What is Digg?34 Comments
- coredump0x01, on 10/12/2007, -8/+18Now if only someone would sue them for making terrible drivers!
- stou, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9Terrible? Apparently you are too young to remember Diamond Multimedia.
- Sundae, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7@spastastic: almost, it's actually High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDCP - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7everyone should care about companys making false claims about their products. let one get away and it'll open the flood gates and before long you won't be able to trust anything you buy will do what it says.
- Spastastic, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7high-bandwidth digital copyright protection
- mwales, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@silenceHR
You can call me a fanboy or whatever, but their driver performance (or lack of) leaves alot to be desired. Their Linux drivers certainly do suck:
Comparison of NVidia Windows and Linux Drivers: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=359&num=4
Comparison of ATI Windows and Linux Drivers:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=357&num=4 - silenceHR, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8ahhhh... and when NVidia releases driver that improves performance of their cards, what does that tell you?
drop fanboism, both companies made really great cards lately and TBH, if i was to buy new card i have no idea which one i would buy... i think price would be only decision making point, cause both have really great cards on the market.
same goes for driver support. yes, 3 or 4 years ago ATi drivers sucked balls, but thats history.
it is quite normal that new card gets boosts with new driver releases, newer the card, more boost with new driver.
this goes for both companies.
blah... why bother explaining... join Beyond3d and read there... - sirber, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Drivers ain't bad. I totally hate though their CCC.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5XP Boot Time is relative to a lot of things. Not the same.
- whickywhickyjim, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I. Cares.
- veza, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7whats does HDCP mean?
- SuperSloth, on 10/12/2007, -6/+10No, ATI drivers suck. Their driver division has always fallen way behind their hardware division. It usually takes ATI about 6 months to work out usable drivers.
Anytime you see a driver release give you an instant 5-10% increase in overall performance (not that uncommon for ATI, IMX) you know that they just fixed a major bug. Frankly, that kind of thing should never happen if your driver divison has any idea what they're doing. It's not like they can't get information on the hardware.
nVidia doesn't have the driver problem, but their generally hardware isn't quite as technologically impressive as ATI's. - Hubris, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3It's a bad thing IF the movie studios follow through with their original stated plans that HD-DVD and BLU-RAY discs will only output medium-res video content in the absence of a HDCP-compliant player (video card) and monitor (TV). If they back down because of all the people who have high definition-capable devices that don't support HDCP, there's no problem.
- silenceHR, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4yap, used them before. and if you read my post, i currentlly using "unoffical" ATi drivers, just not Omega's.
i know they give boost, i never said they dont. it's just that some people think that Omega is writing these drivers, while they are nothing more then tweaked offical ones.... if you didnt know, Omega is member of Ati's beta testing team and he gets early versions of all ATi drivers to play with.
sorry guys for being such PITA, but i spent many hours on Beyond3d and similar sites..... - ebob, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3The problem with the absence of HDCP support in a graphics card is that one of the announced "features" of Windows Vista is that it will not output high definition video without HDCP hardware (both in the video card and monitor). As far as I know, HDCP has been cracked and a box was (and may still be) available for around $120 to convert HDCP-encrypted DVI to component.
- nedzalife, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I used to enjoy ATI video cards, even with the 6 month lag in getting decent drivers, but then I switched to linux (and if anyone doesn't believe me, talk to someone else that bought an 8500dv when it first came out... In Tribes 2, entire buildings would disappear cause ATI's drivers were so bad).
I don't think I'll be going back to Windows anytime soon either... all this TPM, DRM, HDCP, HDMI bullcrap that's going into Vista developement is starting to truely piss me off. - RadiatedAnt, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4you mean to tell me people still use the catalyst drivers from ati's webpage? everyone whos tech savvy knows that the omega drivers whomp ati's drivers..or the NGO drivers etcetera..cetera
- Evil-Dragon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3It means your resolution to your monitor will be downgraded due to the lack of HDCP. I bought a 1900XTX recently before it was annouced about the lack of HDCP, so as you can imagine I wasn't too impressed espically after all the money I had spent. With the way things are going Vista is gonna suck anyway, it's been going like this for some time now.
- sanza, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Thanks for setting me straight-- I was under the impression that it was a new connector that helped impose copy protection.
There seems to be a lot of BUT's and IF YOU HAVE's with the new disc formats. I jumped CD bandwagon right away and the DVD one. I think I'll wait until the dust settles and I need a new TV before I purchase any next-gen equipment... - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2So nobody remembers the driver update for the GeForce 2MX range that gave a 20%-30% speed improvement then? Ya just gotta love fanboys!
- thirdtenor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Macrovision protection has been enabled and limitting content playback on ATI cards for years. Of course its pretty easy to skirt, but its been there all the same.
HDCP is a big deal for HD DVD and Bluray and (currently) nothing else, since you cant actually play either on a PC its not a big deal, YET. You can still play all no prtotected content (HD or not) and games on a HDCP enabled monitor or HDTV. - shredswithpiks, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2umm... no.
depending on how the HD format wars play out, we might NEED HDCP to playback any of it at all. Actually... (I'm sure this has changed) I remember something about vista only working with HDCP video cards???
eh... the point is they shouldn't have advertised it if they weren't planning on implimenting it - silenceHR, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4and whats the difference between official drivers and Omega? some twaks, or you think Omega is writing his drivers from ground up????
i am currentlly using latest Catalysts, but with old Control Panel, i never liked that fancy ***** they made. But, i am bloody well aware that all these "unofficial" drivers are basically same as those on ATi's site, just with couple tweaks, no more, no less. - silenceHR, on 10/12/2007, -6/+7Whats wrong with Ati drivers? Last time i checked they work great.
Fanboism in its best. - Menel, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3ATI drivers have been top notch since the the Catalyst program and about rev 3.10. Have been few to no bugs or quirkyness since then. And they are still fully unified supporting ALL Radeon products.
As far as nvidia drivers go, try going to nVidia to download the latest GeForce drivers to install in your father's computer with a spare GF2PRO, or my sister's computer with my old GeForce 256. Nope. Not going to happen because no longer unified as nViida claims. You have to instead go digging through archives guessing at which rev number has the viable driver.
No thanks, I'll pass. Better things to do with my time.
I had a 9700pro for nearly 3 years with no problems and great fast customer service when an RMA is needed. nVidia....what customer service LOL. - unidentified, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@silenceHR
Have you ever tried them? I don't care what you "understand" them to be, the fact is they are worth the download. The "tweaks" as you put them go a long way. I have not only experianced visual improvements with the omega drivers, but also frame rate improvements IN THE SAME GAME! - jer2eydevil88, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Not so much an advertisement based on factors but instead a misrepresentation on what the product can do entirely. If Microsoft had advertised Windows XP could give you a better sex life by learning to play solitare we would have seen a class action lawsuit brought against them.
- EPeters, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I think its important to point out that Nvidia may be guilty of this as well. It turns out that NO video cards exsist that support HDCP. That's because the firmware (keys to decode the video) haven't been added to the HDCP hardware. It's only a matter of time until everyone gets sued. HDCP is a huge mistake, anyway.
- JohnnySoftware, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Well, anyone who bought PC hardware based on future promises of what any OS - that was vaporware - would do was not too smart. The PC has a long history of vaporware products, dating back a decade or two.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
Buy a Mac from Apple. Apple is much less prone to pre-announcing products years before they have them. In fact, though they did that a little bit between Jobs (late 1980s through early 1990s), Jobs just does not do that.
Steve Jobs makes the engineers do their work first, the marketeers do their work afterwards. The only exception is they will disclose a little information about each OS before it ships, out of necessity, to developers.
But Apple does not disclose stuff five years before their OS ships, more like 6-12 months.
Dvorak just wrote a sobering article in Marketwatch.com about a major case of PC vaporware a week ago.
There is no set period when something officially becomes called vaporware. However, looking back, it tends to be 2-3 years. - neko, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0My goodness, I had no idea such technology was already weaseling into graphics cards. ATI may be wrong in claiming some of their cards support Feature-X when they don't; however in this case, I'd be grateful to see HDCP's absence.
DRM amounts to consumers purchasing their own handcuffs. I can't see why ATI would want to include this "technology" anyway; quoting from the Wikipedia article, "In addition to paying fees, licensees agree to limit the capabilities of their products.".
As for the driver holy war, I've used both ATI and nVidia drivers on my systems, and have to say I prefer nVidia's, despite their use of a scary closed-source binary blob. But if I had to choose between a card with built in DRM chains, and a card that doesn't limit what I can use it for, non-DRM wins every time. If there are any ATI developers out there, please, abandon this HDCP nonsense and sell us hardware that works. - sanza, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1And how exactly is this lack of HDCP a bad thing? AM I completely in the dark or is this like suing Marlboro because the package states cigarettes may cause lung cancer and I didn't get it!
- eadnams, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3... like microsofts claims/ads of XP boot time? Gimme a break, this has been going on forever.
- silenceHR, on 10/12/2007, -16/+1edit : wrong post. kill this one
- pope7, on 10/12/2007, -27/+3Who. Cares.
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