There has been much talk about the new R520 bread of ATI cards that are slated to be released this week. One of the bigger features that sets these new cards appart from their Nvidia counterparts is the support for adaptive anti-aliasing. Earlier this week ATI released a new version of their ATI Catalyst video drivers. In them they apparently added support for these new R520 cards.

Ted from Beyond3D forums has discovered a way to enable adaptive anti-aliasing on existing older X8XX cards and many people are reporting that this new functionality works just dandy!

You can see the massive difference for yourself:

Adaptive Anti-Aliasing
No Adaptive Anti-Aliasing

If you already have the ATI Catalyst 5.9 drivers and own an ATI X8XX card you can easily enable this:

Here are the steps:

set ASTT_NA to 0 in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Video\{5A61609A-036A-4D32-B447-F0E42DA9714D}\0000

5A61609A-036A-4D32-B447-F0E42DA9714D this number is different for every one , you may have multiple numbers at the location because of multiple driver installation but only one is active. To be sure just change the value in every one.

If you use CCC try icon you will now have a new option in the AA menu

Quote:
I made a litte mistake. To enable adaptive AA you have to create a new entry ASTT and set it to 1. The ASTT_NA entry i mentioned above is only there to make the option visible in the CCC tray icon.

it AA alpha test textures and it works

Next week ATI’s new R520’s are set out to sail. Only 3 months late of their expected launch date. Some speculate they were running a little behind because of the whole XBOX360 chip manufacturing process. Who knows. In any case, their new flagship X1800 XT with 512MB of memory will be priced at $549, with a 256MB variant weighing in at $499, while the X1800 XL 256MiB will cost $449. A quick check of a popular online hardware pricing site showed Nvidia’s GeForce 7800 GTX selling around the $460 mark, with the 7800 GT costing $360.

Below is the complete run down on the new pricing strucutre. All MSRP of course so expect cheaper prices at your favorite online retailer:

Some newb ordered a PCI-E nVidia 7800 and didn’t realize you needed a motherboard that supported PCI-E. The guy decides to make the card fit by “carefully cutting off the bottom” so that it would fit into his AGP slot

An image speaks a thousand words:

nvidia 7800 wont work

i bought one of these and tried putting in my dell dimension 2350. my friend said that the shiny metal part on the bottom looks like it has lines because you cut at the lines if it doesnt fit. so i carefully cut off the bottom so that it fit into 1 of the slot things in my computer. now it doesnt work. did i cut it wrong? id post pics, but no camera. is there anyway i can fix this? thanks for any help.

Read the entire thread here

Wondering when ATI will combat Nvidia’s new super powered 7800 series video card? So were we.

Today ATI formally announced their future roadmap details specifically for the new R5xxx series cards.

You’ll notice that they are taking a different release approach compared with Nvidia, releasing their lower end cards first. Perhaps this is because Nvidia usually deams the “GT” line as defective “GTX” class cards that didn’t meet quality control.. Who knows but its damn confusing to say the least.

And just as you would have thought ATI’s X800 and X850 lines were extinct ATI pulls a rabbit out of the hat with what they call “Master Card” editions which are expected in September as “CrossFire Edition” cards? Confused yet?

Anandtech has written a very nice write up explaining exactly what the differences are available for your viewing pleasure here