pouët.net

Sure, I will give a summary as soon as I have it!

So, that picture tells us DirectX is old, boring, outdated and should have died years ago where OpenGL is the pinnacle of awesome and is only rising to become more awesome.

Sdw:
I just installed the HD4870 (1GB model) this evening and it's better then expected!

So far I have run the following demos: Massagin, Stargazer, Inflorescence, Into the Pink, Final Audition, Ferner and Lifeforce.

I have run all of them at 1900x1200 with AA enabled. None of them showed any signs of bugs or driver problems. Almost all of them run fluently all the time. Stargazer looked really awesome! Inflorescence also looked ten times nicer compared to the video capture.

Are there any demos or intros you want me to try?

For 'Rob is Jarig' any card will do.....

Sdw:
Small update: Chaos Theory, Panic Room and Nucleophile all run perfect as well.

Thank you for testing! Sounds like I will be ordering a 4850 soon then!

I'm cooking up something to fix the shader errors (by replacing shaders at runtime). I have for instance http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=51768 and http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=51758 running (so their only problem was incorrect glsl..). What other recent (opengl) productions do we have that still doesn't run on ati?

I'd be interested to know if cannapaceus works on newer ATIs without bugs.

I will try it tonight.

ive got a 4850 at home and it is really damn fast. i stick to ATI at home because ive got nvidia at work, and i want to try and make our demos work on both. :)
the ogl compatibility isnt great, of course. quite a lot of ogl demos dont work - basically nothing by still seems to work, for example. lightwave works pretty well on it though.

Panic Room looks fucking nice at 1920 x 1200. And it ran completely fluent. Good work smash :)

hmm.. of the still demos I think it's only Passing that doesn't render correctly (but all shaders compile), while the 4ks and Seeker work fine (4850/cat8.11b).
Cannapaceus still looks more boring than intended - again everything compiles.
Btw I wonder why ppl still use the ARB glsl extension instead of the 2.0 version ;)

And just like smash I always try to have the opposite at home and work (and more or less the same toolset on both machines)

psycholns: thanks for testing. But does 'more boring than intended' mean that the version you tried had parallax maps disabled (like there was in first demoscene.tv capture) or that it's just too much for your concentration? ;)

pommak: yes now it looks like the dtv recording.. at the other 4850 I first tested on (win2003, cat 8.9) it looked very 2D and quite clean.

Just to bring some conclusion to this thread:

I bought a 4850, but had to send it back because it sounded like a fucking vacuum cleaner. Way, WAY louder than my good old 8800.
So now I'm waiting for a QUIET 'next-gen' card... :/

That's strange. My 4870 sounds like a vacuum cleaner when the fan is running at 100%. But normally it's running at maybe 10 % and during demo's/games its maybe 20% and it doesn't make any noticeable noise. Did you check the fan settings?

Just get one with a decent cooler, my gainward is very quiet (especially after modifying the fanspeed in the bios).

The card I had was a Gainward 4850.
I did adjust the fan settings, but the lowest I could set was 10% I think.

My assessment of the sound levels:



But I know I am really sensitive when it comes to sound, the rest of my machine (CPU cooler etc.) is really, really quiet.

The single slot reference cooler (actually I wasn't aware they had such) or the dual slot one also used on Golden Sample, which I was reffering to?
The latter is clearly more quiet than the 8800 references, unless there's something seriously wrong with it.
Otherwise, where did you get that vacuum cleaner, would be nice to have ;)

It was the dual slot I had, I just it because the Gainward promo texts specifically claimed that it was oh-so-quiet.
Well, maybe I got a bad one, but it was way louder than my 8800.
As it is now, I can barely hear that my computer is on when I stand more than a couple of feet away, with the 4850 I could hear it in the next room...

Obviously that is not normal :) I don't hear mine like I already told you...

Doesn't seem normal. Mine (golden sample) is running 40% at idle. With the case fans (which makes most of the noise) off and running at the default 50% I can distinguish it from my ~800 rpm cpu fan and the corsair vx550 psu fan, while it basicly disappears at 40% (ie no difference if it's spinning or not).

my solution for a noisy computer from this year on is to have log dvi- usb- and fw-cables and put it in the kitchen with two doors between it and my workplace. the cables are not cheap but it was the best investment in a long time, and much cheaper than the material to build a "silent-pc".