As an amateur journalist, I would appreciate discussion on the following topics:
ATI's response to the 3dfx buyout, and perception of competition with
NVidia in the PC, and now Mac, markets.
What is ATI's current schedule for public beta driver releases.
With the Radeon drivers having a basis in the Rage128 code, does the
development cycle for ATI drivers include the idea of improved legacy support?
On the AIW card, rumor has it that it was originally going to release
with a Digital Tuner on board, but that design issues forced that
implementation to a lower priority. Are there current plans to include
a Digital Tuner in the next generation of the AIW (R200 based)?.
Due to the shortage of fast memory, the Radeon family has been
released at a lower memory speed than originally specified. Now ATI seems
to be preparing a release of higher end cards with the type of memory speed
that was originally desired. Does ATI plan to offer both "High-End" and
"Value" lines of their products, and how best would interested consumers
be able to tell the cards apart?
Some user concerns:
Video for Windows support was not included with the Radeon release, rendering
unusable many third party utilities that users of ATI products depended on.
It was thought that ATI would provide such support in later driver releases.
Is this planned for the coming unified drivers, or is there some other
solution in the works?
The first release of the 7.0 Multimedia Center is very impressive, but in
some ways it seems to be a step back from the one program - many functions
idea of the older MMCs. Would ATI consider allowing the user an option to
revert the functionality of the MMC back to the old design? Also, it is noted
that the beta for MMC 7.1 has features to save captures as VCD. Does ATI
have plans to enter the low-end video recorder market with a product that
allows the user to create thier own video CDs? (I hope so).
Support for previous ATI video codecs VCR1 and VCR2 was also dropped from the
Radeon, making users upgrading from previous ATI VIVO and All in Wonder cards
unable to read thier previously saved files. Will ATI support those codecs, at
least for conversion to other formats, or provide some other solution to
this issue.
Public perception in the online gaming communities is still low due to
the lack of public feedback from ATI on a number of user issues. Are there
any plans to allow a public forum on ATI's Website, or to provide more rapid
updates to the online FAQs and Guides to address user comments.
I know that ATI cannot provide support for "Special Purpose" or leaked drivers.
But would they appreciate feedback from knowlegdable users and forums such
as Anandtech to better identify outside issues that could assist in
development and release of better official drivers?