Survey: ATI Radeon 9700

Im with you on that one..

I'm a WarCraft III freak. I just bought the expansion. I'm nearly what someone would call "gosu" but not yet. I think I can call myself a "gosu" in certain ways as a warcraft iii player that doesn't hack. Most of all the other ones hack. One step to my victory is having a smooth high performance system, I did when it came out, now others have that advantage over me.

Agissi, if you can't get the problem fixed, I'm probably gonna buy NVIDIA, they've always been nice to me.

"Video: 8MB 3D video card (TNT, i810, Voodoo 3, Rage 128 equivalent or better) with DirectX 8.1 support. For Mac OS® systems, a video card consisting of an ATI Technologies or nVidia chipset with at least 16 MB of memory is required."

This suggests that in fact WarCraft III does not run in OpenGL mode and as long as ur packin a ATI or a nVidia, you're fine.

Also, you're scaring me away from buying a Rad 9700 pro.

Edit: Also, which one does yours most look like?



or....

Same Poll @ Rage3d.com

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?s=&threadid=33696768

Only two thirds of users experience no problems whatsoever. That's scarey - one in three chance of things going wrong.

I bet ATI already know about problems with the card, but won't come clean for obvious reasons. What we don't know is whether the problems are down to incompatable hardware, or due to manufacturing variations with the card.

It's not unknown for manufacturing problems with electronic products due to lack of sufficient testing in order to keep costs down.

I had a bad experience with an entirely different electronic device recently (I won't say what it was, as I'm sure its being looked into), I carried out my own tests on several units after several replacements were also 'out-of-spec', and discovered that most items failed to meet suitable performance levels.

It seems that the manufacturer did not test these items (to cut costs) and was instead relying on most being OK, and replacing any that customers complained about.

That way sales can continue and costs are minimised, but the consumer ends up being very frustrated if they are unlucky and get a bad unit.

This may not apply to the Radeon 9700 series graphics cards, but as we do not have answers for this particular product, we can only speculate.

Wow, this poll is popping up everywhere.....Wondering if pharoah and phye2002 are the same person....anyway- here is the poll @ nVnews

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14531

About 90% report "no isues" or a "few issues" they regard as "no big deal..."

Given the nature of polls given in hardware fan sites, and those that get their kicks by bashing the other guy, I don't think it's bad at all:grinthumb

Xtr,

Sorry to scare you away, but if your a hardcore WC3 fan, I seriously wouldnt get the 9700. I have another computer with a Geforce4, and another with a GF2 MX400, and they both run smoother then my PC with the 9700 PRO. My card is the top one you have, with the non-stock, back pcb.

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=3x5900u&page=11

Sorry, but something is seriously wacked w/ your rig if a geforce4 and GF2MX400 are running warcraft3 better than your rig w/ the R9700....

The Radeons shine in WarcraftIII

I noticed that those Warcraft 3 benchmarks are for DirectX. Warcraft 3 also operates in OpenGL, which is probably what --agissi-- is using. The tables might then be reversed.

Hmm? I didn't know that 3dfx had a full-blown OpenGL ICD. As far as I know, all they've ever had was that MiniGL nonsense.

The thing to remember is that Ati isn't the only manufacturer of the Radeon brand of video cards. Ati does make its own but it also outsources chips to other companies much like Nvidia does. Its certainly possible that another manufacturer is to blame and not Ati.

Well if you ask me.. ATi use them, and ATi stamp they're name on the boxes, so I think Imma blame ATi

Glide is what it was called, and it was a tweaked, lean, and mean, version of OpenGL. Built for speed.

Sorry for the language,

****! It's too %&$#ing late!

note: considering you a wc3 dude, im sure you'll know what Tower Defence is. Thats mainly what I play, in custom games. Its laggy in those, im not totally sure about regular. Tower Defence games have alot more units in them, as I figure you'd know.

Nic> A couple of things..

1. If WC3 works in both D3D and OGL, but it's only problematic in OGL, why not just use D3D?
I can see that it's not good that the card won't work as it should in OGL, but when it works as it should in D3D, why all this hassle?

2. 1/3 having problems... Well, take a look at the results again... 6 ppl having no problems, 2 ppl having some minor non serious problems, and only 1 has a big problem that has never been resolved...
To me that means it's 1/9th of a chance that it might now work, which when you think about it isn't really that bad odds...

As for compability testing...
ATI has said that the Radeon 9x00(p) should work with any motherboard following the agp specs... These specs are closely defined, so it won't be any problems unless the motheboard maker chooses not to follow them exactly...
So where would you put the blame?
On ATI for not testing every motherboard that's out there (including the ones that had not yet been produced when they released the R9x00(p)), or the motherboard makers for not following the specs?

This isn't just a problem for ATI, but Nvidia too.
I.e. One motherboard maker (I think it was MSI) had put some capacitators right after the AGP slot, that was way higher than the specs allowed, and thus the cards wouldn't fit... Now, this was only a problem for Nvidia for they had created cards that were quite long, but ATI had kept theirs smaller...

Who's to blame in that situation? Nvidia, for creating a long GPU, or the motherboard maker for not following specs?

.02$

A couple of things ...

Who said that all issues with ATI Radeon 9700 are AGP related? We don't know what the cause is, and likewise we cannot say for certain that all of ATI's cards that are sold are operating within the AGP specs. All we can say is that ATI has designed them to comply with the AGP specs (as have mobo makers). Likewise, we cannot at this time jump to conclusions and blame the mobo manufacturer for AGP issues as we don't know if their products are within spec. As other AGP 8x cards (nvidia) work fine with most mobos, then it seems that ATI is the odd one out, though not necessarily to blame (but testing should have highlighted problems).

As regards MSI/nvidia card length issue, then I would be inclined to put the blame with MSI (but only if there mobo was released after the nvidia product that had issues) as they appear to be to odd one out. However, I wouldn't say that physical size issues should be counted as genuine problems here, as we are really only talking about 'operational' issues, not physical, though this is obviously of concern to users.

I think that what this survey does indicate thus far, is that non-technical users are best to avoid this card (unless of course they know someone that is able to assist them with fixing any problems that may occur), or unless it comes equiped with their computer at time of purchase.

Glide has nothing to do with OpenGL. It was completely created and controlled by 3dfx. 3dfx created it to make it easier for developers to program games to take advantage of their hardware. However, Glide is old/dead and even 3 years ago was considered quite ugly with poor support for any high end features. OpenGL was the standard for high end 3D graphics and should have been the standard for games as well. 3dfx didn't fully support OpenGL and only released the MiniGL to hold over gamers. 3dfx has yet to released a full OpenGL ICD (Installable Client Driver).

Thanks for correcting me DaveSylvia. You're quite correct in that Glide was indead a proprietory API created by 3dfx. Here's some info I dug up, just for curiosity ...

Old Story (Nov 1999):
3Dfx is now shipping a 'real' OpenGL ICD with their later Voodoo products. I don't know if I'll ever get around to getting one and testing it, but still 16-bit color, 256X256 texture size limit... I'm not too impressed. Again, I'm not running a review board for gamers here... If your reading my books and articles and you want to write cool programs, get something else... if you want to do nothing other than play GLIDE based games, you probably don't care what I think anyway...

I'm very disappointed in 3Dfx as a whole. Early on, they seemed to be taking a lead in supporting OpenGL on mainstream boards. For quite a while, they lead the performance/image quality race - far ahead of anyone else.

Over time however, they never have managed to release an OpenGL driver for any of their hardware. Oh, sure they had a mini-driver for Quake based games, but that's not good enough for serious OpenGL development. A half hearted attempt at a full implementation is still in beta as of this writing. Who cares now that they are no longer the performance or image quality leader. Still insisting that 16-bit color and depth buffers are
"good enough", somebody forgot to tell their top management in kindergarten that "The customer is always right".

The reason for their lack luster OpenGL support I think is pretty obvious. OpenGL threatened Glide (3dfx's proprietary 3D API) and thus an important market advantage. A game written with GLIDE will only run on a 3Dfx board. A game written in OpenGL will run on any OpenGL board. Thus if someone comes out with a better board down the road, then all those 3Dfx based games may look better on someone else's hardware. I'll give them credit for being one of the few hardware companies who truly understands the simple premise that guides the entire computer industry - SOFTWARE SELLS HARDWARE. It's not the other way around. Unfortunately, their strategy was short sighted. Come on guys, the days of proprietary API's is over. If you want to differentiate, innovate on your hardware, and provide us with some cool OpenGL extensions!

Ah! Very interesting!! Thats a good read there Nic.