From: Paul Kelly (longword at domain esatclear.ie)
Date: Fri 26 Apr 2002 - 15:21:54 IST
In reply to Smelly Pooh's half-assed mumblings:
>>For 3D the two best (fastest & most expensive) options are nVidia
>>GeForce4 and ATI Radeon 8500.
> The Nvidia Geforce 3s are more expensive than the ATI Radeon 8500.
> Until the Geforce 4 Ti4200 comes out, the Radeon gives the best
> price/performance ratio currently available
Probably true, though in the price/performance stakes I'd say the
GeForce4 MX440/460 probably has them all beat.
>>If you intend to use the card occasionally under a games OS like
>>Windows, bear in mind that ATI Windows drivers since the dawn of time
>>have sucked. nVidia is a clear winner there IMHO.
>
> What were the last ATI Windows drivers you've used?
It's been a while.
For the Radeon series I'm only going on what I've read in several
reviews of the cards, with the drivers only coming up to scratch in very
recent months - reports of rendering errors, crashes, inconsistent frame
rates, and lets not mention deliberately turning down the image quality
when they see they're running quake3.exe.
Prior to that I've personally found ATI drivers for everything from the
Mach32 in Windows 3.1 up to Rage in win2K cause system instability. One
such crash years ago wiped out some rather valuable work of mine which
has probably coloured my opinion of ATI drivers since. In my experience
only two companies have consistently written good drivers themselves -
Matrox and nVidia.
All that said, we're just talking about Windows here. I've never had a
problem of any description with an ATI card in Linux.
Paul.
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