swaaye wrote:

I've seen a few Radeon 9700s "die" from RAM failures. I've fixed them by reprogramming the BIOS with lower RAM speeds. I'm not sure if that's what happened to you but the distortion is similar.

This happened to my 9700 too. I first kept it overclocked just above 9700 pro levels...then lowered it a bit... then another bit... then it started making same garbled image @ default. Thats when I got GF8800 gts.

Oh and the reason I say stay away from Radeon 8500, 9000, 9100, 9200, 9250 is because they are all basically the same. The problem with this generation is that they don't have multisample AA and have rather poor anisotropic filtering. The drivers from that generation are iffy, and the chips themselves don't perform very well compared to NV contemporaries. GeForce 3, 4 and FX have superior antialiasing, filtering and most likely OpenGL & D3D support.

An interesting thing about Radeon 8500 and friends is that they have Pixel Shader 1.4 support which is quite a bit superior to PS1.1 of NV GF3 and PS 1.3 of GF4Ti. Unfortunately only a few games used it. Far Cry and Doom3 will use the extra features. But of course the cards were really out of their league with those games so the advantage doesn't really exist and they will actually still be outperformed by GF4. This was apparently due to hardware flaws.

Thats correct. Unfortunately, I never had a chance to get my hands on a GF4 Ti 4x00, but I do know that they were much superior to my ATI 8500, however I clocked the card and however I optimized it with custom BIOSes... That card was a mistake 🙁

I was a Radeon 8500 guy too back in the day. Primarily because the 8500LE was so cheap and because I knew that ATI could be relied on to not make blurry output (I'd seen way too many blurry GF256/2/2MXs.) But in retrospect, GeForce 3/4 are simply better products with better support.