Hey. I’m the guy who called himself “Not Your Momma’s Gameboy” and started the original Radeon 9700 thread, optimistic about my purchase.
Anyhoo, Greg, wanted to let you know that Grand Theft Auto 3, the first game I tried on installing my Radeon 9700 Pro in my new machine hard locks a minute into gameplay, and I have not been able to play it without this happening, no matter what display settings or game options I choose. It hard locks invariably during the second non-interactive mini-movie of the game, right after the “Luigi’s Girls” title, when the gangsters come out of the back of the club and tell you to pick up the guy’s girlfriend and to “keep your hands on the wheel.” Everytime I reach this point, the graphics and controls freeze up, and even CTRL-ALT-DEL won’t bring them back. The audio continues playing for awhile, before dying off as well. The only way out is to force-reboot the computer.
That said, the game looks beautiful and performs stutter-free with the card before this point, and two other games I have tried since then have been absolutely gorgeous and performed faultlessly: IL2 Sturmovik and Mechwarrior 4. Given the prevalence of this hard-lock problem, I have pretty firm faith that this problem will be solved soon, and when it is, I think I’ll be very happy with the card. The 2-D performance is beautiful, and it was effortless to set up the exact dual-monitor setup I wanted, with independent resolutions and refresh rates for each monitor.
One issue should be mentioned, though. ATI is currently not planning to implement 16-bit anti-aliasing which leaves users of older games that don’t support 32-bit color in the lurch as far as smooth graphics on older games goes. There are user protests afoot over this however, and perhaps ATI will be convinced to change their minds on this issue.
Unfortunately the probelm is not completely gone. My “all’s well” message was a bit premature. However I did notice a marked improvement after changing the audio driver.
When I turned my Radeon antialiasing and ansiotropic filtering settings up to max (with everything else maxed), my system hard locked during the intro movie, right around when your character is shot by his girlfriend.
Since turning those settings back down, I’ve still gotten a couple of random freezes, but can generally play. Not sure what to blame at this point. I also see inappropriately brightly colored seams in between parts of the street and certain walls at times, but don’t know if this is a game fault or a card fault, as I’ve never played before.
I’ve had a 9700Pro since this weekend. I’ve actually been quite surprised at it’s stability and performance in the vast majority of the games that I’ve flung at it, with one notable exception… Dark Age of Camelot.
DAoC has problems with shadows disappearing, ground textures moving up and down on trees, shorelines moving in and out, as well as rocks and other items on the ground disappearing. This can happen when running through the gameworld, or it is easily reproduceable by standing still and rotating your field of view about 5 degrees.
I’ve slapped up a few flash animations that I took in the game to show what I’m talkiing about.
The first one is water. Water in the game is static by the way… there aren’t supposed to be any tidal effects :)
I’m not sure if the problem lies in ATI’s court or with Mythic. I haven’t gotten an answer from either outfit yet. I probably won’t hear from either, as I’m just a customer <G>.
I do know that DAoC uses a variant of the NetImmerse engine, as do Morrowind and Freedom Force. Both Morrowind and Freedom Force look fantastic on the 9700, but DAoC just sucks. It’s stable but the glitches are getting to be hard to ignore.
Anti-Aliasing is a no-go with the 9700 as well, as DAoC is stuck in 16bit until the new expansion hits the shelves.
…so, it’s been out a month, and going for about $330 U.S. (and available to Canadians online through ecost for about $620, which is over a hundred dollars cheaper than it’s available for retail in Toronto - ATI’s head office).
What’s the verdict? It seems like most people running into problems with the latest drivers are running some pretty exotic stuff on their systems, like nocd tools, etc. I’d be upgrading from one of the original Geforce 3s, so slightly slower than a Geforce 3 t500 – Driver problems are a drag, but buying any of the Geforce 4 generation cards seems like a bit of a waste, and realistically the Geforce 5 (or NV30) cards won’t be readily available for another 3 months, and will likely cost at least another $150 Cdn.
The problems reported here are likely persuading me to wait though.
And even in that limited case you have to put up with all the little and not-so-little quirks of this card. Definitely high maintenance.
No doubt the NV30 will be expensive at introduction-- nVidia is notorious for gouging at the high end, which is why I was surprised to see ATI’s 9700 down to $322 with shipping so soon after its debut.
I am not totally unhappy with the card, since I did achieve my goal of higher resolution + aniso in BF1942, but I would not recommend it to anyone other than performance freaks who can deal with the care and feeding of this temperamental and expensive card.
>If you can find a cheap GF 4 4600, I’d go with that instead.
Cheap is still $600 Canadian, only about $20 cheaper than I can get a 9700 Pro. But I just can’t push the button on the Radeon – ATI’s driver history just bugs me too much, and it’s kind of annoying that a company based in Toronto will not release the card in Toronto (or anywhere in Canada) until THREE MONTHS (December) after it is available in the U.S. Guess they’re having batch problems, which is also not a good sign.
Bah, I don’t really need to upgrade yet, I guess. I should just wait for the NV30s. But when will they be broadly available? February?
When in doubt, GF4 4200. Ridiculously cheap, and you don’t get into an expensive piece of hardware that may never works like you want it to. Hell, the first batch of NV30s’ll probably be buggy too.
At the very least we’re getting a price war, which is cool. ATI’s electronic engineers are earning their pay, they’re a solid driver team away from giving us two great options.
The Radeon 9500 specs have been leaked. Looks like it’ll be pretty much the same chip, probably with a lower clock, on a 128 bit, 550 Mhz DDR memory bus (as opposed to the 256 bit, 620 Mhz bus on a 9700). There was a lot of talk about cutting from 8 to 4 pixel pipes, but in hindsight I think such a modification would have prevented it from being a full DX9 part, which it was always supposed to be.
Yeah, you might try one of the “golden sample” type gf 4 4200 or 4400 cards-- they can generally overclock to 4600 levels anyway. If you can get one in Canada… I have no idea why the pricing is so crazy there, what the hell happened to NAFTA?
I would go with Chaintech or Gainward. Both overclock like banshees. I had my Chaintech 4200 o/c to 300/550 stable. I had it as high as 580 on the memory but I would see periodic artifacts. Check the reviews at Newegg those levels of o/c are typical for the Chaintech G21. BTW, that works out to 4600 speed core and 4400 speed memory.
