nikthebak
16th January 2003, 20:19
I'm in a middle of purchasing a display adapter to replace my old cruddy Radeon 7200. I've decided to stick with ATI and with my limited budget options, I have reduced the number of possible options to two.
My options are both Hercules 3D Prophets, 9000 Pro 128 MB DDR and 8500LE 128 MB DDR. The 8500LE costs 143 € and the 9000 costs 178 €. So much for ATI's pricing policy, the old flagship seems to be cheaper than the new budget model!
So, which do you think would be a better card? I've read all of the reviews, it seems pretty obvious that the ye olde 8500 wipes the floor with 9000 as far as non-Pixel Shader(tm)(r)-performance is concerned. However, the 9000 has some special gimmicks that might prove to be useful in the future, namely (excerpts from Hercules' home page)
FULLSTREAM™ technology for accelerated hardware de-blocking of RealVideo™ video streams
Hardware HDTV decoder (iDCT & Motion Compensation), MPEG-2 decoder, Adaptive Per Pixel De-Interlacing
I couldn't care less about RealMedia deblocking, but some say that it could be hax0red to work with MPEG4. The same goes for the HDTV decoder. Hardly any processor can decode HDTV MPEG4-streams, so additional processing power from the display adapter would be great indeed.
So do you think that it's possible to use ATI's hardware for assisted software MPEG4 decoding in the future? And would you think that these features justify a 35 € higher price tag and half the performance vs. 8500LE ?
My options are both Hercules 3D Prophets, 9000 Pro 128 MB DDR and 8500LE 128 MB DDR. The 8500LE costs 143 € and the 9000 costs 178 €. So much for ATI's pricing policy, the old flagship seems to be cheaper than the new budget model!
So, which do you think would be a better card? I've read all of the reviews, it seems pretty obvious that the ye olde 8500 wipes the floor with 9000 as far as non-Pixel Shader(tm)(r)-performance is concerned. However, the 9000 has some special gimmicks that might prove to be useful in the future, namely (excerpts from Hercules' home page)
FULLSTREAM™ technology for accelerated hardware de-blocking of RealVideo™ video streams
Hardware HDTV decoder (iDCT & Motion Compensation), MPEG-2 decoder, Adaptive Per Pixel De-Interlacing
I couldn't care less about RealMedia deblocking, but some say that it could be hax0red to work with MPEG4. The same goes for the HDTV decoder. Hardly any processor can decode HDTV MPEG4-streams, so additional processing power from the display adapter would be great indeed.
So do you think that it's possible to use ATI's hardware for assisted software MPEG4 decoding in the future? And would you think that these features justify a 35 € higher price tag and half the performance vs. 8500LE ?