A blistering Gaming card from ATI
Written: Sep 13 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Blistering speed. lots of features inc DVD
Cons: bit hefty on the pocket, The creative geforce 2 might be a better value buy
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| thepanther's Full Review: ATI Radeon 64MB DDR |
The Radeon from ATI has firmly established itself as one of the top 3 cards in the ever tightning 3D Graphics card business. ATI have not been known in the past for releasing mind blowing speed cards, but for there more user friendly, does the job cards, like the All in Wonders, which offer loads of features but were never going to take the games market by storm.
The Radeon certainly changed all this with the ability leave the Voodoo 5 5500 well behind in speed tests. The Geforce 2 hold a firm grip at the top I believe in terms of speed but its still close. To ATI's advantage though the Radeon does come with hardware T&L and anti-alaising, The Geforce has T&L but it allways did and its nothing new in the card.
This cards performs well, and the Voodoo 5 5500 can basically see its dust. ATI say that this card has everything you could want at the moment,
T&L
FSAA
Environment bump mapping
Single pass multi texturing
Cubic environment mapping
and the best support for DirectX 8 (currently).
AGP 2/4x
The Radeon does not do FSAA in 1280 x 1024 but neither does the Geforce 2, the voodoo 5 however does but at that res I doubt the slower speed of the voodoo would be able to cope too well anyway.
Full MPEG 1 and 2 decoders are hardware assisted meaning DVD playback is not a problem, and the need for a dedicated decoder has long gone. It provides TV in and out so you can watch your movies on your TV or even do video capture, one of ATI's specialities.
The quality of FSAA and some of the other features of the Radeon are not as good as some of them on the voodoo 5 5500 but would you rather have a cool looking T-Buffer or blistering games performance, the choice is yours I know which one I would go for.
Price wise its a bit expensive, higher than Creatives Geforce 2 which will sway people towards the Nvidia card, but if ATI have just come out with this card out of nowhere then Nvidia better start watching its back.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 275
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Epinions.com ID:
thepanther
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Member: Stevie Orgill
Location: Burton-on-Trent, DerbyShire, UK
Reviews written: 65
Trusted by: 13 members
About Me:
Passing on my own experience from my business in Computer Hardware.
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