Radeon Vid Cards

[Ralph Beaman]

How are the Radeon Video cards for CM?

[Schrullenhaft]

On the Mac they're usually fine. The exceptions are the 8500 and 9x00 families. A recent driver update has fixed the color problems, but the smoke isn't "high quality" (blocky) with this patch and apparently it isn't something that ATI can fix.

On the PC the same issues exist as they have for quite awhile - no fog (and there won't be any until CMx2) and some problems with text that require a colored-bitmap replacement with antialiasing/Smoothvision enabled ( Radeon Text Fix ).

There is also some talk of the quality of ATI's texture filtering (anisotropic, trilinear, etc.) and some of the shortcuts that they are/were using. For many people it's not a big deal, but for some it is (usually because it gives a benchmark performance advantage for essentially "cheating").

[ November 09, 2004, 12:20 PM: Message edited by: Schrullenhaft ]

[Redwolf]

Well, few people here like them when it comes to CM playing.

The most obvious item is the lack of fog in CM, caused by ATI not implementing fog tables in their Direct3D drivers. Fog tables work for the same cards under Macintosh/Rave and Windows/OpenGL (I assume they also work in Mac/OpenGL).

But more to the point they seem to screw up drivers more often, they are currently leading the liars games (about their texture filtering), although NVidia hasn't been innocent in the past. If you have a notebook with an ATI card you can only use notebook-provided drivers, ATI doesn't provide any for notebooks. That's pretty much a catastrophy as you will run out of drivers very soon with almost all notebook vendors.

The Linux support is nothing short of pathetic compared to NVidia's, and as the Windows security and reliability situation develops I expect a good chunk of people trying Linux within the next years. I wouldn't like to be cut off that right away. Even if you are not enthusiatic about Linux now, unless you already tried it you probably can't be sure.

ATI cards are often a little faster for the same money, especially with cards of the NVidia FX 5xx0 series which were fast only for some games and slow for others. But that really doesn't matter for CM. And for people like me NVidia is very well worth a few extra bucks for the same performance.

[markl]

I would have to agree with Redwolf.

I am no expert on the technical side, but from a users point of view nvidia work with more games which to me is very important, along with Linux support that I will be trying out soon.

The speed issues are mainly pixel spray, ie not the main concern. First up I want my cards to work. But having said that I know a few people who use them with flight simulators that are happy.

But that is all they run. If it is for a family PC definatly get NVidia.

Cheers.

[Canuckgd]

Well, I own a Radeon 9800 Pro, and will be switching ASAP. If I can, I'll go NVidia 6800 GT within the next few weeks. I've had lots of issues with my Radeon, not the least of which was an attempt to upgrade from the Catalyst 4.7 to 4.10 drivers last week. The install failed and according to ATI, the procedure then was to go in and edit several parts of my registry :eek: ! Uhhh, I don't think so! Frankly, I've been using Omega drivers because of very poor performance for Flight Simulator, so even there, the Radeon hasn't been very good for me (ymmv). I hate the fact I don't have fog in CMBB since that adds a tremendous amount to the ambience of CMBB when the weather is down. In any event, I'm not a fan, and would recommend something other than ATI, I'm afraid.

Glenn