well, my 64MB Radeon 8500 is here

B

ben6

Regular
I've undertaken a bit of a massive undertaking. I've gathered an amazing amount of current games that I'd like to use in both my 8500 and AIW 8500DV reviews. The question is what games are most people interested in hearing about gameplay experiences in a review and screenshots apart from benchmarks . Here's a partial list of the games I own:

FPS
===
Max Payne
MOHAA
Quake3

RTS
===
Homeworld Cataclsym and Homeworld GOTY
Earth 2150
Armada II
Sacrifice

Racing and Flight Simulations
NFS PU
NFS HS
Nascar 2002
Flight Simulator 2002
Fly II
Il-2 Sturmovik
Commanche4
Carmageddon TDR

Truform
RTCW
Myth III
Soul Reaver II
HL Counterstrike
Serious Sam The First Encounter

RPGs
Summoner
Arcanum
BG2
Final Fantasy VIII

Sports
Madden 2002
High Heat 2002
NHL Hockey 2002
Tiger Woods 2001

Miscellaneous
Alice
Independence War2
Aquanox
Vampire The Masquerade
C+C Red Alert 2 Yuri's Revenge
Giants
Black and White

There's more but I think that's a general idea of what I have. My thinking is to use at least 15 of them in my 2 reviews 5 in the 8500DV review which will focus more on the other abilities of the 8500DV anyway and 10 on the 8500 review which will focus more on gameplay

PS: Anyone own a 8500+ Commanche4? I've updated the drivers to 9013s and updated Commanche4 to the latest patch, but I can't get beyond the introductory sequence of the first mission. Strange too, since it worked perfectly fine on a 7500 . Really my only major complaint with the 8500 so far (well FSAA in Madden 2k2 is messed up too but works perfectly well without FSAA so it's livable)
 
The 9013 beta drivers carry a rather nasty bug in the display properties applet. Not sure if this is the issue with Commanche4 (OGL or D3D?), but it will definately effect most everything else on your list.

When you go into the display properties, it goofs up the registry to disable ALL fog, and also 8-bit stencil shadows.

To fix, in REGEDIT go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, Software, ATI Technologies, Driver, 000X (X=your device for your 8500)), atidxhal

In there you'll see four (4) keys that need fixing EVERY time you fool with D3D properties:
ZFormats-
Set to "7" for 16, 24 + 8 bit stencil
of
"15" for 16, 24, 32 + 8 bit stencil
(Note: at "15" benchmarks and some programs will be artificially lower performing from the increased depth precision. Use "7" if comparing to other products that are not intentionally forcing a 32 bit Z-Buffer)

TableFogEnable- set to "1" (older ATI cards didn't support this)
ZFogEnable- set to "1"
WFogEnable- set to "1"

So in general, every time you visit the display properties in the 9013's, the drivers gack your registry to hard-code disable ALL forms of D3D fog and disable 8-bit stencil buffer. This leads to unexpected compatibility, incorrect test score results and missing features.

Hope this helps!
-Shark
 
how about Ultima 9??

and some of the DC ported games....

or just anything thats famous for being sloooooooooooooooooooow

RO is cool too
 
Truform RTCW screenshots would be great, I've not seen any so far, some people claim Truform does not work in RTCW at all!
 
Trueform works in RTCW. I've seen it since I own both products. Looks nice too.
Where "some people" get their opinions from, I do not know.

Entropy
 
Actually one of the ATI tech guys posted on the Rage3d boards that Truform was only used in RtCW to provide for geomtry compression.
 
Hey now, UltimaIX runs like butter on my 1.4ghz AthlonXP + Radeon 8500!

:smile:

Ran like crap on the celeron 366 and TNT2 I had when the game came out. I had to set the draw distance so low I couldn't complete some of the quests. Still, good-looking for its day.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

B
My perspective on 3dmark
2 3
Replies
53
Views
8K
Nick[FM]
N
Back
Top