u have a 19" or a bigger monitor using 1600@1200 resulition

nvidia suxks !!!!

[Brian Frank 0]

I'm sure ATI's cards are good for 2D, but I wouldn't buy them for that considering they seem to be aimed at gaming. I'd get Matrox instead for 2D, and my GF2 Pro (with driver support) should finally be in within 2 days.

 

Personally, I can't tell the difference in 2D, and for gaming--a major function on both rigs---Nvidia has the speed for cheap.

I hear the GF3 is supposed to have some good 2D on it, and unless ATI works on their drivers, the next Radeon's are going to get whipped. That's sad considering that they have the potential to wipe the floor with the GF3.

[Spam 0]

Quote:

Well I really like the All in Wonder, but it stinks that ATI is the only people to come out with an all-in-one card.

Have you had a look at the ASUS geforce2/3 Deluxe range? - they have built in tv-tuner/vid in, s-vid/composite out (supports a rather nifty twin view feature like Matrox's dual head technology) and even some funky 3d glasses.
Unfortunately the win2k drivers currently limit the video out functions quite drastically (have to disconnect your monitor for it to work ), however hopefully this might get changed in the future, and both 2d and 3d performance is excellent under win2k, and the tv tuner works fantastically.

[Pythagoras 0]

Quote:

Have you had a look at the ASUS geforce2/3 Deluxe range? - they have built in tv-tuner/vid in, s-vid/composite out (supports a rather nifty twin view feature like Matrox's dual head technology) and even some funky 3d glasses.
Unfortunately the win2k drivers currently limit the video out functions quite drastically (have to disconnect your monitor for it to work ), however hopefully this might get changed in the future, and both 2d and 3d performance is excellent under win2k, and the tv tuner works fantastically.

Really... hmm. I had a feeling that ATI had patented the h*ll out of the All in Wonder idea. Maybe I was wrong. Well I suppose it comes down to everyone will have to support XP (if its not a failure) and XP will become the common OS in PCs so XP support will become paramount...

[pmistry 0]

Just seeing all the posts, I'd thought I would throw my opinion as well. Quite frankly I hate ATI, I used to use all of their products. I have owned ATI Rage 1/2meg PCI, no good Win95 drivers for this card, couldn't play Quake 2 in software. Got myself a Rage Pro 8 meg, this card is famous for promoting strong opengl and direct3d but nope this card had the worst driver support ever. I don't get it since ATI made so much freaking money on the rage pro, i think compaq, dell, ibm, and hp all bundled a rage pro on their systems. Then I got a Rage128 Pro card, but man it sucked, poor 32-bit performance, which was supposed to be its strong point, bad drivers as well. What really pissed me off was that after the Rage 1 card, ATI encouraged me to try the Rage Pro, so I did. The Rage Pro had a decent feature set, but drivers killed it. When 3dfx had the Voodoo2 and Nvidia with the Riva 128, the Rage Pro got left out. The Rage128 Pro card was nice but my box was wrong or something, I bought the Xpert 2000 Pro box , but I got a stripped down 64-bit bus Rage128 Pro card that pretty much was slow and pathetic. So I dumped it, and then got a GeForce2MX and am quite happy with it.

[Ali 0]

Geforce 2 MX is a cheap card. but the only good thing i can tell about it is that it is compatible with almost anything! and the drivers (as others have posted) are good. But for heavy gaming i'm not sure if it is a right choice. because it is always hot! even when you turn on the computer and you are in the early steps of booting it starts to get worm. so you have to have a rear fan or something to keep the other parts of mother board in the right temprature. It has a fan on it but it only cools down the card itself.

the best system i made with that i had to put a big *** power suply and two fans in the case in front and the back. even with that the guy asked me to put his hard drive somewhere close to the fan. i have no idea if that helps but i had a system that kept crashing on a worm day like today! ;(

[Brian Frank 0]

Shoot, skip the MX and look at a Pro. There half the cost of a GF3 and the next step down.

 

I've noticed that with a plain heatsink and no fan the Hercules MX card didn't get insanely hot. I'm still stuck with my temporary GF2MX200 and that just gets hot as hell with a heatsink, but I haven't had lockups in games, so I guess it must be okay.