ATI's Radeon X1900GT On Test

An anonymous reader writes "ATI's Radeon X1800XT reached end of life last month and the company announced its replacement on May 5th: Radeon X1900GT. Bit-Tech has put a pair of retail Radeon X1900GT cards from Connect3D and Sapphire to the test in a range of real-world benchmarks to find out how it matches up to NVIIDA's 7900 GT."

How often do you upgrade?

[AMindLost]

I'm curious, how often do even hard-core PC gamers upgrade their video cards? To me, who only upgrades every 2-3 years, the new cards just become a blur of model numbers and benchmark scores.

Re:How often do you upgrade?

[Overzeetop]

Usually by the time I go to upgrade my video card, they've changed the bus to something faster (ISA, EISA, VESA, PCI, AGP (2x, 4x, 8x), PCI-X), and its just cheaper to get a new motherboard and processor, since processor slots change even faster than card slots. Which normally means that my card mix (ISA/PCI) won't fit, or they've change the HD controller (...,PATA, SATA) and I need a new hard drive.

Which means that each time I consider upgrading my video, it usually is just cheaper to mothball the machine and buy a new one. I think I replaced a video card once, back in the mid 90s. No, wait...I upgraded once back in 2003 so that I could go from a single monitor to a dual monitor setup. And even then, I had to step back about 3 generations from cutting edge so that the card would still work on my motherboard.

Re:nVidia vs ATI

[xiando]

My desktop now has 2xNvidia cards who work perfectly. I bought a ATI card back in the days and found that it was impossible to use the TV-out. That's "half the card" and a very important feature missing and I didn't even need to be a developer to figure out it meant that I had to forget about TV-out or buy another card. I'm never buying ATI again, part of the reason is that there are STILL no drivers, now 3 years later, supporting TV-out on the ATI card I bought.

Who fired marketing?

[Xichekolas]

Next month... "ATI's Radeon X1900XT has reached end of it's life and the company announced its replacement on June 5th: Radeon 9700486772GTX47RZA21 Rev. A!"

Seriously, can we stop using big numbers to compensate for our tiny penises?

Both Nvidia (GeForce) and ATI (Radeon) are guilty of having hundreds of products with the same name that can only be differentiated by their absurdly esoteric combination of numbers, X's, T's, and words like Pro and Extreme (or Xtreme if they are feeling particularly retarded that day). I hate marketing as much as the next nerd, but get everyone drunk some night after work and come up with a new product name.

Then I won't have to spend a week researching video cards before I buy one. I could spend that week doing better things, like waiting for UPS to deliver my video card.

ATi drivers suck under Windows too

[Craig Ringer]

To be quite frank, the ATi drivers are awful under Windows too. The ATi control center manages to take 25s to load on my 2GHz Core Duo laptop with 2GB of RAM and a 7200rpm hard disk. That's equivalent to an awfully grunty desktop. For all that, it doesn't even do very much, has a terrible UI, doesn't work correctly when Windows is set to use the correct screen DPI not pretend it's a 72dpi display (pathetic for a video card mfgr), and is a bit flakey to boot.

The ATi drivers are absolutely crap no matter what platform you're on.

Re:nVidia

[Austerity Empowers]

I think he's saying he doesn't want to "get over it". We're consumers, we don't own enough stock to care what nVidia decides is in its own best interest.

The world DOES need more competitors and open drivers. The latter will remove one really big tether to win32.