Radeon 8500 & Maya 4?

[paconavarro]

Looking to upgrade from an older ATI card, but I'm torn between a GeForce3 Ti200 and a Radeon 8500.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I really need to get something quicker so I can get more work done.

Thanks in advance, and yes, I did go through the forums and read lots of other posts.

btw, has anyone else had any luck getting a Kyro2 to run Maya?

[tzaunie]

I have no personal experience with the Radeon, but from what I've read it would seem that the GF series is far more widely used for pro 3D apps. Also, one of the big complaints I always see about Radeon is poor driver support. Conversely, driver support has always been one of the real strengths of the GF series. Again, this is not from my personal experience but rather from what I see in newsgroups and forums.

If it were me, I'd go with the GF3 at this point.

Larry

[sachin0487]

No one can say for sure just yet as there aren't any reviews and benchmarks of the final Radeon 8500 with the final drivers. I say wait until you start seeing the reviews come swarming in from all the hardware sites, as they will whenever ATI actually gets around to shipping these things, then decide.

[paconavarro]

Ok, lets add this to the equation. If I had the opportunity to purchase a FireGL2 card for the same price as these two cards, would that be a good idea?

[medicine-horse]

In reply to:
Ok, lets add this to the equation. If I had the opportunity to purchase a FireGL2 card for the same price as these two cards, would that be a good idea?

Ohhh..Yes!!!...It`s a nice device..(a bit old though)

Erik

[bonzaj]

In reply to:
Ok, lets add this to the equation. If I had the opportunity to purchase a FireGL2 card for the same price as these two cards, would that be a good idea?

I have a FireGL2 card in my current system and I think its a great card, however one thing you might want to keep in mind is that the Fire GL2 card only supports 32 bit color mode. This may be important in deciding which card you choose. If you plan on using your machine to run apps which don't support 32 bit color (ie games), then the other two cards are a bit more flexible in this respect which is one of the reasons why they are so popular.

Jeff

[zerozeroone]

ok, i don't know about software support but here's a hardware comparison:
ATI Radeon 8500 outperforms the GF3 at under $250
The Fire GL2 is nice, but there's a new fire card coming out aimed at the Quadro DCC based on the radeon 8500 chip.
So hardware wise, ATI has the edge... software support, i don't know

[paconavarro]

In reply to:
I have a FireGL2 card in my current system and I think its a great card, however one thing you might want to keep in mind is that the Fire GL2 card only supports 32 bit color mode. This may be important in deciding which card you choose. If you plan on using your machine to run apps which don't support 32 bit color (ie games), then the other two cards are a bit more flexible in this respect which is one of the reasons why they are so popular.

Jeff

Yeah, I was aware of that. My second system (TBird 800/Kyro II) will be taking care of all my games if I get the FireGL2. I took a look at www.maya-testcenter.de/3dresults.html and it seems that the GeForce3 keeps up with the FireGL2 in most aspects. Since the Radeon 8500 has more raw power than the GeForce3, this is making me wonder if the FireGL2 is a wise purchase as the moment.

[vent] I hate waiting!!!! ARGH! [/vent]

[mythprod]

In reply to:
Looking to upgrade from an older ATI card, but I'm torn between a GeForce3 Ti200 and a Radeon 8500.

If you're deciding between a GeForce3 Ti200 and a Radeon 8500, I'd highly recommend the Radeon. First of all, the Ti200 is in a lower class (it's slower than the original G3) - I think it competes with the Radeon 7500. Anyway, I just bought a Radeon 8500 for $220 (OEM version, it's got a little slower memory bandwith than the retail 8500, but still faster than the G3 Ti500, NVidia's big-daddy right now). In my experience (which is about 2 hours), it works great in Maya 4. In fact, I bought the Radeon 8500 to replace my Wildcat4110 card(us college students like Direct3D for games and DVDs...), and I honestly don't notice any difference in performance, even thought the Wildcat is supposed to be a lot more high-end. Sure the driver support is a little lacking, but that mainly concerns full screen anti-aliasing and DOT3 bumpmapping - and I don't remember the last time those were a necessity in Maya 4. Anyway, what I'm saying is that the Radeon is a great card for Maya 4 - comparable to a Wildcat. The G3 Ti500 might perform the same (although Radeon outperforms the card in most cases) - but it's more expensive.

[ghostgear]

Have you tried the dual screen function? Would be nice to heare if it's functioning with Maya and how the performance is...
-Klaus

In reply to:

[quote]
In reply to:
Looking to upgrade from an older ATI card, but I'm torn between a GeForce3 Ti200 and a Radeon 8500.

[/quote]

If you're deciding between a GeForce3 Ti200 and a Radeon 8500, I'd highly recommend the Radeon. First of all, the Ti200 is in a lower class (it's slower than the original G3) - I think it competes with the Radeon 7500. Anyway, I just bought a Radeon 8500 for $220 (OEM version, it's got a little slower memory bandwith than the retail 8500, but still faster than the G3 Ti500, NVidia's big-daddy right now). In my experience (which is about 2 hours), it works great in Maya 4. In fact, I bought the Radeon 8500 to replace my Wildcat4110 card(us college students like Direct3D for games and DVDs...), and I honestly don't notice any difference in performance, even thought the Wildcat is supposed to be a lot more high-end. Sure the driver support is a little lacking, but that mainly concerns full screen anti-aliasing and DOT3 bumpmapping - and I don't remember the last time those were a necessity in Maya 4. Anyway, what I'm saying is that the Radeon is a great card for Maya 4 - comparable to a Wildcat. The G3 Ti500 might perform the same (although Radeon outperforms the card in most cases) - but it's more expensive.

[carl-schmidt]

In reply to:

[quote]
In reply to:
Looking to upgrade from an older ATI card, but I'm torn between a GeForce3 Ti200 and a Radeon 8500.

[/quote]

If you're deciding between a GeForce3 Ti200 and a Radeon 8500, I'd highly recommend the Radeon. First of all, the Ti200 is in a lower class (it's slower than the original G3) - I think it competes with the Radeon 7500. Anyway, I just bought a Radeon 8500 for $220 (OEM version, it's got a little slower memory bandwith than the retail 8500, but still faster than the G3 Ti500, NVidia's big-daddy right now). In my experience (which is about 2 hours), it works great in Maya 4. In fact, I bought the Radeon 8500 to replace my Wildcat4110 card(us college students like Direct3D for games and DVDs...), and I honestly don't notice any difference in performance, even thought the Wildcat is supposed to be a lot more high-end. Sure the driver support is a little lacking, but that mainly concerns full screen anti-aliasing and DOT3 bumpmapping - and I don't remember the last time those were a necessity in Maya 4. Anyway, what I'm saying is that the Radeon is a great card for Maya 4 - comparable to a Wildcat. The G3 Ti500 might perform the same (although Radeon outperforms the card in most cases) - but it's more expensive.

You might want to read some of the reviews that are out comparing these cards. 8500 is not living up to its potential and is quite possibly fudging the Quake benchmark numbers. Not to say that if ATI would put out good drivers the card wouldn't kick butt. Reviews are at Hardocp, anandtech and also tomshardware.

-Carl

[sachin0487]

Go for the GeForce 3 Ti 200. Now that the Radeon 8500 has actually been released and tested abroad, it's painfully clear that it does not live upto the hype that was surrounding it. It's been proven that it can barely keep up with the GeForce 3 Ti 200 in the vast majority of benchmarks and real life situations. To say that it even comes close to beating the GeForce 3 Ti 500 is crazy.

The GeForce 3 Ti 200 is much cheaper, and offers better performance. On top of that, the ATI drivers are nothing to be proud of. Sure, you can wait for ATI to fix them, but you'll be waiting for a long time. ATI has only recently come out with decent drivers for the original Radeon! How long has it been since that was released? It's hard to compete with the Nvidia driver team.

Every single review I've read has said something along the lines of the 8500 being a disappointment. I feel sorry for the people that pre-ordered one just because of the hype. It has decent potential, but potential needs to be uncovered to be useful. I don't know too many people that enjoy the waiting game.

[mythprod]

Carl, what you said about Quake benchmarks is true - the Radeon is behind the Ti500 (and possibly the Ti200 with certain features on ... like FSAA). I don't see how that relates to Maya however. It has been 2 days now since I've been playing around with Maya 4 on my Radeon and I'm more than happy with it. One thing I noticed is that working with particles is much smoother than I was used to on a Wildcat 4110. The Radeon has the highest available polygon count (not just among gaming cards) and I think that really shows in Maya. But if you have your eye set on the GeForce3 because of what Synapse has mentioned, I'd go for the GeForce3 Ti500, not the 200. At tomshardware.com, I believe the Radeon 7500 outperformed the Ti200 in many respects applicable to Maya, not to mention the 8500. Also, the Radeon 8500 has the highest 3DMark score yet, whatever that means. Basically the card is working well for me (on a PIII 800mhz, 512ram). Hope that helps ...

[kiwi]

In reply to:
Go for the GeForce 3 Ti 200. Now that the Radeon 8500 has actually been released and tested abroad, it's painfully clear that it does not live upto the hype that was surrounding it. It's been proven that it can barely keep up with the GeForce 3 Ti 200 in the vast majority of benchmarks and real life situations. To say that it even comes close to beating the GeForce 3 Ti 500 is crazy.

The GeForce 3 Ti 200 is much cheaper, and offers better performance. On top of that, the ATI drivers are nothing to be proud of. Sure, you can wait for ATI to fix them, but you'll be waiting for a long time. ATI has only recently come out with decent drivers for the original Radeon! How long has it been since that was released? It's hard to compete with the Nvidia driver team.

Every single review I've read has said something along the lines of the 8500 being a disappointment. I feel sorry for the people that pre-ordered one just because of the hype. It has decent potential, but potential needs to be uncovered to be useful. I don't know too many people that enjoy the waiting game.

I agree - I'd go for a GF3-based card. (-not necessarily the Ti200), They offer relatively stable and mature 3rd gen. drivers, and have gobs of room for performance increases as new Detonator drivers are released. (and they're cheaper) (and you can find lots-more on-line config/optimization support)

Also - I read today (http://slashdot.org/) that ATI has reportedly tweaked their new Radeon reference drivers (released yesterday) to run Quake3 as fast as possible for benchmarking (read PR) purposes. -This is great if all you really want is a fraggin' game machine. To be fair, it will probably run 3DMax and other engines under DX8.1 and openGL real quicklike. But I suspect that if you let Maya have it's way with an 8500 under W2K or XP, you might find that the it isn't the best card for running Maya on-the-cheap.

kiwi

[sentry65]

for the love of god will someone just post the maya test center bench results on this card?

It takes all of 20-30 sec
and post your basic computer specs

[mythprod]

In reply to:
for the love of god will someone just post the maya test center bench results on this card?

I'm not sure how this reflects on the Radeon's performance, but here you go anyway:
Rendertime:3min34sec.
System Specs: PIII 800mhz, 512 PC133 RAM, Radeon 8500 OEM, Win2k Pro SP2, 5200rpm HD ...

Also, some things I noticed that are slower using the Radeon instead of a Wildcat4110: almost all Paint Effects features (ex. a growing grass animation starts smooth and gets quite a bit choppier as the scene gains complexity with Wildcat, but STARTS really choppy with the Radeon and goes to senior citizen speed within seconds ... no offense to anyone except ATI...). Also, particles perform pretty much the same, but only when using points and streaks ... boxes and circles are somewhat slower for some reason. Another thing that bothers me is that the computer almost freezes (goes through long periods of processing) when working with cluster weights (and especially using the Paint Cluster Weights Tool). I don't know if these are issues with the G3 as well - maybe one of you guys might have experienced some of these problems. Anyway, overall I'm happy with the card ... it does (almost) everything a 128mb Wildcat card did, and actually lets me do things like watch DVDs and play games (which i'm sure all of you are too busy for). But I'd probably say the same thing about the G3 Ti500 if I had one.

[sentry65]

no man I meant the 3d graphic benchmark - you know, the one that benchmarks the video card when you hit the play button in the animation controls?

the rendering one has absolutely nothing to do with your video card at all - you could run a 1 meg non-opengl card and get damn near the same results as you would on the same system with a wildcat 5110 doing software rendering.

[mythprod]

In reply to:
no man I meant the 3d graphic benchmark - you know, the one that benchmarks the video card when you hit the play button in the animation controls?

Let me know how I can run that - because I've never done that before. Thanks ...

[jtk77]

Radeon and MAya is jsut a combo you;d do better to do without.

............GO AWAY..THERE IS NO WIZARD HERE!..............

[sentry65]

you download the scene file and follow the instructions from the website.

http://www.maya-testcenter.de/index.html

click on operating instructions in the 3D-graphics section and follow those simple instructions

it's very painless and fast to do