ATI Releases Five New Radeons

An anonymous reader writes "Eager to retake the performance crown from NVIDIA, ATI has announced five new releases for their Radeon product line. The latest card features 512MB GDDR4 memory running at 1000Mhz, it's currently the fastest single CPU VGA card out there. From the review: 'ATI has proven they are a leader and not a follower with the X1950 XTX. ATI has released the world's first consumer 3D graphics card with GDDR4 memory clocked at the highest ever stock speed that chews through games when it comes to high definition gaming. Memory bandwidth looks to once again be the defining factor in 3D performance. With a re-designed heatsink/fan unit, faster memory, and lowered price, the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX and CrossFire Edition are both serious 3D gaming video cards for the [H]ardcore that offer some value over NVIDIA's more expensive 7950 GX2. ATI's CrossFire dual GPU gaming platform looks to have just grown up.'"

Linux support from ATI=crap

[harris s newman]

Trying to get ATI drivers to work with xgl/compiz is like pulling teeth. So until ATI releases new drivers with good xgl/compiz support, announcing new hardware is worthless.

Drivers?

[Recovering Hater]

I just can't help but wonder what their Linux driver support will be like. If it is the same or worse then honestly, it only means that ATI has produced five more cards to ignore. Harsh? Maybe, but there is some truth in that statement.

ATI/AMD - Show leadership

[peterdaly]

These cards are nice...for windows users.

What the new AMD led ATI can do to help show leadership is to release the information (or even drivers) needed for Linux to take full advantage of their card capabilities.

ATI seemed to not want to do this. I hope this changes under the new AMD administration.

What I've heard in the Linux community is to stay away from anything ATI if you plan to use it with Linux. Too bad really, because they really do make nice cards.

Drivers

[achacha]

They keep releasing new cards and the drivers that support them keep slowing down and mangling the performance of the previous cards (currently had to uninstall 6.8 catalyst to use 6.6 because the FPS rate got cut in half due to a conflict with FSAA/Bloom effects; and 6.7 driver refuses to install because it thinks the card is not an ATI while 6.6 and 6.8 do). This has been their history. I have been buying ATI cards since mid 90s (glutton for punishment I suppose) and every time a new card comes out I install the new drivers and my slightly older card runs slower or drivers crash or effects are blurred. I think they really need to beef up their driver development to keep up with the constant release of new hardware, what good is a new card if you are worried the drivers will be problematic.

While NVIDIA is not perfect, the 2 cards I have from them work perfectly with their drivers. While ATI is releasing better featured cards their drivers leave something to be desired.

Wait for DirectX10 cards?

[Brit_in_the_USA]

It is generally predicted that DirectX 10 cards will be with us in a few months (holiday season or just after).

Are sales declining because of anticipation of this?
Will ATI and Nvidia be able to shift large quantities of cards over the next few months, with people like myself waiting for the next (significant) generation?

Aside: Yes, I am aware that these cards will still pack a punch in DirectX10 games, and will not be obsolete over night, but the unified shader/vertex architecture of DirectX10 seems to be a big shift in card design and will offer a lot of features to game desingers, not efficntly do-able on the odler hardware, so you may be stuck with a less good lookign rendering of a new game.

ATI is Evil

[SleeknStealthy]

Although it was touched on a little above, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to rant about ATI. ATI does not support more than 2-3 generations of cards. Their driver development quickly stops and their Catalyst drivers are ridiculously huge.

On the linux side of things their support is so freaking lame it is ridiculous. Reverse engineered open source drivers are 10X better than drivers developed by ATI. ATI is pathetic and any company that releases such terrible software in their name does not have very high standards and cannot be trusted. I had a radeon 8500 and I will never recommend or waste my money on such pathetic ATI junk again.

Re:ATI/AMD - Show leadership

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

Well, said - but to expand on that a little:

What I've heard in the Linux community is to stay away from anything ATI if you plan to use it with Linux.

The same applies to nvidia. Try Intel or Unichrome cards. Support companies that support FOSS.

Oh, and for the people who'll inevitably reply with the "they cant release the source, because of 3rd party IP" (I am tired of that particular whine) - why can't ATI/Nvidia release the source for the code they do have IP rights over? (and allow the OSS community to fill in the blanks).

Wow. A video card company releases a new card.

[FreakerSFX]

Why is this considered front page news for Slashdot?

This will repeat in 3-6 months with NVIDIA and then back to ATI.

This isn't surprising or newsworthy at all. Hell we should just set up a recurring story that reverses the vendors.

It is good that there is some serious competition for the 2% of gamers that can afford the very top end. For the rest of us, it doesn't really matter what you pick unless you do care about vendor support for your OS.

Who in their right mind does benchmarks this way?

[Fallen Kell]

I mean, come one people. The whole point of benchmarks is to show how well the different cards perform with the same settings!!!! The numbers they post for all the cards have different configurations and settings that generated those results. Show me ALL the cards running the SAME EXACT settings and give me their results. Don't just arbitrarily show what you consider as "playable" speeds and then show the game settings used to produce those speeds. How in the world are these guys staying afloat when making horrendous reviews like this?

does anyone actually give a flying toss?!?!

[Ginger Unicorn]

i'm serious, not trolling. is anyone on here any more than utterly ambivalent to the fact that there is yet another slight incremental advancement in the power of video cards?

i am interested to hear from anyone who is genuinely excited by this news. I'm also interested in hearing from someone who would pay £400 to increase their rendering power by 15%.

(yes i know that only applies to people who already have the current fastest video card, but i'd love to know if anyone is actually rich and bored enough to replace bleeding edge with bleeding edge at every opportunity)

Being a TRUE leader

[Azure Khan]

Do you know how one of these companies could be a "leader"?

They could start by unifying features into a tight and manageable product set, and eliminate some degree of confusion about features and chipsets from the market.

-AND-

They could stop working on the "problem" of pushing more triangles, and work on the real problem with modern video cards: Power. Personally, I don't really need photorealistic graphic quality if it means I have to keep two power supplies in my system, or plug my video card directly into the wall.

Graphic quality is already impressively high, so maybe it's time to step back and improve the underlying technology and give the market time to absorb and upgrade. Like others, I still work on my ATI Radeon Pro 9800 with 256MB of RAM. I'm not upgrading anytime soon, because there are fewer and fewer AGP cards available, and I'm not willing to replace my entire otherwise completely functional system just to get a PCI-E slot. There are a lot of people like me, who are waiting, and I'm no Luddite. I like my gadgets. But keeping up with PC improvements has become a game of diminishing returns, since I run huge graphics and multimedia applications, plus most of the games on the market, very comfortably on my AMD64 3400+ processor with 1GB of RAM. I have yet to find a game I WANT to play that doesn't play quite nicely on my hardware.

A Less Glowing Review

[mikemuch]

At the end of the day, the worth of the Radeon X1950 XTX comes down to this: Does the improved memory bandwidth you get from GDDR4 really make a difference if you don't change anything else about the card? Unfortunately, the answer is no. In most games, at high resolutions like 1600x1200 with 4x antialiasing and 8x anisotropic filtering applied, the speed goes up by a modest 5% to 8% over the Radeon X1900 XTX. If that's all you get from an almost 30% increase in memory bandwidth, color us unimpressed.

X1950 XTX review [extremetech.com]

Re:Who in their right mind does benchmarks this wa

[Sycraft-fu]

Well, they should have used better controls, but this kind of thing isn't useless. I don't really give a shit about balls tot he wall FPS. I personally find that anything about about 60fps doesn't really look any more smooth to me, and yes I do have a monitor that supports higher refresh rates. From 30-60 is acceptable, but much below 30 starts to annoy me. So my question of hardware is: In the range of 30-60fps, what kind of quality can I get on a given game? Can I crank it to 1600x1200? Can I kick up FSAA? Can I turn on all the shiny options?

That's what's really relevant. I don't care if card X gets 200fps in 1024x768 mode and card Y gets 300fps. Both are way above my "give a shit" boundary. What I want to know is at what level to they start to drop to the point where I'll notice.

Re:Linux support from ATI=crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because as we all know, all hardcore gamers (the target audiance of these cards) run their games on Linux. What kind of stupid company would release cards that won't run well on an open source operating system without any games?