Just in the market for a new system, and I was wondering if current Radeon cards/drivers had any issues with older games. I’d like to go 9600-9800 Pro, depending on eventual budget, but I don’t want to encounter problems with old games like Thief, Half-Life, System Shock 2, etc. Anyone know anything about this stuff?
I have played Thief 1&2 and Half Life: OF on my Radeon 9500 Pro without an issue. Also newer games such as Tron 2.0 and Freedom Force without a hitch. Latest Catalyst drivers = nice.
System Shock 2 works fine on my 9800 Pro with the newest Catalyst drivers. The new Control Panel software also has much, much improved gamma control. I’d been using PowerStrip in order to make gamma adjustments, because the old ATI Control Panel would not let you simultaneously adjust red, green, and blue values, had no numeric gamma scale, and had a “Direct3d Gamma” control that was simply broken. The new software fixes all those things, and I’ve not had any driver issues with any games, old or new.
Great to hear, thanks for the info. I’m mostly concerned about the Thief games, as I replay them a couple of times a year.
I haven’t had a problem with Radeon drivers since the second week after the 9700 Pro was released.
I’m ashamed to say it but I use to be very anti ATi … now I’m not so fussed… the driver issues seem to be sorted… that and I’ve seen the funky things the FX cards seem to do to new games , seems to be a driver issue. … a mate of mine has a FX5900 and after a couple of hours in BF1942 he gets insane vertex breaks (use to happen in Vice City, but the latest drivers fixed that)
now all I have to do is save some cash and I too can upgrade. (oh, and good to know i’m not the only one that LOVES the thief series, thief 3 is coming!!.. yer baby yer!)
I’m a little torn about my Radeon 9500 Pro. For many games, it’s ok. But it’s had some real problems with Operation Flashpoint and NWN. I’ve heard there are problems with Counterstrike and Radeons, but I don’t really know.
The other comment I’ll make on the Radeons is that I find the image quality notably better than on the Nvidia cards. I probably played 400 hours of Morrowind with an Nvidia card, so I know those graphics extremely well, and I think they look much better on a Radeon.