Bloom25, I got an ATI Radeon 64MB DDR card for benchmarking purposes, and, while I have dealt with the ATI video driver problems for some time, I have to say they finally got it right for Windows 95/98 anyways.
All the bugs I had with the Rage line do not exist in the Radeon line. Remember the "radio tear" problem in AH? It is gone with the Radeon. That's not to say the card is perfect.
I have found an obscure bug (feature?) where some video ram is not being released when a game exits. I am not sure as to where this problem lies yet. It could be driver, DX, or game related.
Someone here reported a prblem where they get a "DDHelp" error of some type. I have not experienced this. I am using the card with DX7 though and not DX8 until I get all the benchmarks done.
So far, I have tested the card with AH, Unreal Tournament, Quake2 and 3, Half-Life, Battlezone, Star Trek Armada, Star Trek New Wrolds, Star Wars Rebellion, Homeworld, Nascar III, and Freespace.
Some of the above games are quite old, but all have worked flawlessly. I have been using resolutions of 1024x768 and 1280x1024 for all the game play testing.
I am not fond of the FSAA in the Radeon though. At 1600x1200, the board performs better without FSAA than at 800x600 with FSAA and the FSAA has problems when running without V-synch enabled (i.e. screen artifacts).
One area ATI really improved on was the use of the PnP monitor tables. For instance, with the ATI Rage MAXX at 1024x768, the card would use a vertical rate of 68.8Khz and a horizontal rate of 85.4Hz. With V-Synch on this yeilds a maximum frame rate of 85.
The Radeon, at 1024x768, using the same monitor, would set the vertical rate at 99Khz and the horizontal rate at 120.8Hz. With V-Sync enabled this yeilds a maximum frame rate of 120.
The monitor I use for all my benchmarking is a NEC FP-950 19 inch. The vertical and horizontal rates were gathered from the monitors on-screen diagnostics.
I really do not have any particular alliances with any video card maker. I use ATI due to the support for the products in Linux as it is my primary operating system of choice, but for Windows, until the Radeon came along there were/are bugs that I always had to work around. They finally got the 95/98 drivers right for the Radeon.
I will be doing work with the GeForce cards and will be able to give a more objective comparison. Keep a look out for it on the BB.
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Roy "Skuzzy" Neese
President, AppLink Corp.
http://www.applink.netskuzzy@applink.net