I purchased an ATI HD3870 in December and although it was great in games, the performance in Blender was abismal. This was prior to the latest driver which reduced the OpenGL select time. I therefore returned the card and bought an 8800GT.
Previous to the 8800 series purchase, I owned an ATI x850XT which actually worked great with Blender in WIndows and Linux. I really would love to purchase an ATI card if only to help support the underdog.
My question is this: does anyone have any experience with the new Ati 4850 cards and Blender? Has anything changed in the card / drivers to close the performance gap between Nvidia and ATI with Blender with this card?
Can you be more specific? I was able to run Blender on XP with an HD 3870 but there was still the selection bug going on with the Catalyst Drivers. Otherwise, it was fine.
I’m using HD4850 with Vista x64 and Catalyst 8.8, no problems at all.
But with early drivers (I think it was 8.6) Blender crashed when I tried to enter the Edit mode.
I just got my HD4850, and Blender works great in Server 2003, Server 2008 32 bit, and Ubuntu 32 Bit.
I was getting (what looked like) Z-Fighting when I rotated stuff with the open source drivers, but they went away when I installed the official ATI ones.
The only problem I’m experiencing, is that the render window doesn’t appear, but that could just be something stupid I’m doing.
In Linux it didn’t even work… At all. Blender would have difficulty opening, and when it did it flickered constantly. In Windows, it would open and run, but after a very small amount of polys(a couple hundred), it would lag to the point of being unusable.
To someone thinking about getting a new card I’d just suggest getting an nVidia. ATi does work for some people, but ATi with Linux is notorious for causing issues, and if you look around you’ll find it’s the same story for ATi and Blender. There are lots of display bugs, and in many cases, it’s to the point where Linux/Blender won’t even function correctly. I’m speaking from personal experience.
The thing is that the ati 4870x2 kicks ass. No nvidia card comes close to that one. Still it’s bad that it holds me back from buying one of those because of blender. Actually because of ati’s bad drivers.
I can confirm; bad; no crappy, drivers. I previously suggest 8.8. It worked fine at first, then it made X show me lines all through the screen, and even crashes blobwars: Blob And Conquer…
ATI needs to come good, or I’m probably sticking with catalyst 8.5 till ubuntu 8.10!