There's a few problems with ATI though. For instance, I have a 6800 now because my old 9700 Pro card decided to spontaneously combust taking half my computer with it. ATI's tech support put me on hold for 45 minutes on a long distance call to Canada because they have no 1-800 number, and then told me that because it was an "act of God" it wasn't covered by warranty and thusly, I would have to pay $75 to get the card "refurbished." As if the scorched thing could be "refurbished." Plus, they seem to have *serious* precision issues. If you load up EVE with an ATI card for instance, you will get strange jaggies where the intersection of curved objects occurs. Since this accounts for approximately 100% of the objects in EVE, you see odd jaggies everywhere. (And I'm not referring to the sort of jaggies that FSAA fixes. These are BIG jaggies. The old S3 cards used to do the same thing.) My new 6800 card does not have this problem. Halflife 2 runs just fine on it. Between HL2 and EVE, I'm *very* happy with my 6800, and frankly, after all of my experiences with ATI tech support. That wasn't the only time -- there was also the time when I had to call them up because supposedly, their driver caused an incompatibility with my new LCD monitor -- have you ever heard of driver incompatibilities with LCD monitors? Neither had I. Apparently, neither had ATI. Sony tech support on the other hand quite helpfully explained that ATI's drivers have a setting for diagonal sync. As well as horizontal sync and vertical sync. Apparently some versions of ATI's driver came with diagonal sync on by default. This causes LCD monitors to display a horrible bunch of who-know-what. Sony helped me uninstall the driver, defaulting to normal VGA, they sent me a hack to blow away all of ATI's driver settings (subsequent installations of ATI drivers reuse the old settings) and then I reinstalled, which worked. But please note that ATI was completely unaware of this problem. But Sony was, and it wasn't even their product.
I don't think it's unreasonable for me to respond by never buying another ATI product again. _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
