Individual Entry

Wow! X1950XT should give you quite a blast even on very demanding recent games (and on all the other gpu-intensive activities, obviously).

That’s true, although I suspect my CPU will end up being something of a bottleneck.

I can’t believe it took you this long.

My Radeon 9800pro gave up at the same time as your previous card did (I remember reading about it and thinking what a concidence), and I promptly borrowed a nVidia fx5200 from my nephew (complete with utterly useless drivers) for a week. Needless to say, after a week I’d had just about enough and I went out and bought a Radeon 9500pro. Haven’t regretted it for a moment.

I really am shocked by the state of nVidia’s drivers. Their new control panel, which you have to use in order to access certain features, is clunky in the extreme, and, after perusing the web for a couple of hours looking for solutions to the problems I’m having, I’m starting to realise that I’m actually one of the lucky ones - plenty of people get no overlay support at all.

Also, I may just be imagining things, but I’m convinced that I’m getting considerably more banding on the desktop, games and video playback. I’m certainly noticing a whole lot of blocky gradients that I wasn’t aware of before.

RE: Anonymous How can you compare 2 generations old lowend FX5200 with 9800pro/9500pro?

I have a feeling he was referring to general usability rather than pure performance.

RE: Whiggles You can switch to the old version control panel, all features are available there. I had 4 nVidias and there were no problems with TV-out or anything else (MX400, FX5500, 6600, 7600GST now).

Not true. When you access the old control panel, it’s impossible to access the overlay temperature correction feature, which I find myself having to do every time I boot the computer or run anything that accesses the overlay other than PowerDVD or Media Player (e.g. games with cinematics). Stranger still, options like vibrance and sharpening are greyed out in the old panel (not that I use them anyway), but can be changed in the new one. I’ve been using this card for two weeks now, and am genuinely saddened by how badly thought out nVidia’s drivers seem to be. Perusing the web suggests that many of the problems I am facing have been present since at least mid-2005 and have yet to be fixed.

Whiggles: Than use the custom profile function of the Control Panel, and select only the tabs you need (video out color correction, …).

That tab doesn’t have any temperature settings in Classic Mode. Like I said, you have to use the new control panel to get access to them.

It’s a fairly moot point anyway. With any luck I’ll be rid of this card by the end of the week, and then I won’t have to change my overlay settings every single sodding time I want to watch a video file or DVD.