How Bad was AMDs First Graphics Card?
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- Опубликовано: 14 июл 2024
- Hello everyone and welcome back to another Budget Build Episode where today we're taking a look at AMDs 2900XT, a card that has a rather troubled history, being the first card AMD actually made, and one that has echoed some of the issues with their reputation for years to come, but in reality was it that bad (in some ways yes), and how far have AMD come since...
Intro - 0:00
Why we're looking at the 2900XT - 0:15
The History Part 1 - Delays and AMD Buying ATI... 0:54
The History Part 2 - The Xbox 360 and Nvidia Competition 3:05
The History Part 3 - Features and Delays 4:15
The Specs - 5:58
The System and Drivers - 7:00
The Benchmarks! - 7:48
Grand Theft Auto Online and Driver Utilisation - 18:40
Emulation - 20:43
Overclocking Woes - 21:25
The Drivers Comparison - 22:20
A Huge Rant on AMD Leaving this Card Abandoned - 24:38
Conclusion - 27:00
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Twitter: / budget_builds_
Specs:
GPU: Radeon 2900XT
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
RAM: 32GB DDR4 RAM
OS: Windows 10 64 bit 
Наука
Another big thank you to our channel artist with some more Retro Radeon Renders: ruclips.net/user/shortsH3Lo-yvjD4A?si=Py9WdrNBnVkSl6Yb
Xbox 360 hd grapphics? PC's had way better graphics for the entire time computers existed
You've tried the alternative drivers from amernime?
one other tip, try linux for these old cards, the opensouce drivers totally destroy amd's own on these cards... i recommend testing Solus Linux for example, i just link it to my games lib from windows in steam and such and. away we go.
solus has steam, proton and the rest in the software center ;)
Can you do a video on the HD3850? And then the HD4830/50/70? I owned all of them. I'd be really interested to see/hear you test them. Cheers.
@@JohnChrysostom101 Yes we know. He is talking about being impressed with the GFX the 360 was pumping out at the time. I remember being awestruck seeing Gears Of War for the first time on a HDTV. Ever played Forza Horizon 1? It looks fantastic even to this day. The ED-Ram was what enabled them to include 4xMSAA and it looks great.
Hearing "way back" and "2018" in the same sentence hurt way more than it should have...
I could hear 'way back', '1983' and 'Apple ][e' and be fine with that. They said future generations would be natural PC experts. What a joke. The proliferation of computer tech made more recent generations dumber, not smarter. But the funniest thing is that remembering 2018 makes you feel old when you're one of those PC illiterate kids I'm talking about.
@@Lurch-Bot
"I am 12 years old, you are 80.
Get a life."
@@Lurch-Bot shut up old boomer
2006 seemed like such an optimistic time for tech. now 18 years later things are kind of bleak
That can be said for the WHOLE world for EVERYTHING.
pre-2008 everything was looking great. XD
When the world reached the peak of everything there is no more up , then the only way is down
😂
I don't know what you mean. With artificial intelligence taking over everything within the next few years. The outlook for tech has never been better.
everything had its "blooming" age, but in the end only the successful ones make it
Should also mention, AMD/ATI abandoned the X800 and X1800/X1900 series cards and everything associated with them fairly fast also. It was kind of a trend for them back then to do this.
Atleast the final drivers for them work in all honesty, I used an X800 for years.
Yeah, I had a laptop once (to sell on) that had a Core 2 Duo and X1000 series GPU, and there were literally no working graphics drivers for Windows 10. But on Windows 7, where drivers existed... perfect! AMD and ATI did a horrific job with drivers with their older GPUs.
Kind of sad because DX9 was still king at the time. I imagine a revamped x1900 series would have been adored by all CoD players because ATI Tray tools was becoming a big deal.
If i remember correctly the cards sucked at that time because of patent disputes . It tickles my memory that a key engineer left for nividia and he held key patents or a patent hold didnt like the sale and with drew the use of the patents . Either way Nividia ended up with the patents and the rest is history
Considering this was around the same time NVIDIA introduced CUDA, yeah I'd say this is about when it all went wrong for Radeon as a GPU brand. They never recovered from the 8000 series as far as the market share graph is concerned.
I remember making the best idea I ever had getting a 8800GT 512MB card when they came out, so solid a performer back then.
@@UKVampy Got myself a 8800gts (640mb) one when it was launched. Served me for years.
Not true the HD4000, HD5000 and HD6000 series AMD had 48-54% GPU market share. Things started to change with the gtx 900 series and went bad during the gtx 1000 series vs rx 400/500 series, because AMD was stuck on the vastly inferior 14nm from Global Foundry, while Nvidia was using probably the most dominant process node of all time, TSMC's 16nm.
@@badass6300 this
My 4830 was faster than a 9600GT for less money. 2xxx was shit. Sure. HD3xxx wasnt that bad, but 4xxx just dumbstered nvidia. 5xxx, again. Actually what went really wrong is that people thought amd is shit, just because they heard about it. Fanboys
3:17 turn hte screw counter-clockwise first, until you feel the thread "click" a little. Now start screwing into the opposite direction. That way, you'll always find the start of the thread easily.
Good point, I always thought people did this automatically but I guess not.
I expected Vega lookig at the title.
That thing payed itself 20 times over when mining showed up ^^
Vega VII comes to mind. It's unfortunate they don't have the answer for RTX 20xx series
Vegas were actually good.
I was thinking fury lol
Huh? Vega 56/64 crushed Nvidia. One of the best 1440p cards for the money. Now a 5700XT for 150 bucks is the better choice but botha re craty good. Sometimes u get a vega 64 for 60 bucks tho, then its a no brainer
A year and a half after the 2900 XT hit the market AMD released the HD 4830 for $130 and was over 50% faster with less than half the power consumption. Many of us bought them with rebates to drop it to $99 at launch.
Can’t forget the Legendary HD4890
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial I had a HD 4850, it was great
I realy liked the old ATI cards, but also kinda forgot i used Omega drivers (third party).
Jesus christ I've never actually thought about it. Now you've just reminded me of Omega drivers and it has never occured to me that those were 3rd party drivers since I was a wee boy playing on my pc. Still on AMD though :D
Regardless of what ATI/AMD would have put out in 2007, the actual main take away is that for a very brief moment, console gamers had a superior experience over a high end PC, until Nvidia came along and shut that shit down with the Geforce 8 series. :P As is though, back then I was using a Radeon x850 XT AGP card during my first jump into AM2 with the Athlon 64x2. I went from that card to the X1950 XT AGP. But after the first Phenoms were released, I ended up doing a Phenom X3 Crossfire setup with two HD 3850 cards. I looked at buying two used HD 2900 cards, but it just would not have made sense due to the used market prices on them and the heat they generated. I did end up setting up a Athlon 64 FX-62 SLI system also for Physx stuff, and my first GPU pair in it was two 8800 GTS, before swapping out for two GTX 280.
HEY! I LOVE my 7900 GTO 😛
Except that 7th Gen games were all locked at sub par 30 fps, even back then PC gaming standards were never that low
@@chillhour6155 Thats not exactly true. Many games were, some were not (Forza, Ninja Gaiden 2, Bayonetta and a chunk of others were not if I recall right). Same applies to PS3 also. And honestly, I could care less about the frame cap if the fps was mostly consistent back then. I was using a pipeline/shader unlocked Geforce 6800 AGP during the Xbox 360 launch, so I was used to running stuff at around 30FPS, like NFS Carbon and Company of Heroes.
What mattered a lot, for me, was the hardware like the triple core Xenon with six threads, and modern feature set the 360 brought to the table, along with the exclusive titles like COD 3, and titles that looked better on Xbox 360 like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (I had a Ageia Physx card and still felt the game looked and ran better on 360).
For a brief moment 360 was the only hardware in town featuring Unified shader architecture and 3 core/6 thread processor. That was not present on the consumer PC side until the Geforce 8000 series and later Radeon features in this video, along with C2Q and Phenoms.
BUT, and this is a BIG BUT, I did not care for how the 360 cooked itself to death. That was literally why I never got one for myself. We only got my son a slim model in late 2010 after we were sure the red ring issues were over. But for myself, I stuck to pc gaming. I have not had a modern console during its retail life since the Dreamcast.
I've never used terascale gpus under windows, but I did under GNU / Linux for many years, and the open source drivers (radeon ddx + r600g) were great for their time. Easily the best end user experience with open source drivers on the platform until GCN support finally started coming together years after GCN 1.0 launched.
So it's interesting to hear that they sucked under Windows when they were my preference under GNU / Linux for ages.
AMDs issue with GPUs has never been the hardware its always the drivers, its nice to see how even the RX 470 still holds up today but when it launched the drivers were bad.
There isn't more issues with drivers than nvidias. Did you try any intel GPU?
@@yx8074there is a lot of problems with AMD drivers. Even for gamers only, i tried to run older games on AMD, and it was dogshit. A lot of missing files, missing dlls. I did a fresh instal windows with C++ installation, never been able to play the Settlers 2.
I also did a fresh instal windows with Nvidia, c++ versions was the same files. The game just openned and runs smooth.
@@yx8074it is. Even from gaming only PC they dont stand Nvidia Drivers. I had a RX 580 and i never manage to play old games like The Settlers 2. I even tried to do fresh windows instal, all drivers, C++ versions, missing dlls.
I bought a 4060 recently and just made a fresh windows instal and same C++ files i used before, the game just opens wand works.
literal AMD finewine
Tbf Terascale 2 was left in a much better state than this though. Terascale 1 never competed with Fermi, as the HD 5870 had already been out for quite a few months when the GTX 480 appeared. AMD still dropped Terascale 2 two years before Fermi got dropped, and without the rudimentary Dx12 support Fermi had, but then Dx12 wouldn't have worked well on Terascale 2 either way, because it doesn't lend itself to Dx12 (or Vulkan for that matter) architecturally. Terascale 3 could've been supported though.
I have a BFG 9800 GX2 in my collection, I would love to lend this card to you for you to explore it on the channel.
Neat card! One of the few truly " dual graphics card " - cards.
@00zero557A it is! It's essentially a sandwich of 2 9800 boards squashed together.. it does run HOT and I mean HOT.. upwards of 91c under load on both chips
I actually have one somewhere. No clue if it works though.
@@OneLife69- don't worry, gtx 480 ran hotter out of the box and whole chip series had that feature. I think it could hit 105c under high load and it supposedly was "fine".
Pretty sure that nvidia 4xx series were the hottest cards ever made so far. I'd like to see how they are right now.
edit:
Was the GTX480 that Bad?
ruclips.net/video/PbLuRPgzlLY/видео.html
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial If modern drivers make it viable, then a video could make sense. BUT if you basically rehash your video without showing any new titles, then video might not have an audience.
I mean, if it can run some less ram heavy popular modern game, it might be impressive to see that.
vram is a huge issue with modern games, and ini config tutorial fits more to that Spanish dude that had tutorials for games that could run on ultra low end systems at 24+ fps. Too bad the dude sold his soul to brilliant, haven't seen any new english videos, was great "competitor" to you.
The BIG problem with Terascale wasn't that it wasn't powerful enough to keep up its that AMD's drivers struggled to deal with the fact most games PC games were not that well optimized put its power to any real use. Basically games had to be capable of constantly giving the GPU multiple things to do and the hardware would shuffle between what was most optimal based on what resources are available, if a game isn't giving multiple batches of draw calls at a time so the card fails to live up to expectations but when the game is doing that it was a powerhouse, the rub of all of this is Microsoft was meant to fix this with DirectX 10 and did fix it with the Xbox 360's version of DirectX.
Terrascale 3 mostly fixed this but still depended on game developers to implement efficient draw call batching and multi threading the GPU workload and AMD updating drivers for game spesific fixes. Thats where the Hardware Scheduler of the GCN cards came from and the AMD Radeon fine aged wine came from, what Mantle showed was possible and why DirectX12 and Vulkan were so badly needed.
Nvidia had exactly the same goals with Tesla based GPUs but they relied on you having 4 or more CPU cores to have the driver software do the draw call batching on the fly, it was part of the reason AMD dominated in a lot of DirectX 12 and Vulkan games and Nvidia lagged behind for a while but still won if the game was DirectX 11. Funnily enough a GPU bound DX11 game on something as modern as a 1060 on a dual core processor will run slower than on a quad core where as the GCN equivalent would run about the same on dual or quad core.
*DON`T SELL IT*
? I have 3 I literally cant sell.
All the DX10 cards where an awful mistake a path chosen for profit that affects us today. That includes NV's. The reason they existed was to bridge the gap and make a useful jack of all trades card for both gfx and enterprise which lead to what we have today. These first gen cards could often be beaten by DX9.0c cards in DX9 games and so few DX10 games were ever made it was pointless to grab one till the dx11 era to upgrade, if you already had a 7xxx or x19xx.
I'm so glad someone else knows this!
The cost of producing different architectures for enterprise computing and for general usage is clearly not viable, otherwise all manufacturers would be doing it. The costs involved in developing and manufacturing modern GPUs and CPUs is mindblowing. There are always compromises, whatever the technology or product... it's inevitable. Businesses have to balance any number of factors to remain solvent and competitive. It's what gives us the luxury of having a choice of what to buy.
It's been noted elsewhere online that AMD had issues with integrating ATI into the larger corporation. That happens a lot in the tech world, usually to the detriment of the one or more of the parent corporation's product lines. I can still remember the absolute nightmare of working with HP as a US based laptop & desktop warranty repair services provider after HP purchased Compaq. The whole Compaq & DEC merger hadn't happened too long before that which only made everything worse.
In my personal experience the driver situation did get better with the Radeon 4000 series of cards. I had a 4850 back then which was pretty solid in Vista and later in Win 8 (had 2 OEM machines that were purchased at the worst times for Windows!) AMD's drivers have gotten a lot better over the years, but they're competing directly against Nvidia who's drivers have been outstanding since the mid 2000s.
These days I think AMD's biggest issues with GPU sales are a lack of a true high end GPU to compete with Nvidia with (obviously) as well as a lack of a truly spectacular mid-range card. In the 7000 series there's nothing priced less than $250 new and the 6000 series cards below the 6600 are all gimped in some major way. Nvidia can afford negative press on gimping their lower end cards, AMD can't IMO.
I personally own a RX 6600XT which I was able to purchase in the summer of 2022 for almost $40 under MSRP at a time when pretty much all Nvidia cards were running 25-50% above their MSRPs. Driver wise that card is quite good, but only about 95% as good as the 1060 3GB and 750ti I had before it as the drivers for both of those cards were usually outstanding!
You say lack of true high end, but the 6900xt was on par with the 3090, the R9 290x was a great card
IMHO the times AMD/ATI messed up was not releasing terascale a year sooner, and not releasing rdna1 2 years sooner. the result was GCN sticking around for too long, 2011-2019 was all gcn, in that time nVidia went from Fermi(fail) > Kepler (arguably worse than gcn) > Maxwell (better than GCN) > Turing
Pascal was Maxwell but on 14nm steroids, pretty sure we could have had a samsung 14nm 1080ti 12gb in 2015/2016 for $1499 if amd was competitive enough
AMD should have released bulldozer 2 years sooner also, FX9980 vs I7 980X would have been 14900k vs 5700x but in reverse.
I think the big problem was GloFo 28nm being delayed, then again GloFo 14nm.
I wonder, if AMD went fabless for 65/45nm then WSA was for 28nm ie GCN cards + FX cpus, then jumped to samsung 16/14/12nm for Polaris/ vega, would they have released on time in 2015/2016
I had a 2900 pro card back in the day and that could be unlocked to XT. The card would run Bioshock just fine and crysis with a mix of Med/High settings. Not bad really and was ok as a cheaper option.
This card is about as good according to techpoweredup as the 59 watt 67 dollar budget card 4670 that launched in 2008. AMD really messed up with this card and did really well with the 4000 series. To see a budget card perform as well that soon after.
"Only fixed with driver updates that these cards never got" - I wonder if it would perform significantly better under Linux with Mesa, since there've likely been significant updates. May be limited to dx9 and opengl3.3 stuff though, since it won't be able to do dxvk.
I would love to see the performance difference under Linux. My experience with my RX560 under Windows vs Linux is that games run better in Linux.
Someone in the community a while back added Vulkan support to the R600 series, I bet the card would be in a far better state on Linux.
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 Yeah, i've been following the Terakan development, since i have a few 6970s and 6950s. Still decent cards for 720p gaming, and vulkan really opens that up for proton and more modern casual titles.
You really need to do a "Top Gear-esque" video series about older cars along side this main channel.
I can only imagine how much fun and agitation you'd get from doing it, and if your mid video rant is anything to go by it would be massively popular.
Doom might have been released in 1993 but Budget-Builds Official is Eternal!
I think the problem in Black Skylands was that if it is there, that FSR was active. Not supported GPUs like the 600 Series from Nvidia will just show a black screen
A few historical fixes, the Tessellator in the 2900XT was not D3D compliant. Microsoft wouldn't finalize the spec until the Radeon HD 5000 series came along. ATi/AMD had their own developer tool to implement their tessellator but due to the poor performance of the 2900XT, no developer that I know of implemented it. The Radeon HD 5000 series as the first GPU capable of tessellation. nVIDIA did not have a GPU capable of this at the time. nVIDIA's answer would be an even more powerful Geometry processor capable of extreme levels of tessellation performance (beyond what was even visible to the Human Eye in terms of image quality difference). nVIDIA would go on to attach obscene levels of tessellation to their "The way it's meant to be played" and other such titles in order to win benchmarks against AMD. AMD would answer with a tessellation slider in their driver to fix that in those titles. Eventually AMD would go on to implement a very high performance Geometry processor of their own negating nVIDIA implementing obsene levels of tesselation in their sponsored titles. Once that performance edge went away, those titles disappeared. In some of them, even the area bellow ground, that a player could not see, were being heavily tesselated.
We're seeing the same with RT today. We also saw the same with PhysX. All of those technologies have or will largely die once nVIDIA's edge is lost. CPUs have replaced GPUs for Physics. Tessellation is now down to reasonable levels. Adaptive Sync beat G-Sync. Etc.
I remember I had a 2600XT and it was my first gaming graphics card. I asked my friends what card to get and somehow ended up with it, even though they all deny that they ever recommended it.
It was a terrible card, but was absolutely amazing when I got it. Compared to the crappy entry-level or onboard graphics I was used to, it was like a whole new world. I upgraded to a 4850 a couple years later, which restarted the amazing feeling.
terrascales magic is in windows xp only , i love the hd 2000-6000 cards on xp , i make ultra versatile xp system setups in these use cases they launch 3d mark 2000 on xp flawlessly , they play a ton of windows 98 games on windows xp with these cards with the right drivers they are very valuable
Shame as they’re a DX10 card, but the do seem to manage very well in DX9
According to most people, TeraScale 2 (HD 5000/HD 6000) was trash, all of the 2010 and 2011 iMacs and MacBooks with these GPUs died. As a 2010 iMac owner I can confirm that this is true. TeraScale/TeraScale 1 was supposedly good though
@@charliesretrocomputingTeraScale 2 was great on the PC side of things though.
@@TheDemocrab good point, I don’t know much about the PCs of the 2000s, just the Macs. 😂
@@charliesretrocomputingApple just put them in chassis that couldn’t cool them right and genuinely got a few bad batches of silicon
I had one of these back in the day. It was absolutely brilliant in the winter.
It also seems this card is haunting your video, as you've got some odd audio stutters in a couple of locations. Probably nothing I'd reupload for, but worth mentioning.
Heh I was stuck with an Fx5200 on a desktop and 8400 GSM on a laptop at the time :D Wouldn't have minded one of these bad boys to be honest with you.
I feel you! I built my first pc with an 8500gs, lol
lmfao 11 seconds ago. Never seen a that before.
That's what she said!
Glad you changed this from the community post from ATI to AMD.
This is an ATI card. They only adopted the AMD branding with the HD 6000 series in 2011
@@Txm_Dxr_Bxss You're missing the point, ATI was gone at this point, it was simply AMD using the patents and naming.
I love that you're not just commentating recorded footage, you're essentially doing a let's play and go in-depth on the performance
People are just biased to NVIDIA, GCN 1.0 and 2.0 was mutch better then Kepler, people still got NVIDIA.
I still run my old C2QE/R9 380 pc even though i recently got R5 5600/RX5700XT for daily because it really does 99% of stuff I use pc for. Honestly its only recent games i boot up the ryzen for, and music production.
I love how RUclips subtitles always writes "Terror Scales" instead of terascale 😂
GTA IV is still borked to this day on pc. I can get around 80fps with a RTX 3070.
yeah in dx9 but with dxvk it works much better.
Early gang rise up, at first i thought i was watching another video of yours from years ago 😂
I had their last true flagship card. The Radeon HD 1950XTX 768MB VRAM. It was a night and day difference from any other GPU I had at the time including a GTX FX 5950 Ultra. I was playing Oblivion and I had a GT 5700. Too slow. Went to a 5950, getting better but still not there. Went to an HD 1300. The 5950 was faster. Finally dumped em all and got the fastest and most expensive card in CompUSA that day, the HD 1950 XTX. An OC version with a beefy cooling system. First triple slot card I had ever laid eyes on let alone owned. I loved it. I could not believe how beautiful Oblivion looked maxxed out at 1280 x 1024. The walls inside the spires in Oblivion itself breathed. Something I never noticed before. They actually were animated to look like the spire was a living thing. I loved it. That card made that possible.
The 2900xt was actually a pretty good card, a very standard generational leap, the 8800gtx was just exceptional. AMD hasn't really had many bad releases, it's only whenever nvidia releases an exceptional generation that it's viewed as "bad".
The 2900xt was a massive increase in complexity and they had a lot of issues sorting drivers out on launch, this is made a lot worse by it being dropped for the highly simplified version of it, the hd 3870 that was released very shortly after, so many outstanding bugs never got fixed since getting a competitive version out the door was all hands on deck.
The 2900xt with modern drivers in linux is actually really good to this day.
No it was terrible. AMD DECREASED the number of TMUs to 16 while making them FP16 capable, but most games did not use that. Then then removed the HW AA resolve mechanism, making MSAA ridiculously slow, so slow that when you used it the card was noticeably slower than its own predecessor in the form of Radeon X1950XTX. It was terrible. The lack of usable MSAA also made the whole 512-bit bus useless.
The 3000 series were the same thing, just a die-shrink so they could be made cheaper. The 4000 series increased the number of TMUs to 40 and added the AA resolve back and these were decent cards, they started the last great price-war, GPU became really cheap back then, tho, the Software side of things with AMD was still murky at best.
The later Terrascale cards, tho praised for price and efficiency had a lot of issues. Terrible tessellation and DX11performance on the 5000 and 6000 cards, SW issues with not working AF and Vsync state enforcement, and also cheats when it came to texture filtering (visible binilear-ditherning lines on some metallic/shiny surfaces that looked OK on Fermi) made them kinda a compromise solution.
@@Lady_Zenith Hardware AA resolve was actually in the card, but disabled on launch due to issues. In theory, had the 8800gtx not been as far ahead as it was, they could have brought this feature back in.
Tesselation on HD 5000 was fine, the only issue was that it was like RT today, nvidia released the 400 series nearly a year later and had stronger tesselation, so they pushed affiliated studios to crank tesselation way past what was necessary. DX11 performance was fine on HD 5000, it held pretty close to the 480 despite coming out nearly a year earlier.
The 6000 series was not the advancement people wanted though, it was more of a refresh than a new gen.
Sitting in middle England in my tent, on my cycle trip, it's passing it down. But a budget build video always makes me happy :)
How does it compare to the gallium r600 driver (with both nine and wined3d)?
i know these cards are kind of terrible but i personaly love them. Just bought my thrid one yesterday funnily enough. Now one may ask why three? i got the first one because of your original video on it (just fell in love with the red transparent shroud with the flame prints). after that i decided since i had no use for it to build the "ultimate" 2007 windows xp machine around it. about 150 bucks of retro parts aquired over the internet later i realised the only thing missing now was crossfire, so after the second gpu turned out to be fried the obvious move was to buy a third one 😂
GTA Online has a simplified physics system vs single player mode, there are some graphical reductions too, LOD, render distance, NPC movement etc, it is lighter to run until you hit a high player count so for older cards it typically runs better, its honestly amazing how bad GTAO on the 360 ran overtime but considering the hardware, its a damn miracle it even kept up..i think the heat this card has sat at for a long time has hurt the core and memory since they bleed the heat throughout the PCB horrendously bad. These once overclocked were the fermi/pentium 4 of its time..this is a key showing of the poor early PWM fan curves being so poor, Nvidia cards would suddenly screm at 86C, these cards would just cook and cook. They require a very thick paste to tame them..for example, i have one with a passive cooler that full bore ran almost 110C (curious me wanted to see where it tapped out) but in games it sat at the high 80s you saw on this air cooled card, which ran in the mid 60s with a tickled fan curve, it didn't take a lot, an earlier ramp made a world of difference. The pump out on cheap paste is insane.
I miss the days when amd/ati's worst mistakes were just trying to compete against a strong nvidia generation. Vs today where they're almost constantly shooting themselves in the foot.
Very true
Radeon never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
RX 6000 looked like a ray of hope since each tier (as long as you ignore everything under the RX 6600, as someone mentioned) performed very well compared to their competition, but RDNA 3 largely missed the mark for some reason.
It’s competitor is destroying itself over AI
@@Dango-God RDNA 3 behaved as expected. (They don't want to compete with NVIDIA)
As someone who used to work on modded drivers for TeraScale the final drivers or even the last few versions are a mess. The last version that properly works on TeraScale 1 is 11.11C. Every driver released after made it worse and worse and worse
Like these videos as always man.
I do want to point out though.
8:15 Weirdly enough. I have had this issue always with Black Mesa across both Nvidia and AMD GPUs and different CPUs across multiple Windows and Linux OSs. Black Mesa always crashes at the beginning stages. Then suddenly it starts working just fine for hours then crashes all over again.
Hardware and Software being:
Xeons, i5-2400, i5-3570k, i5-8400, i7-8700, Ryzen 7 1800x, Ryzen 5 3600, GTX 1050, RX 560, RX 470, GTX 1070, RX 5500 XT, 8gb Ram, 12gb Ram, 16gb Ram, 32gb Ram, 1TB SSD for Ext4, 4TB NTFS HDD, 6TB BTRFS Enterprise HDD, NVMes, all across Windows 10, Windows 11, Linux Mint, Fedora, Debian, and Bazzite.
It doesn't matter. It just crashes.
I finally did manage to see a dialogue box pop up on Bazzite though with the saying "Insuffienct Ram" which is weird cause I have 8gb Vram and 32gb of DDR4 at 2933mhz. I looked up a solution. Tried it out. As usual, it did not work. Now, I am halfway through with zero crashes all over again.
Now, I love Black Mesa. I love the Half Life series. But Black Mesa as a game absolutely has issues. It such an amazing looking remake with all its extra details in even the characters from animation to sound. Gameplay is as awesome as any Half Life game. And the saves in the game help pick back up whenever it crashes.
I'm just wanting to point out that the issues with Black Mesa from my experience is beyond just hardware and software. Saving is absolutely essential in playing the game. I know I'm not the only one with these issues. But still. I don't think your issue in this specific title at least stems from the ATI card. It's just something weird with the game is all. Great game though.
There is a reason why the GT 8800 Series are so rare and high priced: The 90/80/65nm Cards from Nvidia have the soldergate Problem when they start breaking the solder joints. When you want a GT 8800 don't do it go for a GT 9800GTX+ 1GB which is the G92b Chip in 55nm which got the solder problem solved. They run for around 40€ here. For the Problem on the HD 2000 Series, the Problems already started with the X 1xx0 series. Many may denie it, but it's the reason why i sold my old ATI X1650 pro 512MB which was pretty fast, as fast as possible as i had plenty Problems with her. The Problems got worse for the HD 2000 Series and for the HD 3000 Series with the drivers. Then AMD took full over the Drivers Team and with the HD 4000 Series the drivers got better for the 3000/4000 series. But the Damage was done and the HD 2000 never got their drivers fixed. I have several 4000 and nearly the complete range of 5000 which work fine and with the Adrenalin Drivers the cancer which is called catalyst is finaly over. But everybody remembers those drivers.
185Watts!!! that was nuts back then, and for me it still is today - but nowadays thats called a low power budget.
Truly a graphics card of all time.
I also built a 150$ brand new system too.
Thanks for another video, love your content :)
I remember the 7800 GTX smacking the X1950XT like a red-headed step child. It was the last Radeon GPU I used until I started using the RX 480.
And today we have the 4090 and the 7900 with AMD still playing catchup. Too busy with their CPUs I guess.
amd is not good for highend but in midrange in raster theyre way better price to performance
As if that's so devastatingly bad, wow, second place... At least their cards don't catch fire/burn themselves.
AMD had the superior architecture(s) from 2007 to 2015, their mid-range GPU chips competed with Nvidia's high-end, that's why AMD's cards were cheaper as well, but people still bought Nvidia regardless... And it all stems from the failure of the HD2000 series and the excellent 8000GT series. The HD2000 is why people still parrot to this day that AMD has bad drivers, when it's not true, after the HD2000 series, AMD and Nvidia swapped place between who had the worse drivers.
@@cosminmilitaru9920 Yeah Nvidia has killed their GPUs with drivers for the gtx 400 series, gtx 500 series, rtx 2000 series and now it's not even drivers, just physical issue with the rtx 4080 and 4090.
@@badass6300 yyeah lol im 23 year old and ppl like 16 year old parrot that amd has bad drivers etc
3:12 you could re paste two cards with this amount of thermal paste. Also, you should pre-spread it. Anyone doing/saying/thinking otherwise is just wasting thermal paste (which isn't a problem today with non-conductive thermal paste, but back then most high performing thermal pastes available were highly conductive)
16:28 “But still-ill,-“
It's definitely a space heater with that TDP. You can get cards with much less low power draw that produce higher results. Good video mate, I won't be getting one of those cards anytime soon lol.
Hey, just a quick question but..... how do you feel about terrascale drivers?
I remember the R350 range of cards getting the community (Omega) drivers, which amongst other things, let you softmod the 9800 se to 9800 Pro. Might be worth looking into... also, wasn't the 2900XT supported on macOS as well? or was that the 2700XT???
Man, were all these uploads in the works during your hiatus? Loving the consistent uploads!
Have you ever used and tested a Nvidia Quattro card before? I have a K2200 4GB one.
the more I watch this channel, the more I know the why AMD have had quite a bad reputation for many, many years... And Sony Vegas not being stable on old AMD hardware kinda makes sense now
Power consumption at 6:05 ... 🤨Also yay, more Budget-Builds!
Should be 185Watts good spot that
Would you say, Terrascale drivers are Terrable ?
From 2004 to 2016 i only used ati gpus.Had 9600, hd 3650, hd 5670, hd 7750. At the end of 2016 i bought gtx 1050 2gb. Then i got a laptop with a gtx 1050 3gb version in 2020. And now got a laptop with an rtx 4060. So since i chnaged to the 1050, i went with nvidia. Im very happy with my purchase. At 1080p it runs everything superwell
interesting to se this,because this gpu is same old like me, do you plan testing xtx is version of this card?
I have some more Terascale coming to the channel soon.
This card was AMD's modus operandi for many years, a smaller cheaper die, with a wider memory bus than the die size would suggest.
I was not surprized when the ~250mm² 256 bit 5700XT was launched, it was on 7nm after all. What did surprise me was how good it was, when i bought one for ~$360 USD, it was somehow beating the RTX 208p in several games, sure the 2080 still won in most games, and soon Nvidia would release drivers that would make the 2070 faster than the 2080 a month earlier, but still for a 250mm card, to compete with a 500mm+ card, from a company that never seemed to focus on GPUs was a wild surprize from me.
I remember buy 3 old Dell workstations and surprise to see inside had ATI FireGL V8650 which is HD2900XT with 2GB VRAM. I just take it out tested and cleaned after verify it's still working well, still on my GPU collection shelf.
Hey, budgets, do you test the card with multiple hdd/ssd windows/drivers installations, because swapping windows installations on boot would probably make it faster to test different drivers and having games on a separate partition is what you're doing already, I bet.
Like, if you reinstall drivers, you need to restart anyway, idk if there's a better way.
Just wonder why you don't install the mod driver you did install in the last video festuring hd4890, which should be compatible given the same GPU architechture.
Those retro 3d video edits look awesome, how did you make them?
Check the pinned comment 👍
A possible reason for GTA online running better than singleplayer is the fact that online loads an entirely different map into the game. It might look the same but it isn't. The online map has a bunch of additions to it that are completely missing from singleplayer. So rockstar might have changed something in the online map that fixed the issues with that era of AMD gpus.
I didn’t think about that possibility might be a more optimised environment meaning these cards see utilisation.
Might just be on my end, but I'm hearing a lot of audio glitching in this video. In the same places, consistently. Editing issues?
Ahh, AMD/ATi's Pentium 4 Netburst moment for Radeon. My friends' 8600GT and 8800GTXs were making me envious versus my HD2600Pro. They eventually did succeed with the HD4000 series and HD5000 series. The HD4830 and HD5770s were bang for the buck cards. Driver-wise, you can still make these run in modern systems using modded drivers from Leshcat or Amernime.
HD7000 with the GCN architecture was the start of "modern" Radeon cards though. Still working today with Vulkan and DX12 in my fiance's system as a HD7770.
how would Linux be? the same or better drivers?
I bought a 2600 XT because it was the only modern graphics card offered for AGP. My friend got a 8800 GT and it absolutely crushed the performance of my card. I expected it as I was using an already wildly out of date platform and just thought I could get away with not upgrading yet, I was wrong. But then I upgraded to the Radeon HD 3870, and still got crushed by his 8800 GT and then he upgraded to a gtx 260. I didn't buy another AMD graphics card for a decade after that I was so burned.
Hmm If had to ask would this be a perfect fit for a windows XP build with an amd or intel dual core build maxing out at 4gb of DDR2 ram? I get that driver support is a huge issue but I'm just looking for a card that will run most late 90's and 2000's games with no issues at all.
My questions aside, great video as always and yeah this makes sense why AMD such a rocky start when they bought ATI.
Are there any unofficial drivers for this card you could try??
None that I could find
Another great video! This is why I have always been an nVidia fanboy! They support their cards for a long time! I love that! By the way are you a 198 CM red head? Because I am! You just look so tall in your videos!
They where still impressive - both camps back in that time. I remember working in a online shop and actually holding one fresh one in my hands. That feeling, smell and sensation, never to be seen again with such leet high end hardware.
I wonder what the drivers are like on linux. I know running games through proton will take a performance hit but source games running with display compositing turned off in the OS I have found usually run a tad bit faster than on windows
it would have been very interesting to see the performance comparison between official and open source drivers on Linux against Windows ones
15:30 Ubisoft antycheat always had problems with AMD drivers, I remember probably like 7 years ago, my friend's rainbow six siege game crashed all the time by antycheat detecting his drivers as malicious
I love your videos, thank you for reutring to making them more often! Yoy were truly missed. However I have one question. Could you start also making them at 60 fps. Because game look laggy at 30.
I’ll have a look into it, but my editing software isn’t usually too keen on high framerate footage, it is usually captured at 60fps though and converted down to make it less jarring.
I bought 2 GPUs from flea market 2 days ago, 8800 GTX and GTX 280 and and none of them works.
Does the back heats up?
Have you ever tried these cards on Linux? I know those drivers are still getting the odd fix and even perf boost for older AMD cards (though I don't know if they go back to TeraScale or it's more GCN-era..) and you might see some improved OpenGL perf at least.
I mean they made one hell of a comeback since then
First AMD cards were the 6000 series. ATI Radeon 5000 was followed by AMD Radeon 6000!
I had this card back in 2008 and I loved it. It was my first high end PC and I held it for a long time.
am i the only one that noticed a few audio stutters in specific parts of the video though the audio bugs are perfect for this bad amd card video
ATI in the Gamecube was my first "mind blowing" moment.
Nah, Terascale and GCN1 were the peak of AMD and ATI overall. Even as appealing the 8000 series were, I remember very well if you wanted to have a top of the line card, you'd get an HD series card from the Terascale and GCN1 families. The place where it started to go wrong was GCN2 and onward.
AMD, in their quest to build ever more complex and powerful compute cards turned their graphics cards into an insanely complex mess to develop drivers for while Nvidia standardised their own process, which meant that making a graphics card perform as well as it can out of the box very easy.
AMD also didn't have the money nor the willpower to hire developers who'd be able to properly develop drivers for their cards, so we ended up having unoptimised cards that are very inconsistent. I mean, just look at Fiji and Vega. Absolute monsters in terms of compute capability that would spank their contemporary Geforce counterparts when they worked. Hell, the Radeon VII can occasionally outperform an RTX 3080. Only problem, they're completely broken more often than not.
And that's still the case today. After a relatively easy generations to develop drivers for in the shape of RDNA1 and RDNA2, AMD once again decided to drop the ball and create an architecture that"s a pain to optimise in the form of RDNA3. Sadly, I think we're at the point where AMD doesn't care anymore, as they seem content with selling MI cards for insane prices in datacentres where their ultra complex designs aren't a problem because the client will just put in the work to have a level of high precision (FP32 and FP64) compute performance Nvidia and Intel can't match. It's sad, but it is what it is.
I certainly will say that during the era AMD did go on to redeem themselves with the HD3000/4000 series and to some extent the HD5k/6k. However GCN for me is where their fortunes changed (from a user perspective), the drivers are a huge leap in quality and the longevity was brilliant (likely helped from the drivers being decent and the consoles more or less being standard AMD x64 PCs with GCN GPUs.
The issue with Terascale lies for me with the competitor being so decent, Tesla and Fermi2 were brilliant and in the long run much better cards, especially when system requirements stagnated so much.
Fiji I actually used for years since the R9 Fury’s launch having only replaced it in recent times, but they were not commercially successful cards.
I will definitely be revisiting some later Terascale cards, and we may even be seeing one next week.
Thank you for the insightful comment 👍
Still haven't had a 2900 XT (or Pro) to this day. I had a 2900 GT as a temporary card though and at least it ran Dirt3 surprisingly well. :D
I never used AA options during the 8000 series era. I pay to see ALL the pixels!
The Black Mesa is crashing on all amd gpus now, that's because it was recently revealed some kind of bug related to the water quality and splashing animation causing the crash with the latest build of the game
Imagine drivers so bad that your Ubisoft account gets banned.
I wonder how the card would handle with modded drivers.
Sadly there aren’t any good ones
You could test it with the open source drivers on linux (which are still maintained) on opengl titles or directx9 titles with gallium nine but idk how decent those are (it's the RADV/RadeonSi driver backend end used for GCN and newer cards that have really gotten good, the driver for terascale cards has been mostly just in maintainance mode for many years but it does get some occasional benefit from the improvements to the mesa gallium driver core)
@@olnnn Looked it up.
Appearantly, Terascale 1 chips and drivers are mostly DX 10, whereas Terascale 2 are DX 11+.
Hence the lack of development for the former in Windows space.
And as alluded in the video, most people just go 8800 GTX for that specific era of retro gaming.
Or older cards for retrogaming (such as Radeon 9000 series) or later for Win7 era.
Basically, This generation of cards was were Radeon got the "Bad driver" epitaph, that has lasted to this day.
Despite Terascake 2+ and GCN having proved otherwise since then.
Also, it would seem that Nimez drivers are now knows as "R.ID".
Which I only got confirmed looking at a video about the Radeon RX 5300.
Considering that Nimez got known as Nimez about 1½-2 years ago, why change it already.
I actually had to spend about 10 minutes looking for modded drivers for Terascale 1, could find Nimez, which I knew about, "settled" for R.ID, which explained that TS1 aren't like the others.
Just... huh?
I really am surprised that many of those games even launched with such low vram
How did you make that intro? Id love to make ps1 looking stuff like this
Check out the pinned comment for our channel artist. They’re brilliant,
AMD Makes My AMD AMD yeah
Back in 2008 I couldn't afford the 8800 GT, so I bought a HD3870 and was quite happy with it.
I had one of these back in the day.. still have it today with a monster thermal right cooler on it. I remember being so gutted at it's crysis performance
pretty clear the 1GB frame buffer was the issue with the bad stuttering in many of the games like GTA, should have tried them at lower settings, i bet the frame times would have been better and less stuttering.
Unfortunately not
Okay I think you might have solved my issue with my 2600 xt, because I have a laptop that I was going to use as a gaming time capsule, and most games I can play for a little bit and then they crash. And I was using the drivers installed by windows.
I didn't realize this generation of cards was that bad with the drivers.
Those 8800 ultras were pretty cool tho
I still have a pair of asetek hybrid cooled ones
Radeon back then looked way cooler under blacklight tho