Just got a Radeon 9700 Pro

[JimmiG 244]

I just sold my Geforce3 Ti500 and got a Radeon 9700 Pro (Connect3D).The rest of my system: AthlonXP 1900+, 512MB PC2100 DDR, Epox 8KHA+ KT266A mobo, 120GB Western Digital "SE" 7200 RPM driveFirst impressions:FS2002 looks sweet with 6x FSAA and 16X Anisotropic filtering :D This is my new default setting for FS2002, at a resolution of 1024x768 (could probably go higher but then I wouldn't get 100 Hz). With my GF3, the settings that worked the best were 2x AA and Level4 Anisotropic filtering. The image quality improvement is significant.FS2002 plays much smoother. While it still bogs down at major airports/detailed cities (CPU limited), it's now extremely smooth most of the time. There's almost no FPS difference between no FSAA and 4x FSAA and only a small performance difference between 4x AA and 6X AA.With 6X AA, there is a subtle image quality improvement over 4x AA. The horizon looks more natural and the shapes of mountains and hills, as well as the aircraft, are more defined. Also the cowling in VC mode looks much better.It doesn't do AA on alpha textures, so if you're using the high detail replacement autogen trees, they will still display texture noise, but it's not that noticable and seems to be less pronounced than with the GF3.Texture blurries are a thing of the past. While blurry textures still do exist, and pop up from time to time, the textures reload in a matter of seconds, where it would take up to half a minute for them to become sharp with the GF3. Having 128MB of ultra-fast memory on the card, hooked up to a 256-bit bus, pushing almost 20GB/sec of data through the pipeline sure helps :-lol3DMark, I scored just over 12k 3DMarks (12200) with normal settings. Cranking up FSAA to 4X dropped the scores to about 9700 3DMarks which is downright amazing. In 6X AA mode, the score dropped to about 8800 3DMarks which is very impressive considering the amount of samples it is taking before rendering the final image. My old Geforce3 got about 8300 3DMarks and that's with no FSAA!Games like Unreal Tournament 2003, Mafia and Morrowind are now fully playable in 4x AA mode, where as the GF3 would struggle with those very demanding titles.If you're looking for the ultimate videocard right now, you're looking for the 9700 Pro. Will be interesting to see how Nvidia stacks up when they finally get their next-generation card out February 2003.Some people have been worried about ATI's drivers. Let me tell you that so far I've not had one single problem with them. No lockups or glitches at all. I can't guarantee that they'd work this great for everyone but if you uninstall your old drivers and install the ATI drivers correctly it's very likely that you'll have a flawless experience.

[Guest Stratus_Fractus]

Mind posting a pic?

[Guest]

Jimmi; If your monitor will handle it, crank up that res to 16x12x32. When I did for the first time, I think I drooled on my keyboard. I run 4xAA & 16xAF at that res and wasn't able to notice a difference between 4xAA & 6xAA pic wise. I too have a slight twinkle in the tree tops. Thanks for the explanation as to why. Never could figure that out. Only the trees. Hardly noticeable, but there.

[JimmiG 244]

Yes I do, I'm too busy flying :-lolNo seriously (really!), watch out in the screenshot forum today or tomorrow and I'll get some pictures posted.

[JimmiG 244]

My monitor can handle 1600x1200 but only at 75Hz which is tiring to look at for long periods of time. I must say that it looks good though, sharper than at 1024x768.Higher resolutions also reduce the flickering on autogen trees. Basically it's a limitation of the FS2002 graphics engine, which was never meant for such high resolution autogen trees and never implemented mipmapping for them. I think this is fixed in CFS3 so hopefully it should look fine in FS2004 as well.

[Guest The Ancient Brit]

JimmiG,I wish my experience with the ATI Radeon 9700 card were the same as yours. The longest time FS2K2 has run on my system is five minutes before either a system crash or a screen lockup (requiring a reboot of course) occurs. I have now run out of ideas. I have tried upgrading the Radeon drivers (uninstalling the original drivers beforehand) all to no avail. I have tried reinstalling FS2K2 but still the lockups and screen freezes. I have run FS2K2 at all sorts of settings but the result is the same, disaster within five minutes or less. I had almost identical 3DMarks score as yours with FSAA to 4XThe system is a Pentium 4 at 2.53 GHz with 1.5 Gig of Ram and four 120Gig hard drives configured with a raid controller a 22 iiyama Vision Master pro512, Ten fans cool the system (fortunately they don

[Guest JonP01]

And I hope you have a quality power supply to match. That is one gas-guzzling PC you have there.

[Guest]

Didn't THG or somebody do a review of the 9700 where the heat sink didn't fully contact the GPU? The symptoms were the same as yours. Pull out your card and see if you can detect any gap; it may be that your drivers are fine but you're overheating.

[Guest The Ancient Brit]

JonPO1,I have a 550 Watt power supply, my dealer is like me, a belt and braces man.Dennis,Thanks for your suggestion, I will try it and have a looksee. That the card works for prolonged periods is certain. Recently I spent several hours sorting jpegs into folders ready for burning on to a CD and I noticed that when changing from list display to thumbnail display, a full screen of 70 thumbnails were displayed faster than my eyes could reach the bottom of the screen. The card also handled the 3DMark benchmark without any problem.I will try sitting at Meigs for a half an hour and see what happens. I think there may be some oddball conflict between the card and FS2K2 going on in the background that is causing me such grief and unhappiness!Denis. The Ancient Brit.

[Guest]

DenisI have the same problems with my new Radeon. Only the symptoms are harder to pin down. It will sometimes work for 2 mins and sometimes for up to 10 mins. I have tried new 4 in 1 drivers for mobo, latest card drivers, all settings I can think of etc etc etc.In other modes the card will run with no problems, only in Fs2002 does it get nasty and throw it's rattle out of the pram.I have replaced my ti4600 and put the Radeon in a draw awaiting a solution somewhere, sometime.Athlon, 512MB xp pro etc etc etcPlease let me know if you find out what is going on.... and I will youRegardsJohn

[JimmiG 244]

Do you guys properly uninstall the drivers for your old card? I recommend formating and reinstalling, or at least using Detonator Destroyer (if your previous card was Nvidia). Just uninstalling the drivers from Add/Remove programs will not always get rid of everything.

[John_Tavendale 453]

I had a Radeon 9700 and nothing but troubles. I think it was user error rather than a bad card :-lolMight get myself another one day soon

[Guest]

hi john do you have hotmail messenger?

[Guest]

yesI find all files that relate to ATI or the file number, Reg edit as wellall done in safe mode vga

[Guest The Ancient Brit]

John,I am much happier today since there seem to grounds for cautious optimism. Having uninstalled and reinstalled both the graphics drivers and FS2K2 for the third time, I departed Meigs and was still flying 30 minutes later, a personal best time with the Radeon at that point. Pushing my luck I left the flight continuing on its way and went out for the remainder of the morning. Three hours later FS2K2 was still running. I am using the new ATI Catalyst drivers. I did a simple uninstall with the video card drivers.I was running FS2K2 with the default settings (Yea gods they are awful) exactly as installed with no add-ons of any description. I have now changed the screen settings to 1024x768x32 and am running with the menu bar showing and I have had no problems. The next stage is add utilities, fltrec81, fsscreen, autosave and fsuipc. If that works then I start to crank the FSK2K to maximum as I had them when running an Athlon 1800+ and a Geforce 3 card.Denis. The Ancient Brit.