Anand's retail Radeon 9500 Pro review - much faster!!!....

[crystalcube]

If manufacturers can't clean relevant things out themselves, I'll complain about their crappy drivers. nVidia's have worked great, including after uninstalling the Radeon 9700.

That does not means that nVidia did a clean uninstall because if you remove and reinstall the drivers you will never know if they actually cleaned the reg. settings during uninstall.

It is quite possible that nVidia drivers also never cleaned the registry but when you reinstalled they just found the previous settings and they worked like they did before you installed ATI drivers.

 

[Tahir2]

LOL. I wonder if there is a "Does reformatting affect 3D performance" article to be had here.

I think it does.. had to format (HDD was flaky so I replaced it). My, oh my what a difference that made!

Seems IQ was improved but was slower.. noticeably slower.. then I realised I had not installed the SiS AGP drivers

My advice is the same as what most people are saying Chalnoth... format.
It is a pain but there is some wisdom to what is being said no matter how much of a pain in the ass it is.
I won't blame NVIDIA or ATI for this mess though.. blame MS.

And that is also when I got my first BSOD too and lockup.

 

[T2k]

The last time I reformatted was because I was repartitioning the drive for Linux. I never do it for hardware reasons, and I never will.

This is when you definitely don't need to do it since Partition Magic can do anything with your partitions.

Hehe, it's really funny: he never will do it when its needed but he definitely will do it when its unnecessary!

And you did blame anybody else when you get issues on your fully screwed Windows?
This is ridiculous.

edit: typos

 

[MuFu]

I wonder how the 9500 Pro is going to stack up against the upcoming Ti4200/Ti4200 8x replacement, NV31.

Apparently it can drive a single or dual link DVI-I device and one or two CRTs. Clockspeeds are 350MHz for the standard version, 450MHz for the Ultra.

MuFu.

P.S. RV350 and M10 are virtually the same. Both are 0.13u, definitely.

The NV31 is only 4 pipes though is it not?

I have no idea. Personally I think it'll be 8x1, same as NV30.

MuFu.

 

[Heathen]

NWN 9700 Style

Chalnoth Wrote

Neverwinter Nights, for example, was utterly unplayable at 1024x768x32 with 6x FSAA. Toning down the FSAA to 4x cleared up the stuttering for the most part, but I see no reason why this game should be harder on a Radeon 9700 than my GeForce4. I clearly see a driver issue here, related to performance. This doesn't mean it's slower, just that it's not as much faster as it should be, not by a long shot.

Well NWN runs just dandy, performance and IQ wise, at those settings on my machine. Maybe it's your machine or the fact you haven't bothered to set your system up properly.

 

[Tahir2]

If manufacturers can't clean relevant things out themselves, I'll complain about their crappy drivers. nVidia's have worked great, including after uninstalling the Radeon 9700.

You installed the ATI drives AFTER the installed NVIDIA drivers.

Er... kinda contradicts your conclusion then doesnt it?

 

[jb]

Chalnoth,

I had a GF2 and wanted to try a K2, I uninstalled the GF2 drivers, looked for every instant in the reg that I could find of NV, GF, ect and removed them. Installed the Kyro2 cards and did not have a single bug. Yet I noticed D3D games were dog slow. So I download and ran the 3dmark2001 test and got a whooping 739 on a 1.2 Ghz AMD! WTF is up with the score? I tried everything to tweak and went to as many k2 message boards. I got the same advice, reformat. I was deep in development of our UT mod and the though of having to move all of those files over was a night mare. Still I when ahead and did just that. When I reinstalled everything the first thing I did was run 3dmark2001 and got a 2200 score which for the time and cpu I had was about were it should be. I also noticed that my D3D games ran a lot smoother.

The fact that you have never had to an issue upgrading is not surprising since you have always stuck with nV cards and we know they share lots of common drivers. But the moment you change to a different chip set then they share almost, if not absolutely, nothing in common. The fact that you can just switch back to GF4 tells us nothing. And if you not re-installing the drivers every time you swap then your not cleaning it up as good as you thought.

Again I have to state reviews are done on a clean image for a reason. Do you know why? Why do you think your method is better then theirs? Most of the users here that have reformated from another card do not have these issues. You did not and your have a bunch more. Your a smart guy and very intelligent so I think you can see what I am trying to say. Reformat. I know its a pain in the butt. And I know you should not have to. But we all know lots of things happen in this world that we should not have to do. We just do it because we know its the smart thing to do.....

 

[WaltC]

I'd have to agree. First thing that happens in my computer when I get a new video card is "format /s c:". If you don't do this, you only have yourself to blame. (Though I suppose you could blame both IHVs, plus Microsoft, but they're not going to do anything about it, are they?)

Come on, man... The entire structure of the Windows(XP in my case) driver installation process is designed to avoid having to do unbelievably time-consuming things like format c:...Do that just to swap out 3D cards?

If you know your way around the file system and Regedit--just basically--and you have a good grasp on how to and how not to install/uninstall products like 3D cards and sound cards--you should *never* have to go to those extreme measures just to install a new device...*chuckle* At least, I never do--and I never have any problems--most of the time. For those very rare instances where I have had a problem either an "upgrade" reinstall right from the Windows GUI, or for doing things like trading out HALs, a repair reinstall from a boot to the XP boot CD solve them in a fraction of the time a format/reinstall would take. Jeesh--take me *days* to rebuild my software after a format/reinstall...

I moved from a Ti4600 to a 9700 Pro without the slightest problem--just because I knew the proper uninstall/install procedure. Aside from the install/uninstall I've had to do nothing...9700 Pro functioning like a top--as stable as my Ti4600--and a whole lot faster and better looking.

 

[tamattack]

I didn't do a fresh install when switching the video cards, and I'm not going to. If the drivers are still screwed up after I've been relatively careful to uninstall nVidia's drivers, I don't care. It's still ATI's fault.

OK, so lemme get this straight... NV drivers do not uninstall themselves properly (witness the creation of utilities like Det Destroyer...) and somehow that's ATI's fault?!?

Meanwhile, ATI's uninstaller does a better job than NV's, and you credit NV for that?!?

Please excuse me while I laugh...

 

[Sabastian]

Come on ... I can't understand for the life of me why Chalnoth you refuse to refomat. It isn't that big of a deal really. It should only take an hour or so to get your system back in order. Further I read somewhere during my want to be geek studies that it is good for your HD to do a format about once every 6 months. Chalnoth... give up the "crapy" driver arguments all that is doing is exposing your true colors. In the vast majority of reviews that I have read with regards to the Radeon 9700 pro the reviewers in question have had little to no problems with ATI drivers. To me it sounds like you are dishing out a load of FUD.(Oh no ... not the chorus of ATI driver complaints coming from nvidia fans AGAIN!!??)

But that is just my opinion.

 

[Sabastian]

I didn't do a fresh install when switching the video cards, and I'm not going to. If the drivers are still screwed up after I've been relatively careful to uninstall nVidia's drivers, I don't care. It's still ATI's fault.

OK, so lemme get this straight... NV drivers do not uninstall themselves properly (witness the creation of utilities like Det Destroyer...) and somehow that's ATI's fault?!?

Meanwhile, ATI's uninstaller does a better job than NV's, and you credit NV for that?!?

Please excuse me while I laugh...

Me-thinks ATI driver cleans up better then nvidias, assuming this is all true of course.

 

[T2k]

I wonder how the 9500 Pro is going to stack up against the upcoming Ti4200/Ti4200 8x replacement, NV31.

Apparently it can drive a single or dual link DVI-I device and one or two CRTs. Clockspeeds are 350MHz for the standard version, 450MHz for the Ultra.

MuFu.

P.S. RV350 and M10 are virtually the same. Both are 0.13u, definitely.

The NV31 is only 4 pipes though is it not?

I have no idea. Personally I think it'll be 8x1, same as NV30.

MuFu.

If so, the only difference is the clock speed?

That's gonna be a helluva expensive mainstream chip...

 

[tamattack]

Me-thinks ATI driver cleans up better then nvidias, assuming this is all true of course.

Yes, I think so too, based on my experiences with both ATI and NV cards.

 

[crystalcube]

Further I read somewhere during my want to be geek studies that it is good for your HD to do a format about once every 6 months.

That maybe true if you are using any Microsoft OS and you install & uninstall softwares frequently.

 

[KimB]

That does not means that nVidia did a clean uninstall because if you remove and reinstall the drivers you will never know if they actually cleaned the reg. settings during uninstall.

It is quite possible that nVidia drivers also never cleaned the registry but when you reinstalled they just found the previous settings and they worked like they did before you installed ATI drivers.

From experience, nVidia's drivers do a very good job of uninstalling themselves (if done through add/remove programs). I have done this for some time now whenever I have updated my drivers with an nVidia card, and each time all of my graphics settings are reset.

And regardless, I think it's just absurd that any nVidia setting should ever affect any ATI setting. ATI's drivers aren't going to be reading nVidia driver settings! That's just silly, and I think that many people think it is true just because they have heard it repeated so many times.

The only settings that might affect anything would be Windows settings that are modified by the drivers. But even this shouldn't affect anything as far as compatibility and stability are concerned. I'm not saying this doesn't happen. For example, I did think the desktop brightness was a bit off after switching back to my GeForce4. I don't really consider this much of a problem, though, as it's really simple to fix. If ATI's card, for example, depends on certain low-level windows settings to be set in a certain fashion, then it should set them, and then return the settings during the uninstall. The same should go for nVidia's drivers. But even if they're not uninstalled, any settings that could affect the card should be reset by the drivers upon installation.

Anything less is just plain carelessness.

 

[KimB]

This is when you definitely don't need to do it since Partition Magic can do anything with your partitions.

Well, I don't have Partition Magic. I suppose if I took the time to find it, I wouldn't have reinstalled then.

 

[KimB]

Come on ... I can't understand for the life of me why Chalnoth you refuse to refomat. It isn't that big of a deal really. It should only take an hour or so to get your system back in order. Further I read somewhere during my want to be geek studies that it is good for your HD to do a format about once every 6 months. Chalnoth... give up the "crapy" driver arguments all that is doing is exposing your true colors. In the vast majority of reviews that I have read with regards to the Radeon 9700 pro the reviewers in question have had little to no problems with ATI drivers. To me it sounds like you are dishing out a load of FUD.(Oh no ... not the chorus of ATI driver complaints coming from nvidia fans AGAIN!!??)

But that is just my opinion.

Well, I guess I haven't streamlined the process down that far. It usually takes me a few days to get everything back in working order (Installing Windows generally takes a couple of hours. Reinstalling all of my programs takes a whole lot longer). I suppose I could do better if I made a backup after a fresh install, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of getting a fresh start on the drivers, wouldn't it?

 

[Bigus Dickus]

I can't help but pile on in the fun.

Chalnoth is running beta DX9 drivers, with a release candidate DX9 API, on a windows installation that has been through three motherboards and God knows how many other hardware components, and is complaining about "stuttering" in the demo version of UT2k3. His complaint is that the demo doesn't run at 6X AA and 16X AF perfectly smooth. He claims that nVidia's drivers uninstall themselves cleanly, despite the need for detonator destroyer, and complains that ATi's drivers somehow don't clean up nicely (even though his GF4 seems to work fine after having installed and uninstalled ATi drivers ?? ).

From all this, he concludes that ATi's drivers are "horrid."

 

[KimB]

I just have to say that my biggest stuttering problems were NOT in UT2k3. They were in Neverwinter Nights and the Tenebrae mod for Quake. UT2k3 actually wasn't that bad as far as this was concerned. What I did notice was that the benchmarks showed much more wildly-varying framerates than my GeForce4 (Well, I will have to clarify this a bit more: the more wildly-varying frames were mostly at the start of the benchmark, so I guess it's not even that bad for UT2k3).

And NWN is a retail game, using the latest patches (though another was just released, haven't tested it yet, and I don't know if I'm going to anytime in the very near future...got some Linux work to do).

And I still say that all of this crap about needing to reinstall is just people not paying attention to things like what programs are installed, what's running at startup, what settings they've modified, and the like. For example, I almost reinstalled a few weeks back because I was having internet troubles. It turned out that it was just a setting I changed in my firewall that caused the problems, so I fixed it. I don't believe reformatting is ever a necessity (unless there's data corruption somewhere), and I'm certainly going to blame ATI if it's causing problems on their video card.

 

[KimB]

If so, the only difference is the clock speed?

That's gonna be a helluva expensive mainstream chip...

Actually, I heard that the NV31 was going to be a performance (~$200), while the NV34 was going be the mainstream part.

(Yes, this would be a departure from their past naming scheme, but as long as a mainstream NV30 derivative exists with all of the exact same programming-side features as the full NV30, then I'll be very happy)