Radeon 9500

Jeff

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Is it any good? no idea, but they have started to ship. Mine is on order. :)
 
I ran out of DVDs to watch so its time to play again. Bought TT 1.5 last night. Today I ordered the Radeon 9500, an Audigy 2 and a 80 GB Baracuda V. :D

Oh yes I also have one of those RF kayboard/ Gyro mouse combos on order.
 
Will you ever stop tweaking!! I must say all I want to do now I've got my 808s is watch all my DVD's again:D

No more tweaks for a while, gives the CC time to recover!!

Steve
 
I wouldn't bother getting one if you alredy have something like a Radeon 8500 128/GF4 Ti4200- they are about the same sort of speed unless you use heavy aniso/FSAA (which is often not practical as the 9500 has a pretty lowly pixel fillrate).

The 9500 Pro is a much better buy. At komplett it's only £7 more which is absolutely unbelievable considering the difference in spec (+4 pipes, +64MB framebuffer!).

MuFu.
 
I did buy the pro, but its the true (they say) 30bit overlay I'm after. I might have to try UT 2003 on the large screen though. ;)
 
Any of these fanless?
 
Originally posted by Jeff
I did buy the pro, but its the true (they say) 30bit overlay I'm after. I might have to try UT 2003 on the large screen though. ;)

Ah right, cool. The Pro looks like a great card for the price. I have the whitepapers and some of the board specs here for the high-end board (R300-942/9700 Pro) - I am told there are some significant improvements in the filter and DAC stages compared with the R200 boards, and of course you have video now handled by the shader pipeline with much higher precision than on the previous generation of cards. Do you have a Radeon 8500 you can compare output with? I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in the results of such a comparison. :)

No meep, none of the 9500 boards are fanless. Sapphiretech recently showed off a heatpipe-cooled (fanless) Radeon 9700 - Pro, I think - at Comdex so perhaps that will reach our shores in the next few weeks.

MuFu.
 
I'm currently running a 8500, I also have a 9000 and I have previosly tried the Radeon 64 DDR and the Radeon 7200. I wasn't impressed with the 9000 (cheap crap), hopefully the 9500 will be better, the board design looks good.

The Fanless 9700 pro is already on dabs, £294 plus VAT :eek:
 
I got mine from ebuyer for £267 ;)

The card is ace, best one on the market at the moment, games run smooooooooooooth
 
Do those Sapphire fanless (heatpipe) cards disable access to adjacent PCI slots? (can't see that info on their site)

I ask because I'm running an mATX mobo and would like to use all 3 PCIs which I can't do with my xalmann modded 8500 at present.

Thanks all

Peter
 
Ordered it from Dabs, no sign of it yet. :(
 
I might have to try UT 2003 on the large screen though.

Jeff you playing games using your Barco??? kudos if you are cos i'm tooo scared;)
Tim
 
Originally posted by Tim Cooper
Jeff you playing games using your Barco??? kudos if you are cos i'm tooo scared;)
Tim

No but for for some games I'll make an exception. :)
 
Jeff,

Did Kryton like it or did he spit it out and want his 8500 back :D

Is it better? Significantly? Or do I just send my 7500 to Mark to remove the filters?

Steve
 
Steve,
I was under the impression that the filter removal on Radeon's was NOT beneficial unless you were running at ultra high resolutions, as Ken Hotte does, something ridiculous like 1900x960 or some such number.
Cheers.
Tim.
 
I got fed up waiting for my order and cancelled, I've read that there are issues with 9700/9500's and Sonic DXVA filters anyway, so I'll wait until after the new year.

Jeff
 
As they are now in stock I decided to get one anyway, it arrived this morning. I'll post some findings tonight, but I suspect the true value of the card won't be known untill all the pieces of the puzzel are in place (DirectX9, DirectX9 Radeon Drivers and the new Directx9 complaint Sonic DVD decoders). I have the 1st 2, but not the new decoders.

Jeff
 
i've had exceedingly bad experience with ATI cards, and from what i hear my major complaints havn't been fixed in the new ones. the alpha shading, alpha stipple, fog table, and several others havn't been improved, and the drivers still impersonate a virus (too bloody big, slow down the comp, and get into everything)

hence my new comp has a GF4 ti-4200, of course i am rather fond of the Nvdias to begin with.


btw, jeff, i would have bought the GF4 ti4200 in your position, half the cost, at least equal performance (speedwise), and certainly better picture quality.
 
Braedan,

Geforce cards are OK for HTPC use, but not up Radeon quality. They still have 8-bit DACS and overlay and don't even have overlay gamma adjustment. Games wise I couldn't care less, but remember the 9500 is a directx9 card so way too early to tell on how it really performs.

Jeff
 
OK the 9500 is up and running, I've installed the full release version of DirectX9 and the ATI Catalyst 3.0 drivers. From a sharpness and noise point of view the 9500 (pro) is every bit as good as the 8500 and much better than the 9000. The cards advanced settings and overlay control are extactly the same as the previous regular Catalyst drivers and give no indication that the card is outputting 30bit colour. I have seen a few things to suggest colour improvements but some sort of confirmation of what the card is doing would have been nice.

One very good sign of better things is that with the TT Sonic filters I could previously see quite bad mpeg blocking artifacts in the mens loo scene in monsters inc. These are now totally gone (as on my SDI setup).

All we need now is for Sonic to release its DX9 decoders.

Jeff
 
Since I use the comp for both, I have to look at both aspects, and I do play games more.

Game performancewise, the Nvidias beat an ATI into pulp hands down any day from what I've seen at the LANparties.
 
Originally posted by Braedan
Game performancewise, the Nvidias beat an ATI into pulp hands down any day from what I've seen at the LANparties.

I guess nobody at your LAN parties has a Radeon 9700 Pro/9700/9500 Pro then, huh? ATi currently produce the top three fastest cards available by some distance.

Originally posted by Jeff
The cards advanced settings and overlay control are extactly the same as the previous regular Catalyst drivers and give no indication that the card is outputting 30bit colour. I have seen a few things to suggest colour improvements but some sort of confirmation of what the card is doing would have been nice.

The move to FP32 precision in the pipelines is mainly to maintain colour accuracy during multipass operations, as you probably already know. The pipeline itself handles 128-bit textures but most of calculations are done to 96-bit precision (more than enough for accurate 10-bit per component output, anyway). Necessarily, the ASIC has non-displayable 32/64/128-bit buffers throughout the pipeline. 96-bit formats are upconverted to 128-bit where needed.

There is still some debate as to whether the human eye can even resolve to 10-bit accuracy. Personally I don't think it can, although in certain circumstances, the non-linearity of human sight can be taken advantage off to highlight small differences. The R300's output will always be 10:10:10:2 in a 32-bit mode, don't doubt it. :D Older cards use a symmetrical, 8:8:8:8 mode. Have a look at this:

tom.parhelia_color.04.png


I am guessing that the R300's 24-bit mode is 8-bits per component. Take a look at that very fine gradient and switch between 24-bit and 32-bit colour mode (I assume this is possible). Can you see much of a difference?

I can only just see very faint banding on it right now with a Ti4400 in 32-bit mode. The difference between 32-bit and 16-bit mode is of course, massive.

MuFu.
 
If you take each colour on its own, then 256 variants isn't nearly enough, your pic shows 8bit banding problems very well. If that was a picture of the sky, it would hardly look realistic would it? One of the main avantages that Radeon cards have had over the Geforce cards is a 30bit overlay pallet. The question that remains is whether the new cards ouput 30bit.
 

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