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ATI/Half-Life 2 Bundle Confirmed 38

Posted by simoniker from the gorgeous-shiny-headcrabs dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Inquirer has a recent article on the launch of ATI's Radeon 9800 XT and 9600 XT, happening tonight at Alcatraz." In fact, there's now a press release announcing that "...customers purchasing ATI's Radeon 9800 XT and 9600 XT will also get a free copy of Half-Life 2 when the game ships", whenever that is, and confirming the price of the 9800 at $499, and the 9600 at "under $200."
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ATI/Half-Life 2 Bundle Confirmed More

ATI/Half-Life 2 Bundle Confirmed

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  • ATI Technologies Inc. today introduced the RADEON(TM) 9800 XT and the RADEON(TM) 9600 XT, delivering killer DirectX(R) 9 performance in leading games like Half-Life(R) 2, which will be bundled with the graphics cards.

    Looks like ATI and Valve know where their bread is buttered.

  • Beware the Bundle (Score:3, Informative)

    by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @08:23PM (#7099541) Homepage
    My understanding is that at least at the start, you don't get a CD, you get a cupon that let's you download it from Valve's Steam system. In the future will it switch? I somewhat doubt it, but I hope I'm wrong.

  • They win (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This may be the one thing that gets me to switch to ATI after using Nvidia for so long!

  • forget ATI (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ArmorFiend ( 151674 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @08:39PM (#7099635) Homepage Journal
    Forget it, the only bundled item I want to see are the hardware specifications for their card, so that someone can build decent free drivers for them. Is it so much to ask that you know how to use what you're buying?
    • Forget it, the only bundled item I want to see are the hardware specifications for their card, so that someone can build decent free drivers for them. Is it so much to ask that you know how to use what you're buying?

      And this is going to stop windows gamers from buying the card? Its a bitch to get games working under linux, its easier to buy another PC and buy some cheaper, better supported hardware. If the only multimedia is music/video then you dont need an the fastest GFX card out ther, an old Geforce

      • One size fits all? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hbackert ( 45117 ) on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @10:21PM (#7100225) Homepage

        Really, an all 1 one machine doesnt exist.

        I found that out too. Had a dual CPU Linux box for almost all things (beside a server running Samba, DNS, DHCP and all this type of server work). Linux was fine, but the machine was too slow for newer games (when dual booting to Windows), many games did not use the second CPU, some ATI and other drivers did not like two CPUs at all...all kind of nasty little problems.

        The simple solution was a game-only computer: 1 CPU, fast video card (time to upgrade the old Radeon 8500LE). I can whole heartly recommend such a setup. If you buy the latest-and-greatest hardware, you'll have endless problems with Linux (e.g. nForce2 mainboard: no IOAPIC, no Firewire, just now they start to work, 9 monthes after the boards were available, Linux 2.5 was better but not everyone like to live on the bleeding edge). I don't blame any Linux developers as it's clearly the fault of the hardware vendors who don't supports Linux drivers actively, with very few exceptions. Use old-and-venerable hardware (1+ year) and it's a great Linux box (read: everything works out of the box) but when dual-booting to Windows for games, some hardware is no longer supported, or does not work well any more, or is just too slow for current games. I was not able to find a one-size-size-fits-all, so I bought 2 sizes and I could not be happier.

        My next video card will be some updated ATI or nVidia card. With HL2 bundled or not. That will go to the Windows-mostly machine. The current ATI 8500LE will go to the Linux-mostly machine so I can finally connect 2 monitors.

        It's not the perfect setup taking more space and needing a KVM switch, but it simplifies the choice of hardware a lot as I don't need to wait for simultanious Windows-and-Linux support. Getting Linux worh with it 1 year later is fine for me.

        And for those who'll cry "I cannot afford 2 computers, I want my latest-and-fastest video card to be supported in Linux" I say: those video cards are far too expensive anyway. How can you afford a US$500 video card? Save for a US$200 video card, a US$300 second computer or reused parts, a KVM switch and use the best of both worlds. Seriously.

        • How can you afford a US$500 video card? Save for a US$200 video card, a US$300 second computer or reused parts, a KVM switch and use the best of both worlds. Seriously.

          How you are right, right now the 9600 pro overclocks rather nicely and can be bought for 110 bux. Still faster than those Nvidia ti4800's that are more expensive. Thou, the real need for the faster cards are shader and anti-aliasing. Most games will run with great FPS without anti-aliasing, but turn 6x AA on, and thats when you need the 980
    • Except for the fact that you'd end up with a mass glut of free drivers for X hardware. Hardcore gamers would end up downloading them to squeeze an extra frame out and Linux users will use because its the only driver that will run on their system. That'd be like trying to make a standarized shoe cleaning machine when everyone has a relatively unique sized shoe.
  • A free copy of Half Life 2 sounds good to me, however I doubt they will be shipping out them out in a timely manner. I don't want to be waiting 6-8 weeks for ATI to get me my free copy of HL2. ...yah know, 6-8 weeks from, uh, whenever it's done.
  • I heard previuosly that it will not be the full version of HL2 shipping with the ATI 9800XT. I heard it will be a single player only version. WTF is with that, or am I wrong?
    • I heard previuosly that it will not be the full version of HL2 shipping with the ATI 9800XT. I heard it will be a single player only version. WTF is with that, or am I wrong?

      Hopefully...

    • Re:Castrated version of HL2... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      http://ati.com/companyinfo/press/2003/4692.html

      MARKHAM, Ontario - ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX: ATY, NASDAQ: ATYT) today announced that Valve(R), a leading game developer, has named ATI as the preferred graphics card partner for its upcoming game Half-Life(R) 2. As a part of this agreement with Valve, ATI customers will get the full Half-Life 2 game free1 with the purchase of select RADEON(TM) products.

      1 Shipping, handling and applicable taxes or customs charges are not included. Charges vary depending on p
    • Unfortuneatly that's true. The single player version is also the one that they will be selling at Walmart. Hopefully they will have some sort of upgrade method in place.

  • review (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...driverheavens 9800 XT review...makes for interesting reading.

    http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/9800xt
  • Who's gonna buy this card just cuz it comes with HL2, especially since the game isn't even out yet. The good thing about this is the fact that the 9800 pro should be going down in price and according tomshardware.com the new ATI card barely surpasses the 9800 Pro in the benchmarks. In two months the 9800 Pro should be within my price range (maybe the all in wonder). One thing someone could shed some light on for me involves the memory. 128 MB vs. 256 MB ? Do I really need 256 MB in the next couple of y
    • Valve made some statements that the 256MB cards would be made use of by HL2 (it would detect the video RAM and increase texture resolution or pack more textures into video RAM for faster use), but I think for the most part you'll be ok for a while with 128MB.
    • I'LL BUY IT.

      Why? It's a good deal. I've been looking at a Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB. Best price I can find after taxes, shipping, etc. is about $140. HL2 will be about $50, and I'll be buying that when it comes out.

      So, that's $190 for the game+older graphics card or $199 for game+newer (and better I'll assume... I'll wait for the reviews) graphics card. I'm just doing the math.

      Yeah, waiting will suck, but I mostly want the new card for HL2 and D3 anyway. Also, I'm hoping that I won't have to wait to ge
  • If they can afford to put a copy of HL2 in the box, can't they afford the extra $.50 it'd cost them to support TWO DVI monitors? Enough with the VGA connector already...

    My next upgrade, sadly, will remain Nvidia. At least one of their partners can support my monitors.
  • Package it before the game comes out. Now that we've come so close to tasting it

  • Crap (Score:2, Funny)

    by kaellinn18 ( 707759 )
    *opens box and sees two copies of original Half-Life*

    I knew it had to be a typo...
  • The Radeon 9600 XT runs at a whopping 4.77Mhz, and boasts an unbelievable 640kb of onboard ram! It also has state-of-the art, high resolution monochrome graphics(710x480), and is more than enough for all your computing needs. The Radeon 9800 XT takes that same incredible system and adds a gargantuan 5Mb Hard drive and stunning CGA graphics!

    Radeon 9600 XT:$5000.00
    Radeon 9800 XT:$6800.00

    ORDER TODAY!
    • Any All-In-Wonder 9700 Comptability issues? How about Opengl and or DirectX what happened to them?
      • The Radeon 9600XT and Radeon 9800XT are so advanced, their names stand for "eXtended Technology". Unfortunately, this means that we had to break SOME backwards compatibility with older versions.

        OpenGL support? Well, specific applications can choose to support it in MS-DOS, and our video subsystems are so fast, it will only take SEVEN HOURS AND TEN SECONDS to run the "draw wine glass" benchmark popularized by SGI! The 9800XT can even do this in STUNNING CGA COLOUR!

        DirectX? You must mean direct framebuffer
  • Surprised this hasn't popped up before... Maybe the delay of Half-life 2 is because of ATI? Maybe they cut a deal so that if you want to be the first to own HL2, you have to buy an ATI card?

    What would we have to talk about without conspiracy theories?
  • Despite my P4 1.4 and GF2-GTS card showing it's age, I know now is not the right time to go out and get upgrades..

    2004 we should start seeing BTX motherboards with PCI express on them, ATI has already announced support for PCI express.

    So why buy anything AGP right now? It's going to be phased out by next year!

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