Part of this section is from our RADEON 64MB DDR Guide:

Anyone who has owned a Rage 128 or Rage Pro-based card is likely nervous about the RADEON's drivers. Back when the Rage 128 was released, ATI completely changed their driver model to communicate with the processor via AGP protocol, unlike other manufacturers, who communicate through chip registers. Over the past couple of years the driver has slowly matured and has finally reached a state that offers plenty of stability and performance. Naturally, the RADEON's code is still relatively young; so there may be performance improvements in the future, but at least there is a strong level of compatibility in the shipping driver build.

We encountered some issues with Windows 2000 3D functionality, as we mentioned earlier. ATI has reproduced our results, and is currently working on a fix for the lockups and texture corruption. We did not experience any problems with the Windows 98 driver.

Here is a comment from the RADEON 64MB DDR Guide regarding the RADEON's 2D clarity:

"At long last, ATI has released a card with crisp 2D quality. With 19 and 21” monitors going down in price and becoming more popular, a 1600x1200 display is more accessible now than ever before. Without a doubt, the RADEON offers some of the best 2D quality to date.

On a side note, the RADEON is the only card on the market to support a hardware alpha cursor (the arrow with a shadow) in Windows 2000. If only there were a way to benchmark it."