MrMeth :
I have to disagree with you guys on the driver thing for that generation i thought the ati drivers were great , compared to now with cat 8.4 or 8.3 what ever it is . I was with ATI since the 7000 cards and saw allot of the drivers seeing as i had a 7000, 8500 , 8500 Le , 9000 all in wonder , 9700 , x800xl and up until recently 1950 pro ( got a 8800 GT for dirt cheap 130$) and imo the drivers during that generation were solid and bug free compared to drivers on my x800 or my 1950 pro. But thats just me .. I wish amd would bring back the all in wonder line and price them cheap to
I never had driver issues with my AIW Radeon 9800 Pro. It was a great gaming card as well as even better tv recording to my PC. Sadly, it's P4 i865PERL motherboard died and I went PCIe x16 with an Athlon X2.
Yes, we need to see an All in Wonder 4850 Pro at least! I don't think AMD's going to go there, so I won't hold my breath. If there had been an AIW 3850, I would have gotten that for my wife's PC. So, if AMD has people surfing tech sites to see what people say about their products, then let's give them a heads up that many want the All in Wonder back.
Regarding drivers, I had an Nvidia 405 chipset board that didn't like ATI cards, so I went 7600gs. The drivers for the board and the card left much to be desired under Vista. When I went back to an AMD/ATI build, I had no issues other than having to turn off the DX 8.1 pixel shaders in Morrowind.
Everything else, old games and new, play great. Maybe Turbine got their act together, because I get better framerates than I used to in LOTR Online. That game didn't support Crossfire or SLI very well; but maybe Catalyst 8.4 made a difference?
At any rate, ATI's reputation for bad drivers is a rather stale canard based upon issues many years ago, while Nvidia seems to get a pass regarding DX10 and Vista. Both companies fix driver problems in later releases, anyways.