I for one am taking a chance and holding onto my 3dfx cards for another 6 months after my debacle with ATI. I currently own the 3DFX V3 2000 PCI & AGP & V5 5500 AGP. They all work flawlessly with win2k and I couldnt be happier accept that they are slow compared to today's best. In case you didnt know I have posted my ATI experience below.
ATI FIRST HAND EXPERIENCE
Epiphanic Lucidity
Read what I have to say and make your own decision.
I will never buy another ATI product. ATI consistently provides drivers that suck. The new ATI Radeons suck… the drivers don’t work for scat on win2k. Driver updates are non-existent as in the past. They have no toll free tech support, so when you get it and it doesn’t work right you’re in for a long wait before it does. Their new Radeon cards ship with win2k drivers, which don’t work properly. If you want to feel scat on buy Radeon.
NOTE: I bought two of the ATI AIW Radeon cards for two systems both identical accept in the amount of ram and a few different peripherals. Neither card worked on either system properly. Don’t believe me take a look around people, are starting to figure it out for themselves. Some people will say I should stop complaining and switch to a different operating system like win98SE. Those same people are enabling ATI to get away with this crap. No I never tested with win98SE or WinME because that was not my OS and I am not going to switch to a different OS for ATI, lol that is so funny especially when the ATI AIW Radeon ships with win2k full release drivers. Anyone who says you should switch OS’s to make the card work is just plain out to lunch.
"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." - Lillian Hellman
System Specs:
Win2kPro
Enlight 7230 Case
Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro
Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer
Everglide Giganta (Black)
Golden Orb H/S & Fan
Asus CUSL2
3DFX V5 5500 AGP
3DFX V3 2K PCI
ViewSonic P815 Professional Series 21 Monitor”
HP A4033A 20” Monitor
Blackout Buster 500VA
P3 700 I don’t o/c it but it will do 933 fine and post at 1GHZ.
Kodak DC280 Zoom
VideoBlaster Webcam 3
320MB SDRAM PC133 Cas2 Infineon
Epson Stylus 900
Epson Perfection 1200S
SBLive Platinum 5.1
2 Maxtor 45GB AT100 7200
Adaptec 2930 SCSI Controller
Maxtor AT100 Controller
Toshiba 8x DVD
Plextor Plexwriter External 8/20
Klipsch ProMedia v.2-400
Linksys 10/100 Ethernet Card
Linksys 10/100 Hub
Previously Owned two V3 3500TV’s which didn’t support Win2k initially but has supported it for well over half a year now and EVERYTHING worked even with the beta drivers, unlike ATI which released their newer card with Win2k drivers which don’t work with 70% of the card properly.
I wish I still had a copy of the long and detailed report I typed out to them concerning the problems with their card, but I formatted my HD and started from scratch anticipating this suggestion after initial trouble shooting efforts failed.
Note: Isn’t it irksome that the common panacea for computer problems these days is the all to often suggestion/demand that you reformat your HD and start from scratch to try to solve problems with a new piece of hardware. I find that this policy is absolutely unacceptable and is abused in the computer industry, which relies on it to make their hardware work rather than hiring more knowledgeable help, which could save the customer much time and wasted effort. Do you think they tell Bill Gates he has to reformat his PC? “”This “screw the consumer’s time, it’s not costing us anything” attitude appears to exist across the entire spectrum of new technology industries.”” (Worth magazine Jan 2001, by Eric Alterman. Excerpt from his article below)
In the phone calls to them (which the customer pays for) they could not help me but were interested in my errors as some had already been reported and some were new to them and some helped them figure out more in detail why certain errors would occur. They encouraged a detailed write up. I did them a favor at my own expense and time and then they replied with we will only fix problems reported to a significant degree… Only if customers complain enough will they bother fixing a problem. What a joke. In other words they know of problems but are not fixing them until their customers really start complaining in droves.
Under win2k these are the problems I encountered. All games I tried using OpenGL which is “fully”supported by ATI “Full OpenGL® and Microsoft® DirectX® support.” of which I probably own 40 have graphics that look like [-peep-] and are too dark which cannot be fixed without second hand programs or special tweaking instructions/editing of CFG files etc... (3DFX had a Gamma slider allowing you to brighten or darken Direct 3d or OpenGL games independently besides the desktop quickly solving this problem. Direct3d, which works on some games, looks like crap on some (examples: Diablo 2, Quake one) and good on others… Compare Diablo 2 using OpenGL with a voodoo card versus Radeon Direct3d ((pixilated and snowy), (Radeon fails if you try OpenGL). TV looks good but the downloading of the TV schedule fails half the time. TV out onscreen ATI software controls for turning the TV on and off do not work at all. When you plug in your Svideo your automatically outputting your pc signal to your TV and cannot switch it on and off like you’re supposed to be able to on your pc, instead you have to reboot!, but there is more… Furthermore once you view your pc on you TV your graphics no longer fit your pc monitor screen and you end up using your mouse to scroll to areas on the peripheral of your pc monitor you cant see any longer unless you scroll there. This problem is terrible since you cannot use the controls that come with the card to switch back to using the monitor as the screen properly. What happens is that you get stuck with this scrolling problem and it doesn’t go away even when you reboot. The only way I found to fix it is to completely uninstall the drivers and then reinstall them and then set the monitor resolution low to like 640x480 and then reset it back up to whatever you want. You see upon rebooting and reinstalling the drivers the problem is still there but now if you change the resolution down to 640x480 and then back up to whatever you want it set things back to normal. This is very time consuming process. ATI never even replied to this particular problem. DVD playback, which is hardware driven stutters! This I couldn’t believe and was the last straw because I thought that at least worked when I first watched the beginning of the Matrix for about 30 seconds to see if it was working. Later I go to show a friend and it is stuttering as we watch it for a few minutes. Mpeg4 playback fails! ATI was aware of the Mpeg4 playback failures but has not fixed this problem yet! This card is a nightmare folks! I have forgotten much of what I wrote them detailing errors received and better descriptions of the problems but this should be enough to explain what a piece of crap ATI is foisting. Foisting (Webster): “To give somebody something inferior: to give somebody something inferior on the pretence that it is genuine, valuable, or desirable.” A good synonym for foisting would be FRAUD.
After spending about four hours total on the phone with them and getting them all the information they wanted I get no reassurances. All I get is hopefully we will have an answer to some of these problems in the future. Blah Blah Blah. Month goes by and no driver updates that fix the milieu of problems. Many people have posted on Tomshardware in the past as to the untrustworthy nature of ATI concerning drivers and their inability to act quickly to fix driver problems. I now know what they were talking about first hand. Don’t make the same mistake. How can you purchase a card that ships with Win2k drivers today and have it not work in everything properly accept TV in? When it takes half a year to fix all the problems on such a product why bother buying it since by that time the card will be selling for less than half what you paid for it and will be half as fast as newer cards on the market. ATI may fall just like 3DFX but for poor drivers and poor support, not speed, if they continue with this irresponsible behavior.
On Mature Drivers: Gee the drivers are not "mature," that must be the problem, lol. You know what a "mature" driver is; a euphemism originally meaning buggy or "dfw - don't coitus work" fed to the public to convince us we are stupid and should not expect the drivers that come with our hardware to work properly and we should just shut up and wait a few months and longer and maybe they will work with some newer beta drivers and by that time the cards outdated and a very poor investment for what you got out of it.
An email I retained sent to ATI in response to a customer support reply that was more useless than the long distance phone support.
Thank you very much for you're very kind reply... I find the information I have provided your company with at my expense much more valuable to you than the information you have provided me. Reiteration of solutions I have already tried does neither of us any good. I have returned both cards to the original retailer. In the future please refrain from releasing unfinished products. I and other customers regard such actions as unlawful. I can no longer recommend your products due to poor driver performance under win2k (I have not tested any other OS nor do I wish to do so as your product ships with supposed perfect win2k drivers), which I have tested extensively. The long list of problems with your drivers is tiresome. DVD play, which I previously thought, worked perfectly stutters randomly. In the future please don't rely on your customer base to solve your problems for you because in the end you lose valuable promotional commentary along with a good customer. No need to reply I just thought you should know how thoroughly disgusted I am with your product and your company.
Interesting Article in Worth magazine Jan 2001, by Eric Alterman, which reflects how many of us feel…
“”This “screw the consumer’s time, it’s not costing us anything” attitude appears to exist across the entire spectrum of new technology industries. I bought a scanner from UMAX that has never worked. There’s nobody at the other end to help, at least nobody I had the patience to find. The ugly thing has been sitting on my desk, unused, for two years. and have you tried to hook up a DSL line recently” I have, and I had to give up on that, too. It turned out Verizon, the new beast created out of Bell Atlantic’s merger with just about everybody else, had not yet come up with a modem compatible with Windows Me, though apparently it neglected to mention that to the person on the phone who was all to willing to take an order and let the caller waste hours trying to make the damn thing work. Chris Taylor of Time recently wrote of spending almost six months stuck inside a similar nightmare courtesy of Pacific Bell, which given its location, really ought to know better. The truth was that the company did not even offer the service, called D-Slam, that it had promised him, as it had run out of the hardware, but it continued to advertise it because, a rep admitted, their “competitors haven’t stopped advertising yet: The worst of it is that the entire time you are wasting away on hold, watching your fingernails grow, the company brags about its new and improved service menu.
This whole sector of the economy feels like the Soviet Union: Long waiting lines, no service, contempt for the consumer, products that don’t work when shipped, but somebody with the power to create a little trouble for the big boys arrives, and everybody starts jumping. Of course, the obvious differences are that innovation barely existed in Soviet industries, while the computer manufacturers are just about the most innovative people of all time. But the net result turns out to be more suffering for the rest of us.””
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" Hope this was good enough because I love doom. Your reply will be emailed to me so feel free to add the link to it. Fair winds, Diemos
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