Hardware: Radeon 9700 with max

[Marcel]

I don't know about the non-pro version, but at my work I have a 9700 pro version in my system. It works nice, and as you can expect it is rather fast but nothing shocking. If you do a search I think you will find that a good Geforce4/Quadro has better viewport performance in Max. I'm not sure so check it out.

Maybe it is my way of working, but at home I was perfectly happy with my geforce2MX up to a few months ago (when I had the chance to get a radeon 9000 pro for little money).

[visualboo]

I have a 9700 pro at work and I can safely say I would never recommend any ATI card. So to answer your question I can't see the non-pro working any better than the pro.

I give ATI 5 :thumbsdow

[ostov]

I cant find any Quadro cards at the hardware pages in norway:shrug: I wonder if I should just take a geforce 4800 ti128ram... Anyone got a idea??



ostov

[visualboo]

hehe, I have a Gainward GF4 4600 at home and it's the best card I've ever owned. I love nvidia.

nVidia gets 5 :thumbsup:

[ostov]

Originally posted by visualboo
hehe, I have a Gainward GF4 4600 at home and it's the best card I've ever owned. I love nvidia.

nVidia gets 5 :thumbsup:

I wonder if I will buy a geforce 4200 ti 128ram and then wait some time to the fx serie is getting much better (they have noew realeasd 5900 based on some nv35 chip.... No clue what that means, but sounds nice:) )



ostov

[roosterjm2002]

I have the 9700 pro and love it over my GF4...and ive always been a nvidia freak, but as of lately, their slipping off the ball...

The GF4 had alot of artifacting in viewports....i couldnt stand that...the 9700 is flawless

[visualboo]

See mine is exactly the opposite. Same thing just opposite. Also, my GF4 is just as fast and at half the price now. Did I mention WAY more stable too?

[dvornik]

Visualboo, you're just lucky your Softquadro and Maxtreme work. Not everyone is that lucky.

[DaForce]

on my 9700pro i can handle half a million polys in real time, i have never tried with more polys so i dont know. But the pro version can handle atleast half a million.

[Massemannen]

There is a softmod so that your 9700Pro is performing like a FireGL XL or something :rolleyes:

[CGTrader]

I dont know why are you guys so unhappy with Radeon 9700 series :shrug:
Several days ago I had GeForce4 Ti4200. Yesterday I got Radeon 9700 (not Pro) and I can say that it really rocks :buttrock: I compared these two cards with non textured 6 million poly scene and can say that Radeon is far better than Geforce4. I was big NVidia fan too, but I can see that Radeon 9700 do its job very good. Plus if you take a look, for instance, to www.tomshardware.com video cards benchmarks the difference is obvious.
Other thing that is interesting to me, why everybody choose OpenGL than directX? Again I tested variuos complex scenes in max and can say that DirectX is much faster than OGL. Am I missing something? I guess OGL is more popular because there are a lot of users with older gcards (I agree that few years ago OGL was much better than directX).

[Marcel]

DirectX has all sorts of problems with the viewports, like hidden lines not being hidden and other annoying stuff like that. You don't get errors like that with OpenGL. Sometimes textures look better in the viewports with DirectX though.

[CGTrader]

yes, with older cards DirectX was unstable and had many errors. Now, with newer cards I don't have any complaints about DirectX. But the speed is better, so I choose DirectX :thumbsup:

[gaggle]

The whole OGL/DX thing is weird. It's obvious to me that everyone should go OGL, because I've never ever seen MAX using DX without artifacts already mentioned, or slowness, or whatever. And it's the exact opposite for others.

The conclusion seems to be that we still have a long way to go to make computers more userfriendly and simple :).

Anyway, regarding the Radeon cards, I'd like to encourage as many people as possible to write in about their experience with the stability of the whole thing. Speed is one thing, it's my understanding that most people agree that for the moment ATI holds that lead, but the big unknown factor to me is stability. I would still be using a GeForce MX400 and some ancient drivers I used back in the day if I wasn't for my desire to be able to play games. Damn that setup was stable as a rock.
I know ATI has had major issues with their drivers in the past, but has that been worked out? I understand their drivers are stable and nice now for gaming. But no reviews out there offers insight into stability when used in a professional sense, in MAX or Maya or whatnot.

So with that in mind, I for one would be very interested in hearing about people's experiences about the stability of these Radeons (or ATI cards in general really).

[JeffPatton]

I had to upgrade a couple of weeks ago when the heatsinks fell off my GforceIII card. So I went with the latest and greatest at the time. An ATI 9800 Pro (128mb). I've never had a problem with Max crashing before, but now occasionally, when I open the material editor it will crash. Thats my only complaint. I have just learned to save everytime before I open the material editor. Everything else is wonderful with the card.

I will switch from DX(8) to OGL for a while and see how it goes.

Just my .02

[visualboo]

Originally posted by Massemannen
There is a softmod so that your 9700Pro is performing like a FireGL XL or something :rolleyes:
That officially NUKED my system the last time I tried that.

Where's the smiley for toast

[visualboo]

Originally posted by dvornik
Visualboo, you're just lucky your Softquadro and Maxtreme work. Not everyone is that lucky.
And unlucky with this pos ATI?

:beer:

[ostov]

I'm now confusd....:shrug:



ostov

[Joebount]

Well, I had a gf3 before and now a radeon 9500 Pro : it works well on max, really fine. I dunno for this firegl patch, I didn't try it since Visualboo afraid me with his problem ;)

[halo]

i think the 9700's lack hardware overlay planes that the geforces have, so they dont move menus around so well, but my 9700 is pretty stable and pretty fast, however as ever with ati the drivers took a while to get updated to work properly

[visualboo]

hehe... I was waiting for you to pipe up Joe :p

[S_3D_A]

lol you guys sound almost like this gaming forum I visit. I wrote along comparison between the ati radeon 9800 pro and the new Geforce fx cards. But if you have the money I would buy a quadro pro card. But if your budgeting get a geforce fx. Not sure how well ati's are with max but I wouldn't vouch for them since they HAVE had compatibility problems with some games.

I shall post my comparison between the two if I can find the post on the other site.

[S_3D_A]

aha found it. I originally posted this on a gaming forum where alot of people had ?'s between the nvidia line of cards and the ati. I guess you can use this to decide between which one is more suitable for max.

____________________________________________________

Here are some info on the next generation of video cards that have hit the market. Pretty much the pros and the cons.
Now if your a gamer like myself you will agree with me that ATI hit the ball out of the park last year with the Radeon 9700 pro. It had everything in it that a 400 dollar gfx card should have. Now the 9800 pro just as the name implies is nothing but a slight revision.

Lets get into the specs of this card. There isn't much to say about this card that hasn't already been said about the 9700 pro since they are almost the same card. Still manufactured with a .15 micron process, take in note that the mid 9600 cards are ATI's only cards that carry the .13 micron chips.

The 9800 pro is still using DDR on a 256 bit memory interface and it still has 8 pipelines. Damn the only difference I can see is clocked speeds. Due to some design tweaks I would suppose the 9800 pro runs at a core clock speed of 380 mhz. Now if you did your research guys you would know that the 9700 clocked in at 325 mhz. Alittle bit of math and we come out to a 17% increase. Disappointing if you ask me. Oh yeah I forgot to mention they also boosted the ram speed from 310 mhz to 340 mhz. More math and you will find that this is less then a 10% increase. More disappointment.

There are a few notable enchancements to the 9800 but nothing to jump for joy over. It comes equipped with a new F-buffer which lets the chip run infinitly long pixel shade programs in open GL. Downside to this is a speed penalty. They slightly tuned antialiasing and compression technologies.

Well I guess that is just about it for the 9800 pro. The end result is a card that is anywhere from 5 to 25 % faster than the Radeon 9700 pro. But the entire point to this card I would suffice to say that it seems to be a tiny bit faster than the Geforce fx 5800 ultra.

Now on to Nvidia and their new Fx line of cards. The 5600 closely resembles the bigger 5800 card. The only difference is the redux in the number of pipelines from eight to four, and a lower clock speed. The 5600 runs at a clocked core speed of 350 with 700 mhz ddr ram and ddr2 used with the 5800 which is not overly necessary but something that the 9800 pro doesn't have.

Now as there was disappointment with the 9800 pro there is disappointment with the 5600 fx. In terms of performance, the 5600 fx runs at about the same speed or even slower than the Geforce TI 4200 in most current games at default settings. On a more positive note the Geforce Fx architecture really shines when you bump up the anti-aliasing or anistrophic filtering settings. with these settings the Fx cards are often times 50% or more faster than the Ti series. Very impressive but more disappointment is in store.

The 5200 ultra is an interesting one. With four pipelines and a core/memory clock of 325/650, you would expect it to be a bit slower than the 5600. I guess Nvidia has taught us another lesson, your assumptions can and sometimes will be wrong. In order to get the cost down I would presume most of the new compression features have been cut and cache sizes reduced. This has greatly reduced performance. But you must consider that the 5200 is a budget card which is to be retailed at about 150.

Needless to say the budget card doesn't even fair nearly as well as the mainstream model. Dammit it even barely outpaces the MX440 which it is meant to replace, and almost keeps up with the 5600 but and a big but once you turn up the anti-aliasing frame rates take a noticiable nosedive.

I would have to say the biggest advantage that the FX series has is that they all deliver the same directX 9 features. There seems to be no repeat of ATI's horrible renaming of the Radeon 9000 and 9200 both directX 8 cards and not directX 9.

All in all ATI wins the contest for the faster card but if your looking for reliability in drivers and over all product I would go with Nvidia.

[DonMeck]

My experience with 9700 (pro?):

using openGL - sloooooooooow
couldn't handle 30.000 polys.
Using d3d - evrything fine. But haven't done any tests with big scenes.
BUT the d3d driver doesn't support 2 sided materials and wireframes seems not to be sorted (z-buffer) correctly.

I haven't checked if it's more powerful than a Gefo 4 Ti4600 (which should be).

But with a Gefo 4600 openGL should be prefered.

Max's OpenGL implementation was always superieur to the d3d one. I don't know why under d3d with a radon it's sooo slow. But it's certainyl a radeon driver issue.
The only bad thing is, that discreet didn't implement the realtime shader stuff for openGL. This is really lame!

[halo]

my 9700's easily handle 30k...300k as well...

[DonMeck]

In openGL mode?

[JeffPatton]

I tried my 9800 pro in OGL mode, and it was noticably slower. And a few test renders had a random light blue pixel in it here or there....went back to DX8 and rendered and the pixel was gone and it was speedy again? Strange stuff indeed. I was surprised at the slow down.

As a side note, system specs are:
dual MP1600's, with 2048 mb ram.

[CGTrader]

btw, when I use DirectX9 drivers then everytime max starts Direct3d Driver Setup dialog appears (the one that you can revert from D3D or switch between 8.1 or 9 D3D in max). With OGL or D3D 8.1 everything is ok. Does anyone has this problem and know how to make it to not appear everytime. It really piss off everytime hit OK button when max starts :annoyed:

[ostov]

I will take chanse getting the radeon 9700 card? and the geforce 4800 will be good enough



ostov

[S_3D_A]

Ditto that one Shetones. Is anyone else getting the directx 9 driver error? Supposedly max 5.1 is suppose to recognize it but it doesn't seem to be able to. Ran a diagnostics check and I currenly run directx 9a and still max opts for me to switch back to directx 8.1

Any fix for this situation would be greatly appreciated.

[DaForce]

I too had a similar problem, and that was before i updated to the lastest version of max 5.1 SP1, and this actually caused me to not be able to choose directx at all. So i then re-installed max from scratch, then applied the 5.1 upgrade and then the service pack, after that i was able to select directx 9 without any problems at all.

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