What was good about NV3x?

[Moloch]

I got my 8500 in early january

I got mine in September '02, and most games were basically unplayable due to bugs and stuttering until Catalyst 3.4. I upgraded from a GF2MX as it didn't have enough grunt for competitive RTCW, but the R8500 was on average no better for a good 6 months. From then on though it steadily got better, with pretty much no glaring issues through 2004, and most bugs I could attribute to the card slowly dying (capacitors ended up popping and spraying the inside of my case with goo :?). Nonetheless, when people say ATI's drivers were garbage, they're 100% correct.

User error
Apart from being slower initally, I never read any reviews which show stopping bugs, what games couldn't you play?
I played RTCW- only problem I had was the forrest level- ran like ram on my 750mhz setup, apart from the ones I listed, and those were way after september.
Ati's driver were far from garbage even in january, played everything I threw at it, for the record, racer is a freeware game, so ati likely never heard of the game untill people started reporting it.

Morrowind ran horrible on my 8500/KT266A/AthlonXP. It would develop a pause in the menus where it would take a few seconds for the game to respond to clicks. And it would stutter. I'm not sure if it works better these days with the newer drivers today.

My 8500 was a pretty big jump from my Radeon DDR. But the 9700 was just a huge jump from the 8500, in every way, and was (and is) a lot less buggy experience. 9700 PRO has got to be the longest-lasting video card in history, IMO. The NV3x may have contributed to its life in that game developers couldn't really jump on DX9 and go, until now.

I never had that problem with morrowind- just slow performance because of my cpu, and a ti200 ran the game no better(had one accoss from me back then.)

 

[Fodder]

User error

Given that later drivers improved the experience tenhold, I'd say you're spot on.

what games couldn't you play?

Most. I got stuttering everywhere (worst in Q3A-engine titles), mouse lockups in Freelancer, white lines in BF1942, system lockups in Dungeon Siege, and so on. The stuttering was the biggest (and most persistant) issue though, I was getting a lower average FPS with the GF2MX, but a far smoother game. It's not that I physically couldn't play them, more that they ran so miserably that I couldn't bring myself to play them. On the upside, I was also one of the lucky ones who didn't get abysmal performance in HL/CS and QW.

I played RTCW

Competitively? Constant stuttering and FPS spikes really put a damper on your game.

 

[Moloch]

User error

Given that later drivers improved the experience tenhold, I'd say you're spot on.

what games couldn't you play?

Most. I got stuttering everywhere (worst in Q3A-engine titles), mouse lockups in Freelancer, white lines in BF1942, system lockups in Dungeon Siege, and so on. The stuttering was the biggest (and most persistant) issue though, I was getting a lower average FPS with the GF2MX, but a far smoother game. It's not that I physically couldn't play them, more that they ran so miserably that I couldn't bring myself to play them. On the upside, I was also one of the lucky ones who didn't get abysmal performance in HL/CS and QW.

I played RTCW

Competitively? Constant stuttering and FPS spikes really put a damper on your game.

They improved performance, but only had 2 bugs.
Never played RTCW online.
Only stuttering I ever had was in LFS.

 

[see colon]

User error
Apart from being slower initally, I never read any reviews which show stopping bugs, what games couldn't you play?

nolf2 had glaring problems (performance and quality) throughout. textures near the camera would disapear at certain angles(poly's would be rendered grey), the game was painfully slow in some areas, and items (posters, mailboxes, signs, ect) would be renedered fully lit in the distance and the lighting would pop in once you got closer to it.

fsaa was unusable in ut2003 not only because it was slow (ss and all) but because any geometry affected by a projector would spontaniously disapear. it's pretty hard to play a game when the ground is constantly disapearing and walls are appearing in front of you. on another note, the moving lava in the lava giant remake was unflitered as were the rings around the moon in phobos, shock combos, and a variety of other effects.

delta force:land warrior had a rediculous amount of errors, but the game was pretty glitchy on everything so i really won't hold that against ati.

delta force: black hawk down would hard lock my computer until 2 driver releases after the game was released.

i could go on, but there's no point. i owned a geforce 3 and an 8500 when they were both the newest card's on the block. i had, at the time, 2 identical machines (same mobo, same cpu, same ram, same sound) except for the video cards and the case. the gf3 beat the 8500 in almost every game i threw at it, but overall i prefered the 8500's image quality (when it worked), and it's dual vga support and better dvd performance.

 

[swaaye]

Oh I also had terrible problems in Unreal 2's robot world level. Stuttering graphics and missing filtering. Was still in college at the time and people around me weren't having the same problems with the game. Nobody had 8500s. The level was basically unplayable for me.

I'd say the Radeon 8500 was ATI's biggest folly easily. Unless you step back to their days with the Rage cards and earlier. Really, they've only become serious about driver quality since the 9700 showed up. They were truly a very bad example to the industry before that. The 8500s drivers were bad but were nothing compared to the days of the Rage Pro.

It's like they just couldn't get out of the 2D era when drivers were rarely updated. It was pretty easy to make decent 2D card drivers since it was a lot less complicated than 3D rendering. But even with just 2D functionality a lot of cards had buggy drivers simply due to poor support (S3 968, Trio, Virge; ATI Mach cards, etc.)

 

[Ostsol]

Heh. . . I guess I was one of the lucky ones, with the 8500.

 

[ZoinKs!]

The 8500's drivers were aweful early on. I was an early adopter (got it October 2001, iirc) and the drivers still sucked for months into 2002. Glitches in AvP 2 stick out in my mind: flashing white textures and windows that were opaque instead of translucent.

I was choosing between the 8500 and gf3 but figured the 8500's ps 1.4 would give it more lasting power. Turns out the driver improvements made it last-- I used it for more then 2 years and it was still a decent card when I replaced it with my 9800.

EDIT:
On topic, there wasn't much of anything good about nv3x. If the nv3x dominated sales instead of the r300, the onset of dx 9 shaders would've been even further delayed. The 9700pro came at the perfect time.

But I think the 8500 would've had an effect on the market similar to the 9700 (except on a less drastic scale) if the drivers had been good from the beginning.

 

[see colon]

when i had my 8500, (and my gf3) i took a 6 month vacation from work, and gamed every single day. if there was a new game out i'd have at least played the demo. those were the days, let me tell you. my wife was making enough to support us both, and i had no problem letting her

i think i saw pretty much every issue there was to see on both sides of the street, and i had a 3rd machune with a kyro in it.

 

[Moloch]

Heh. . . I guess I was one of the lucky ones, with the 8500.

QFT.
Never played NOLF though.
UE2 works perfect, and UT2003 plays fine, despite being really slow, fsaa isn't an option, since the only possibly setting would be 2X, and the fps drop vs the improvement in IQ doesn't justify it.