r350 performance / stability

[dr_Fell]

I am planning to buy myself an AGP card. Does it make sense to buy r 9800 pro now ? Do so old ATI cards have better stability than new cards ? Are so old chipsets still developed or rather ATI will concentrate on new chips ? With new ATI drivers Phoronix stated that there are big performance improvements also for r300 series but no benchmark for r9xxx.

[Michael]

ATI is investing no resources these days in any R300-specific improvements for their fglrx driver and do limited (if any) quality assurance testing of the Radeon 9 series..

You best bet fir such an old graphics card would be with the open-source Radeon driver.

[dr_Fell]

Thanks for answer.

I thought that newest ATI drivers gave much performance boost also for r300 series... (and so r350 too)
In some benchmarks that I managed to find ATI drivers were much faster than open-source drivers even older versions than 8.41.


You are telling that ATI is doing nothing to improve r300 performance... But in this article author wrote that even r300 cards gained performance boost ?

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=822&num=1

Do You think that it makes sense to buy even older card, i.e. 8500 ? Could it be faster with OS drivers than r9800 with ATI driver ?
I don't need much 3d performance, mainly for blender 3d suite. I need cheap graphic card with performance like gf4 ti or a bit more, for AGP 8.


Michael

[Kano]

That's of course only an option when you don't need OpenGL extensions which are only provided by fglrx. Like gl2benchmark does not run with the free driver. AIGLX however works.

[Michael]

Thanks for answer.

I thought that newest ATI drivers gave much performance boost also for r300 series... (and so r350 too)
In some benchmarks that I managed to find ATI drivers were much faster than open-source drivers even older versions than 8.41.


You are telling that ATI is doing nothing to improve r300 performance... But in this article author wrote that even r300 cards gained performance boost ?

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=822&num=1

Do You think that it makes sense to buy even older card, i.e. 8500 ? Could it be faster with OS drivers than r9800 with ATI driver ?
I don't need much 3d performance, mainly for blender 3d suite. I need cheap graphic card with performance like gf4 ti or a bit more, for AGP 8.


Michael

Yes there are performance boosts going back to the R300 series, but what I am saying is that AMD is not doing any R300 specific work anymore. Those performance boosts came as a result of work they had been doing across their code-base and it impacted all product families.

But what I am saying is that, for example, if you run into a bug that is only found on the 9600/9800 cards, it would be very unlikely (and would likely never happen) that AMD would devote the resources to fix the bug unless it was just a trivial fix or affected the R500/600 series too.

I wrote that article you referenced.

[dr_Fell]

Yes there are performance boosts going back to the R300 series, but what I am saying is that AMD is not doing any R300 specific work anymore. Those performance boosts came as a result of work they had been doing across their code-base and it impacted all product families.

But what I am saying is that, for example, if you run into a bug that is only found on the 9600/9800 cards, it would be very unlikely (and would likely never happen) that AMD would devote the resources to fix the bug unless it was just a trivial fix or affected the R500/600 series too.

I wrote that article you referenced.

Thank You very much, that's what I wanted to know.