Drivers / Image Quality:

The ATI Catalyst drivers are pretty stable and the amount of games which show errors are very limited, but it´s still not on par with the excellent Nvidia detonator drivers. They might not be flawless, it´s no reason not to buy this card. One annoying point though: the driver and control panel are two different downloads. I find the unified "one-download-fits-all" approach of nvidia better suited for the lazy ppl. :)


Tested on a 17" 1280*1024 TFT screen, the 2D image quality is great as expected. It has been a while since I´ve encountered a 3D card which didn´t produce a clear 2D image though. I should test it on a 21" at 1600*1200 or higher resolution to find it´s true power, but I lack the funds to do that so I´ll just rely on ATI´s reputation of producing high quality 2D image cards.

The 3D image quality is absolutely outstanding. This is mainly due to being able to run with full screen anti-alising (edges are smoothed) and antisoptric filtering (no blurry depth vision) with less difficulty than a GF4 card.

click on pic to see high res (but jpeg compressed) image