For many years I have been pretty heavily involved in the gaming industry. Through scores of beta tests, to assisting in the design of scalable systems for third generation MMORPGs to writing reviews and conducting interviews I’ve been in, out and around the industry since it became an industry.
Of course game graphics and system hardware have come a long way in a ridiculously short amount of time. Who remembers when 3dfx graphics cards were all the rage?
In recent years the showdown on the graphics front is between nVidia and ATI. Now nVidia has held the lead for quite some time and the weight of it has made them stagger at times. ATI, ever the stalwart competitor has put up a good fight and come up with some very good products over the years.
Being a massive nerd, I love to build my own game systems. During my last build I decided to take a shot on the latest and greatest ATI card. I had previously only purchased nVidia products as I had felt they were marginally better in performance but mostly because I knew that game developers used them in their development machines. But the RADEON 9800 Pro 256 was my choice at the time.
A choice I have regretted every single day.
Since the day I booted my newly assembled behemoth containing all of the latest and greatest gaming hardware (for that millisecond) the 3D gaming quality on this Sapphire OEM has been deplorable. Some games, the games that are more 2D based than 3D based had almost no problems, but every game that renders 3D objects has quality issues. Every single game. Now, simple model and texture games such as Zoo Tycoon 2 have the minor irritation of the occasional flashing texture. Easy to overlook and ignore and in all likelihood ATI will release a driver update to relieve this issue even more.
But games with heavy 3D, like EverQuest 2, World of Warcraft, Doom 3, and Half-Life 2 have significant problems with bad textures, broken models, running text, ad nauseam. And forget about Battlefield Vietnam, that’s just texture stew.
Sapphire tells me to talk to ATI, of course. ATI has been stringing me along with “that should be fixed in driver update X” messages for months. The store I bought it from wouldn’t take it back after the first 30 days (and who can blame them? After 30 days a used graphics card is scrap silicon to a retailer).
I had taken the last 6 weeks off of my harassment campaign for support and decided to try it once again. Just to see if I got any different kind of result. Um, yeah.
In all the time I’ve been trying to resolve this problem with ATI, not one single time has anyone asked for a screenshot of the problem despite my offering to provide them every time. In all this time not once was there ever a mention of simply replacing my defective card with a new one. I paid almost $500 for it and you can now pick that same card up for about $250. And I know it is simply my card that is defective. I’ve borrowed the exact same card from a friend who bought his from the same place I did at the same time I did and his works just fine in my machine. I’ve also tried an nVidia based card. No problems. Clearly I have a defective unit and you would think ATI could afford to replace it.
The last email I received from ATI suggested that I adjust my bios settings with things such as “Set your AGP support from 8X to 2X”, among others.
I made sure to reply: “Thank you for supporting nVidia.”
Will
