ATI VE verses Matrox G550

[iampedro]

Who has the advantages over this deal?

What are the pro's and cons? to you knowledge?

I will be working in Windows 2000...

Also, what is the difference between Ati VE and ATI 7500?

[RoGuE]

The Radeon VE, or Radeon 7000 as it is now more commonly known is a decent card, but the one I recently purchased at work has truely horrid picture quality via analogue D-Sub. The DVI seems fine though. Personally I would choose a G550 every time, but this only cost £27, so it was hard to refuse.

The Radeon VE/7000 is a poor choice for gaming compared with the upper Radeon cards, as it lacks most of the advanced 3D features present on the 7500 and 8500.

[RichL]

I had a Radeon VE recently. The drivers were so increadibly unstable under 2000 I wound up junking the card and getting a 2nd hand Voodoo 3000 instead, which worked flawlessly.

Stick with Matrox if you can.

[Indiana]

The Radeon7500 is MUCH faster than the VE, but also more expensive.
Even the VE should be a bit better for gaming than the G550.

But if you're really planning to do gaming the VE will be just too slow nowadays, you should get the Radeon7500 or even the 8500LE (has dropped in price quite a bit the last weeks). The Gf4 Ti4200 would be another reasonable alternative.

If you're not into gaming, the G550 would probably be the better choice than the RadeonVE, since I've heard claims about the VE having bad signal quality more than once - and this is the field where the G550 excels.

EDIT: All recent Radeon drivers are VERY stable here in Win2k.

[Pace]

What do you plan to do?

Only G550 will allow independent resolutions in DualHead.

P.

[{PainCresT}DAn]

Indiana I can't totaly agree with you on the stable driver thing with ATI... I've had deal with various ATI products (and being that I'm the Systems/Networks administrator where I work and we only have ATI here except 3 G450's) and I just recently purchased the 8500 retail (275/275) 128MB card I can say that for the most part the cards are great hardware but drivers always have something querky about them... ether things like font corruption, graphics anomalies, or weird things like all games play smooth but GTA3... donesn't matter even if I disable everything it still chops.... doesn't make sense

My GF3 Ti200 (which died for no reasone) 64MB could play the game reasonably good (had to lower some detail but nothing big). If I play on the 8500 it plays smooth most of the time then all of the sudden loads of disk access and chopety chop chop. if I max the settings things tend to be a little better but still it chops. All other games I've played are perfectly fine no problems at all just GTA3... even if I set it to 800x600 it still chops.....


Back to the drivers how about when my system goes into standby... never had a problem with my GF3.... but it goes into standby and when you try to bring it up the screen spews out a multy coloured TV styled static on the screen and the system never comes back... ATI really need to focus more on there drivers and compatibility. ATI has great hardware but poor drivers, at least compaired to its competitors.

[The PIT]

Well the drivers work fine for me under win2k I did have a problem six months ago when drivers wouldn't work with anything Norton but thats now been fixed everything is fine.

[The PIT]

Theres one thing I forgot and thats ATI don't have a proper uninstaller and leave tons of files scattered all over the windows directory. If ones screwing you up the chance of finding it is about zilch.

[Indiana]

GTA doesn't run good with the Radeon, but that's surely not ATIs fault here. GTA3 ran like crap on Geforces as well, just that they released a fix for this. A fix for the ATI is available that doesn't fully solve all issues but still helps a bit.
GTA doesn't run smooth on the Parhelia, either.

It has to be the worst coded game ever, having problems on ALL major chipsets without applying fixes (NVidia, ATI, now Matrox. Don't know 'bout Kyro, but I'd surely be surprised if it ran smooth there).

I never had issues with text-corruption here.
Sometimes some games don't like the hierachicalZ optimization of the ATI resulting in clipping errors / popping polygons. Temporaribly turning off HierarchicalZ normally solves these issues.

(Of course in total NVidias drivers will give less issues with games, but since I'm not really the hardcore gamer I don't care that much.)

[Protege]

I guess parhelia is out since your probably looking for an inexpensive solution. But that should play GTA3 rather well.

[iampedro]

Is the G450 the almost the same as the G550?

[RichL]

In terms of 2d/3d speed, I dont think theres much in it between the G450 and the G550.
AFAIK, the G400Max is the fastest of the G-Series cards made.

[iampedro]

And the G400Max is able to do dual independant display?

[Greebe]

Yes

[iampedro]

Do, you know of a good cheap place to buy a G400Max?