Dear ATI card...

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don't mince words maxx. tell us what you really think.

i haven't liked, or used, ati for years. gave up on them long long ago. i know it's better and better and, did i mention, better. but nvida hasn't failed me yet. enjoy rolling over your card. you deserve it.

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the question though, and seriously, is will ll now remove ati cards from their list of supported hardware. granted that ll has done the best that could possibly be done, ati is still not properly supported. at best it's misleading, after all this time, to have it on the list of pc requirements.

*edited for some reason but having answered the phone, i don't remember what it was

*hugs his nVidia GeForce4 TI 5200 256 meg card*

EDIT: Whoa, do they even make 512 meg GeForce4 5200 cards...? heheheh

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY!!!

Another person has come over to the GeForce side! And it's Maxx Monde!

Did you know, a recent poll by Sierra/Valve, the makers of Steam and Half-Life show that there is a 2:1 ratio of users of GeForce to ATI? GeForce is WILDLY more popular. For very good reasons.

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Say Hello to the GForce 6.


http://money.iwon.com/jsp/nw/nwdt_rt.jsp?section=news&feed=reu&src=201&news_id=reu-n14200438-u1&date=20040414




Yes, I know I posted this on 2 different forums, but it somehow seemed appropriate here.

You know what's weird? I used to have drawdistance set to 512. Then I had to turn it down to 256. Now I chug along at 128 with a cruddy framerate. Same old Nvidia card I always had and the same general display settings.

Maybe my card's getting senile.

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Uh. Wow. That's pretty harsh. Since I joined SL in February, the following ATI issues have been corrected:

1. FSAA support
   
2. Avatar Vertex Shader Support
   
3. OpenGL Mouse Selection Problems
   
4. Other stability-related issues we don't even know about?
   

This is a pretty good set of improvements for just six weeks. Yeah, the argument could be made that us ATI users are in "alpha test land," but, really, to say there has been no progress isn't just misleading-- it's flat-out wrong.

I understand that ATI texture corruption and cubic environment mapping ("Shiny" to you and me) fixes are just around the corner. Rather than bitching, maybe you should be offering to buy the Linden devs a round of beer, eh?

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Except those features have been broken since beta in some cases, so a year is hardly speedy progress. Some of them have even been reaffected by problems with the new ATI drivers, and new ATI bugs have shown up over time (the AGP problem shininess not showing,etc..) It is an endless cat and mouse game. LL fixes something, ATI breaks it in a new driver by doing something obnoxious and non-standard. It is harsh to remove ATI altogether, but it should clearly recommend Nvidia cards for this software.

ATI used to have a reputation for making horrible drivers and horrible cards. Then they managed to turn the tables and actually best Nvidia on the hardware front - the R300/R350 chips (Radeon 9700/9800) were superior to the Geforce 4/early FX chips. However, they have not been able to dog the reputation of buggy drivers. No amount of standing up for ATI can make up for the fact that they have consistently had problems with every driver release, and in a system that uses graphics in the way that SL does, those problems show up right away.

Switching video cards is not an easy choice, especially if you have invested in a high end card like the 9800 Pro. For some people it is not even necessary - some ATI users do have few problems with SL, it depends on a combination of things. However, for those who do continue to have endless problems with it, the unfortunate solution is to switch to a Geforce FX card. I have run SL across four different video cards, three Nvidia (Geforce 4, Geforce FX 5200 and Geforce FX 5600), and one ATI card (9700 Pro) and the only card I have ever had a problem with was the ATI. Also, of the four cards, the image quality is the highest on the FX 5600 - there is a warmth and smoothness to the images that is not present on the ATI or Geforce 4. I have noticed in screen shots as well from friends with ATI cards - I like how SL looks more on an FX card.

Cristiano

PS - congrats Maxx

I've read up on the GeForce 6. That thing has TWO, count em, TWO molex power connectors! Put that bad boy in your machine, hit the power button, and watch the lights dim.

Lets cut to the chase...

You may also want to consider Matrox. They have some what slid out of the gamer realm so to speak, but what they lack in flair that ATI claims to have, they gain in quality. Their consumer level cards rank very well and hold their own. They use hardware to crunch draw times out, which is much faster than software. Sure they are a bit more expensive, but you get what you pay for.

I dropped hope that ATI had a clue about 5 years ago. I have been gliitch free ever since

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To forestall the rumblings of ATI v. NVidia based on the imposing power requirements of the NVidia 6800/NV40:

Both the ATI and NVidia next-gen cards will be supplied with TWO molex accessory feeds for top of the line. Both will have lower-level models which will have only one accessory molex plug. Later this year, when the first PCI-Express mobos start to hit the market, the PCIE versions of these powerful new graphics cards will scale back to one (or no) molex plugs - PCIE graphics-card slots are standardized to deliver up to 75W, quite the improvement on today's AGP slots.

Which card will be _better_? Hell if I know. Read the reviews when ATI does the "paper release" for their x800, coming up very shortly. All evidence indicates that the two companies are playing little games to one-up each other (ATI's intentional delay, NVidia's power limited soldered onto the distributed sample boards), all at the expense of the consumer. No matter what happens, these cards are going to be twice as good as anything that's currently on the market, and as usual both companies have cards waiting in the wings which would outperform even these cards that so many are fighting over.

To paraphrase a Linden and infuriate a Cotton, "take a step back. Chill out."

essentially LL was at one time a nvidia prefered developer... 'the way it was meant to be played' as it were...

startin from there its not hard to see ATI may not have been as forthcoming as to its own issues at it should have been with LL, and vice versa.

LL had a blanket statement 'its a problem with ati's drivers, send them bug reports and requests (we don't want to hear about them)


well lo and behold they weren gettin fixed...


Now in the last 3 months alot of users, myself included, have been doing alot of debugging from a more technical standpoint (such as discovering the fsaa problem being actually directly tied to mouse selection, not ati drivers)

Many of the other graphical hiccups have been ferreted out and fixed as well too...


I do believe ATI's (understandable but still undefendable) stodginess probably caused the root of almost all the problems... but LL pre 1.2 was the one whos kitchen was a mess, so in the end they're the ones who ought to be tryin to clean it if you ask me. Sure where they DO look and can actually specifically identify problems with ATI's drivers thats a great thing... it will mean progress with further catalyst drivers... *NOT* looking at all though and just blanket blaming all the problems on someone else... thats gone now, and LL deservesalot of respect for the hard work they've done in the last few months to make up for it.

Its not pefect now... but honestly.. if you look at actual release notes and read 3d news sites... Nvidia's been *NO* better at helpin developers that were more affiliated with ATI than ATI's been helpin developers that were affiliated with nvidia.

Final lesson: Picking sides in the graphics war seems to have done nothing but hurt any of the game developers who've tried it.... and the users who end up payin the price