ATI - I loved U, but your support is never there! Now we are getting a divorse!

[Tetras]

When they are punching at a lighter weight as nVidia cards (8800GT for instance) that have been around far longer then they certainly arent viable

There is no area where they are significantly inferior (the same of which could not be said of for example, Phenom, where the power consumption and overclocking is a deal-breaking downside, lower price or not) though.. AA/AF performance does leave something to be desired.

They are decent lower end cards but simply cant compete on the level they were actually designed for

With the 2900 cards being out first ATI knew full well where it was performance wise, the 3800s weren't supposed to be aimed at a different market/price point but yes you could say the 2900 performed below expectation (and most likely it did, I have not seen enough comments by ATI to say but I'll take your word for it).

As you rightly pointed out aswell, the HIGH end ATI card only competes performance wise with mid range nVidia cards aswell.<<---Thats very poor

3870 XT is pitched (price wise) at the mid range, there it should be judged.

Thats opinion rather than fact

Yes it is but if you look at the feature set and performance of 780G in comparison to the competition it really is outstanding. I would even go further than my first comment and say it is a solid candidate for the best IGP ever released. In a recent comparison RD600 was poor; feature set wasn't great, handicapped by SB600, the DFI had a reputation for overheating and stability issues (whether that was down to ATI or DFI difficult to be certain but that only DFI picked it up must say something).

[Cosworth]

This is more like it... friendly discussion!
Perhaps if everyone (including myself) start posting here more often then perhaps we might see a better response from the ATI forum chiefs.

I have to admit that after one poor experience with ATI I was certainly hesitant to return back to them but as far bangs for bucks are concerned they are indeed good value. Hence my return to the red team with the X1950PRO which at the time were excellent value for money, especially for me as I wanted to dabble with two cards. I simply couldn't afford two nVidias with the same sort of performance at the time and most certainly didn't want an nVidia chipset motherboard either simply to have to run them.

[Blitzen]

and most certainly didn't want an nVidia chipset motherboard either simply to have to run them.

Made exclusively by (besides Skulltrail)..........

You guessed it!

ATI/AMD

[Cosworth]

the point being, having to buy a motherboard as well in order to run the cards in SLI.

[DA1745]

Well, seems like the frustration on one side or the feeling of a favorite product being attacked is being fired at each other... I don't mean to call us victims here or anything because come on its a graphics card. But the passion should not be wasted on each other. Because some will say ATI is great here & here, others will see or think the argument is faulty & on & on it will go. We basically know where the cards stand we know the pricing structures, we choose because of our personal or other experiences we know about to feel a certain way about each company's (ATI's ~ Nvidia's) cards.

I am not mad at ATI for not having a few dogs in the fight at the top (other than x2) end because there is no way i can ever justify & afford those cards anyway. Some of you can / do so your opinions & all that are different.

But i do take offense at the frustrations / driver issues that ATI has created. Someone posted that driver support was great. Wow, not my experience with them, at all. Granted I spent most of my time struggling to get their All-In-Wonder mistakes straightened out, i suppose if you just ran a straight video card and just ran display drivers your experience(s) could be greatly different and positive but I didn't buy the All-In-Wonder card from the shelf that said "buy all of these cards with a huge amount of time to waste, endless patience, and the response to all technical questions will be "we can't reproduce that problem" and "suggest you un-install the drivers and re-install" ...and we reserve the right to completely take out the parts of the software you liked and worked well & when that goes terribly wrong... we'll drop the product support all together".

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I spend a lot of time on a board called Slickdeals. OMG the last month or more its almost been a daily or every other day occurrence to see one of the front page deals some version of Nvidia 8800 of all flavors, 9600, 9800... The prices after rebates are very tempting but since I don't really know which one I'd get yet as I'm looking to go from my 19" monitor to a 32-37" LCD display (prices on those R just really nice) and from the sound of things i can afford to wait because the market is flooded with cards, more nvidia graphics cards are due out this summer & prices or rebate deals should continue as they fight over fence sitters to entice us to spend our credit.

I support AMD/ATI secretly. I'm into RED or something that I just can't define. (Would be funny to see a well crafted psychological blind study to see if their was something to the GREEN VS RED thing that made me drawn to the ATI line before I knew what a GPU was ). I just feel like if I get another email from ATI saying that's a Sapphire problem talk to them & Sapphire tells me you have to talk to ATI about that, i might just snap and drive around Canada with a trunk full of pop pops and find out WTF is the reason they think its ok to treat customers the way they do.

[CooperXS]

Since when you can find official ATI support on the forums?

support.ati.com that's where you should be posting your issues.

[DA1745]

Originally Posted by CooperXS

Since when you can find official ATI support on the forums?

support.ati.com that's where you should be posting your issues.

Oh the answers are even better over there....such as we are no longer supporting your product. Thanks for buying it a few months back AIW 800XT & AIW x1900 but ...MMC 9.16 will be the last software update we will provide no further service etc.

[shaithis]

I am starting to get the feeling that AMD will either withdraw from the gfx card market or just focus on entry and budget level cards.

WTB: New competition for nVidia