New Radeon 8500 Drivers - Fog Finally?

[Claymore]

Anybody check out the monthly video drivers which seem leak out?

For example:

Driver Webpage

I'm holding off on a new desktop purchase and would prefer to get a Radeon 8500 if it would just display fog correctly.

cheers

Murray

[Schrullenhaft]

I haven't tried the latest Radeon drivers, but I doubt that they've supported fog-tables in DirectX with the latest ones.

I find that Rage3D keeps up with some of the latest Betas (they tend to point to MaxReboot for the downloads). I don't know what the source of those "Omega" drivers are listed on VoodooFiles, but I'm guessing that they are optimized drivers 'assembled' from previous releases (a mix and match setup).

I'll be checking some of these newest releases for the Radeon family within a few days, but again I doubt that they add fog-table support.

Unfortunately your best choice for full support of all of CM's effects is still the NVidia GeForce family. The Kyro's work, but have a small problem with transparency (bitmaps in front of a transparent object are also trasparent - corrected with a setting that lowers performance a bit). I haven't checked out the Matrox drivers lately, but I believe that they support everything OK in CM, just not a lot of performance comparitively.

[Claymore]

Originally posted by Schrullenhaft:

I haven't tried the latest Radeon drivers, but I doubt that they've supported fog-tables in DirectX with the latest ones.

That the Radeon boards haven't managed to invoke the DirectX fog table is a plain old shame. It is the one critical factor in my upcoming purchase.

For most graphics applications I find the GeForce and Radeons are interchangeable, except for video work. The tuner and TV-out features of the Radeon are without peer.

GeForce cards disable the monitor when using TV-out (skimpy hardware architecture) and provide limited resolutions and (arggg!) a black border (just plain lazy driver support).

It is plainly beyond my understanding why Nvidia does not support their GeForce drivers more. Hopefully economics will drive them towards a solution as more people start viewing DVDs and video from the computer.

For me proper TV-out functionality and 100% CM compatiblity are essential in any new desktop I purchase. Therefore I shall continue to sit on the fence and wait...

Cheers

Murray

[rucrazee]

I am running a Radeon 8500DV and it is, without a doubt, the best video card I have ever purchased. It is a little slower than the standard Radeon, but totally feature filled. No, it doesn't support Combat Mission fog, but the newer games I have tried it does. I have been using this card to watch TV while I surf. I have also been using it's wonderful video capture abilities to transfer my war documentary VHS tapes to VCD/SVCD format. For best quality in capture, you may want to use software other than the ATI bundle. I guess I have ranted enough, it all really depends on what you want to do on your computer.