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Drivers - The Heart and Soul Of A Graphics Card |
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ATi certainly has
the features, now can they deliver functionality
and performance? |
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Below are some screen shots
of ATi's unified driver suite that is common to both the
Radeon 7500 and Radeon 8500 cards.
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Color
Settings
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Options
and Information
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Direct
3D Settings
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OpenGL
Settings
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Display
Settings
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Installation was completely
uneventful with both cards. ATi's drivers do have a
great deal of functionality with respect to various 2D and
3D settings. In addition, ATi's "HydraVision" adds
multi-monitor support. However, "SmoothVision"
Anti-Aliasing was basically non-functional for us. We
were able to get it working occasionally under Direct 3D
titles and benchmarks but it was very spotty and we weren't
completely sure the settings were functioning correctly.
OpenGL SmoothVision doesn't work at all at this time.
We frankly expected more from ATi. Obviously they were
rushed to get the products to market.
We'll come back to these issues
in our final assessment at the end of this review.
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Multimedia Tools, Utilities And In Game Screen
Shots |
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All the good stuff |
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ATi does pack in a great
offering of Multimedia Tools and Utilities for streaming
video, DVDs. Audio etc. Here are a few captures of all
the goodies that are included. Click images for full
view.
All the tools you could use, are
included with both the R7500 and R8500 cards.
Image Quality:
Image quality with respect to
the desktop or 2D has always been a beauty to behold with
ATi cards. They seem to make the best RAMDAC in the
business and on board filtering is typically of the highest
quality. It was no surprise that 2D images were very
crisp and clean and on par with GeForce3 cards up to
1600X1200. At 1600X1200 and above, the R8500 and R7500
cards were arguably slightly cleaner than a GeForce3.
3D image quality was also
excellent, if only we had SmoothVision anti-aliasing.
Here are a few screen shots from
Aquanox to give you the visuals. Click images for
full view.
Let's stop playing around here
and get to work on some numbers.
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Test Setup and
Benchmarks! |
