Anandtech going to see R300 ?!!

[Ascended Saiyan]

I'm suprised that nobody has posted this yet but it seems that Anand Lal Shimpi will be visiting ATI & will be writing up an article on what he has seen.{that's if he isn't under NDA of course}

Who knows they might even announce there next generation card at E-3 but I wonder what there methods will be of solving the Bandwith problem since this chip is rumoured to have 8 pixel pipelines.

 

[Pete]

It's exciting, but why not post a thread after he writes that article? He's announced his visit in an earlier article/post, as well. Nothing to say until we at least have some specs to quibble over.

 

[Ascended Saiyan]

Well as a fan of innovation guess I got carried away & I didn't know that he had announced something earlier.

What I found interesting though was that ATI feels confident enough to let any journalist to see there chips at work already which means that Directx 9 & the R300 are close to release & not Q4 as they mentioned in an earlier interview.

 

[Kristof]

AFAIK DX9 is still not in beta so it **IS** some way off... unless MS produces an initial version with absolutely no bugs or issues...

 

[Guest]

yep no DX9 yet and what if anand gets the flu he won't be going and we all be excited about nothing.............

 

[Hellbinder]

I cant understand why they would let that Nvidia worshiping creep anywhere near the R300.

He could see the R300 walk on water and Render all of New York city in real time and still come away with some Negative Insinuations.. And inuedo about Nvidia's next product...

The industry would be a better place if he was a Dentist.

 

[easyride]

LOL!

Whatever... Anand seems fairly objective to me.

My only real complaint about his (p)reviews is way too much benchmarking without AA and/or aniso.

I'd also like him to report compatibility with a wide variety of games, but what reviewers do?

 

[Bambers]

AFAIK DX9 is still not in beta so it **IS** some way off... unless MS produces an initial version with absolutely no bugs or issues...

lol. imo DirectX versions aren't beta until they're released to the public. Then we have to bug test them and the final version is released as x.0a or x.1. Bit like all MS products really

 

[Typedef Enum]

When Anand posted his 8500 preview, he was right in-line with practically everybody else: ATI has their work cut out on the driver front.

This is from his August preview.

First off, although we don't always see things the same way I definitely agree with Tom on his statements that ATI should not have chose to present the Radeon 8500 this soon. Even had NVIDIA not released their Detonator 4 drivers earlier than expected, the Radeon 8500 was in no shape to be evaluated at all. The drivers were buggy and they lacked support for the full Radeon 8500 feature set. Although it's definitely interesting to see what the Radeon 8500 can do, ATI should be very worried that too many of you will get the wrong idea about the product. All I can do is present you with the picture as I see it.

You can go right down the line, and find virtually all websites who received 8500 samples making the same conclusion.

Then, he did a full review in October...

This brings us to the question of exactly how "final" the Radeon 8500's drivers are. ATI has already stated on numerous occasions that they will continue to improve the Radeon 8500's drivers and with each step they will get closer to their goal of extracting every ounce of performance out of the R200 chip. But how long will it take? It won't be a week, not a month, and maybe not even a full quarter before we see the Radeon 8500 running at its full potential. And when the day comes that it is running as fast as it can without any drivers holding it back, what will NVIDIA be doing? You better believe that NVIDIA isn't sitting around idle while the Radeon 8500 begins to encroach on their territory.

Where is the lack of objectivity? He was totally on the ball...

Fast forward to mid-November...ATI releases better drivers, and this is what he had to say:

The inclusion of SMOOTHVISION proves that the technology is superior to anything else we've seen out there on both a performance quality level. Unfortunately the drivers aren't flawless and there still are random bugs. While ATI has done their best to list any incompatible games or other scenarios in the driver release notes, they can't change the reality of not being able to test on every person's system. The drivers are still not up to par with NVIDIA's Detonator series from a stability standpoint but it's good to see ATI actively addressing their problems.

Again, he cannot possibly hide the fact that the driver situation was still dicey, even in November...and this was a card that had already been released for a couple of months.

Although not specific to the 8500/drivers, Anand had this to say about the AIW roundup:

Because of the lower price point and overall great bang for your buck, ATI is the first to win our Editor's Choice Gold Award for a TV/video capture graphics card with the All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500DV.

If you were to browse all of his R200 previews/reviews, I don't think you can possibly fault him for lack of objectivity. About the only thing he didn't do was, possibly, doing some sort of a "this is where things stand with the latest drivers" type article...

 

[Doomtrooper]

When Anand posted his 8500 preview, he was right in-line with practically everybody else: ATI has their work cut out on the driver front.

This is from his August preview.

First off, although we don't always see things the same way I definitely agree with Tom on his statements that ATI should not have chose to present the Radeon 8500 this soon. Even had NVIDIA not released their Detonator 4 drivers earlier than expected, the Radeon 8500 was in no shape to be evaluated at all. The drivers were buggy and they lacked support for the full Radeon 8500 feature set. Although it's definitely interesting to see what the Radeon 8500 can do, ATI should be very worried that too many of you will get the wrong idea about the product. All I can do is present you with the picture as I see it.

You can go right down the line, and find virtually all websites who received 8500 samples making the same conclusion.

Then, he did a full review in October...

This brings us to the question of exactly how "final" the Radeon 8500's drivers are. ATI has already stated on numerous occasions that they will continue to improve the Radeon 8500's drivers and with each step they will get closer to their goal of extracting every ounce of performance out of the R200 chip. But how long will it take? It won't be a week, not a month, and maybe not even a full quarter before we see the Radeon 8500 running at its full potential. And when the day comes that it is running as fast as it can without any drivers holding it back, what will NVIDIA be doing? You better believe that NVIDIA isn't sitting around idle while the Radeon 8500 begins to encroach on their territory.

Where is the lack of objectivity? He was totally on the ball...

Fast forward to mid-November...ATI releases better drivers, and this is what he had to say:

The inclusion of SMOOTHVISION proves that the technology is superior to anything else we've seen out there on both a performance quality level. Unfortunately the drivers aren't flawless and there still are random bugs. While ATI has done their best to list any incompatible games or other scenarios in the driver release notes, they can't change the reality of not being able to test on every person's system. The drivers are still not up to par with NVIDIA's Detonator series from a stability standpoint but it's good to see ATI actively addressing their problems.

Again, he cannot possibly hide the fact that the driver situation was still dicey, even in November...and this was a card that had already been released for a couple of months.

Although not specific to the 8500/drivers, Anand had this to say about the AIW roundup:

Because of the lower price point and overall great bang for your buck, ATI is the first to win our Editor's Choice Gold Award for a TV/video capture graphics card with the All-in-Wonder Radeon 8500DV.

If you were to browse all of his R200 previews/reviews, I don't think you can possibly fault him for lack of objectivity. About the only thing he didn't do was, possibly, doing some sort of a "this is where things stand with the latest drivers" type article...

Well being objective also means you post flaws about all video card drivers and please don't try to paint the picture that Nvidia drivers were flawless, from Nvidia uploading official drivers that were not totally complete causing people to lose their video tabs to not one mention of the huge anistropic hit taken by the 4600, but graphs and graphs of FSAA benches . No mention of the poor implementation of Nview on the Windows 2000 drivers and having to edit the registry to enable two monitors :
'EnableW2kDualView in HKLM\System\CurrControlSet\Services\nv\Device0 to 01 00 00 00'
I still see posts with BSOD's referring to nvopengl.dll and 'page fault in non-paged area'.

In fact Nvnews was filled full of lock up and crashing threads on the Geforce 4 debut.
Judging from that, and some first hand experiences here...Anand could do a better job of reviewing video cards more indepth.
Anistropic filtering tests would be a good step forward and how about some screen shots like the old Anand used to post, show LOD, artifacts whatever.
Graphs are neat but I don't play graphs with my video card, I play games and the quality of the display is very important to me besides the frame counter.

 

[Galilee]

So in a R8500 review he should review Detonator drivers?

 

[Gollum]

Well being objective also means you post flaws about all video card drivers and please don't try to paint the picture that Nvidia drivers were flawless, from Nvidia uploading official drivers that were not totally complete causing people to lose their video tabs to not one mention of the huge anistropic hit taken by the 4600, but graphs and graphs of FSAA benches .

I don't get it, when reviewing an ATI card and talking about ATI drivers, why should he get into Nvidia's drivers at all? If the drivers of a card he's reviewing in an article have flaws then he needs to mention it - its completely irrelevant to the review of a certain product wether another company's drivers for an entirely different product may be faulty too IMHO...

 

[jb]

DT point was that Anandtech went out of his way to meantion in different articles how bad the 8500 drivers were intitally. Which is all fine as they did suck back then (I have a 8500 and had to deal with it). However he did not bother to do that with the GF4 drives in which there were many issues in all of his other reviews since then. It could be just a simple mistake, it could be he did not see any, or he could just not care. None the less, it does show that he has not been consistant. Now is that bias? Not sure...

 

[Typedef Enum]

from Nvidia uploading official drivers that were not totally complete causing people to lose their video tabs

Surely, you're joking...That little 'episode' was fixed in a matter of hours dude.

not one mention of the huge anistropic hit taken by the 4600.

Somehow, I don't recall ATI ever hitting the websites, providing PR's to the effect of, "Hey...SmoothVision still doesn't work...and we also have this nasty bug dealing with textures...and John Carmack has identified a problem which may never be fixed, due to....etc."

No mention of the poor implementation of Nview on the Windows 2000 drivers

Enlighten me on this...I haven't used Windows2000 since XP went final, but I would be really shocked if there were any differences...and I can't honestly say that I've ever read any issues in our forums pertaining to this claim.

Nvnews was filled full of lock up and crashing threads on the Geforce 4 debut

You're really reaching...Take a good look around @ any of the GeForce4 previews that were released a couple of months ago...I don't think you're going to find any single one to claim that there were significant issues with the drivers...nothing like what you're claiming.

Drivers will always be an issue, whenever you release a new chip....You cannot even begin to compare the state of the drivers between the 8500 and what nVidia has done (pick/choose the chip).

 

[pascal]

My first TNT the drivers were not good.

Common I have a GF3Ti200 and It is not perfect and drivers are not perfect too. And the image quality (subjective opinion) is not the same as my old Radeon.

I still have to use an old GTF timing set if I want to use standby with my trinitron monitor. This problem/bug is as old as TNT !!! I know other people who have the same problem.

 

[Guest]

One thing I really don't get that some dare to mention that detonator 4 is rock solid and stable drivers cough.......

You should read about all the problems they have with the gf2 and gf3 especially under winxp. And bugs they don't fix for over 4 years.

and anand sayz by the time the 8500 drivers get up to pace.....it will be months not really a possitive view followed by nvidia blablabla......they come with someting better in the mean time........

mine can't even run in agp x2 but my radeon can does so by default no problems nvidia crash crash crash.

Anand sux wiht his reviews only uses the same old benchmarks instead of what we want to see and know!

Btw do u really think they let see him the blueprints of the R300 lol....

 

[Bambers]

The original geforce256 drivers weren't spectacular either. In fact, from my experiences of my 8500 and gf256 nvidia drivers are no better than atis.

 

[Hellbinder]

Type, My Nvidia Worshiping friend......

You falsely assume that I was only refering to the 8500... What about his comments about Kyro shortly after his initial review, Or his Horrid Misrepresentation of Smoothvision in not one but TWO articles. Or the many other issues and inuendos he brings up that you did not quote..

You can Always tell the Who the Nvidians are from their post. They are the ONLY ones who can take a perfectly CLEAR and EASY TO UNDERSTAND point like the one Doomtrooper made and Twist it into Nonsensical Blubber.

Doomtrooper was CLEARLY saying that he never points out any negatives in his NVIDIA articles, or even mentions the competition. But he brings up Nvidia in EVERY LAST ARTICLE he writes about EVERY OTHER COMANY and always finds some negatine to post or ill concieved comparisson to an Nvidia product. . From Radeon, To Kyro, To even the latest Parhelia...

The truth is obvious. It is also Obvious exactly which group of people refuse to acknowledge the truth.

 

[Doomtrooper]

Surely, you're joking...That little 'episode' was fixed in a matter of hours dude.

May have been a couple of hours but caused a massive thread to appear on Nvnews that has over 20,000 views to fix the 28.32 issues...does a couple of hours excuse that ?? If they uploaded the wrong driver for 10 mins, does that make it any better

Somehow, I don't recall ATI ever hitting the websites, providing PR's to the effect of, "Hey...SmoothVision still doesn't work...and we also have this nasty bug dealing with textures...and John Carmack has identified a problem which may never be fixed, due to....etc."

Anand posted lots about Smoothvision not working properly..His Quote "FSAA: A no-show
Unfortunately one of the most interesting features of the Radeon 8500 that we could take advantage of in current games, ATI's SMOOTHVISION AA, is disabled in the current Radeon 8500 drivers. In spite of the fact that there is a SMOOTHVISION AA panel under Direct3D, the only AA modes supported are the older and inefficient supersampling methods. ATI is promising SMOOTHVISION support in a newer driver revision due out later this month."

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1544&p=15

Yet not ONE benchmark, mention...zero..zip..nada.. of Anistropic filtering at ALL or taking as much as a 60% hit in games with a Geforce 4 when all you see on his own forums were Anistropic performance issues....hmmmm.

You're really reaching...Take a good look around @ any of the GeForce4 previews that were released a couple of months ago...I don't think you're going to find any single one to claim that there were significant issues with the drivers...nothing like what you're claiming.

I don't read reviews about driver issues because of lots of real good reasons Type...some websites are so biased even if it BSOD'd ALL day they would never mention it. My main reason though is reviewers usually have the card for about 1 week and benchmark a few games on top of the line hardware, a much more realistic evaluation of drivers can be seen by browsing the forums...like Nvnews.

These threads for examples:

http://www.nvnews.net/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12394&highlight=tabs

http://www.nvnews.net/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14067&highlight=unreal+tournament

How about Nvidias Mobile graphics drivers ??


http://www.gotapex.com/reviews.php?rev=gf2go-vs-7500/p3.html

What I'm really getting at as I've never seen a video card have perfect drivers and its getting really old seeing that sand thrown in ATI's face time after time. Sure ATI's drivers are not perfect, but they are not near as bad as some websites make them.

 

[Foodman]

From all reports, the state of the 8500's drivers is pretty damned good. I'd buy one right now if I had 130 to spend.