We had some difficulties with the Rage Fury and beta drivers, but the company's had several months to work on the code. Fortunately, the AIW128 seems to have been worth the wait.
Product: All in Wonder 128 16 MB version
From: ATI
Price: about $200 US
Pros: TV in/out, DVD playback, video capture, closed caption decoder and 2D/3D graphics on a single card. Included software titles and a "breakout box" add additional value. Drivers for Windows 2000, Linux and BeOS also available from third parties.
Cons: 3D performance is lower than some cards currently available; 32 MB version of the AIW128 is not available at this writing. Windows 98SE users have to fiddle to use WebTV with current drivers. Some compatibility issues.
Perhaps we're suckers for a product that does a lot, but the All in Wonder 128 strikes us as a much better product than the company's previous efforts based on the Rage 128 chip, announced back in Aug. 1998. For one thing, the AIW128 worked, reliably, right out of the box -- and that's a welcome change from many of the other 3D cards currently on the market.
As we've noted all too often in our previous reviews of the Rage Fury, Asus V3800 Ultra, Matrox Millennium and other cards, it is a lamentable trend among graphics card vendors to ship the cards and then finish the drivers later. Indeed, ATI seemed to be one of the worst offenders in the first few quarters of 1999, as both Mac and Windows users of its Rage 128-based products suffered through bugs and month after month of beta-quality drivers for an already shipping product. This had the unusual side effect of creating a demand for third-party drivers, and web pages such as RageUnderground filled the void with customized drivers to which ATI now unapologetically links. Similarly, ATI's reticence in supporting "alternative" operating systems Linux and BeOS has led to the development of third party drivers for those camps, too. Note, however, that some of the features of the card may not be supported, as ATI warns in a Windows 2000 driver disclaimer.
For this review, however, we concentrated on testing the card's Windows 98 performance. So, it was with great relief we noted that, throughout our rigorous set of tests (detailed below), the AIW128 captured video, played DVDs and handled both 2D and 3D graphics with aplomb. Hurray!
In fact, the AIW128 performs so well as a DVD player that we finally turned our backs on the dedicated hardware MPEG-2 decoder card -- part of the Creative Labs PC Encore Dxr2 DVD kit -- that we've had in our test computer since that product's release. Indeed, the AIW128 displays DVD video better than the Dxr2, in terms of image stability and overall quality. Considering the comments we've made in the past about the superiority of a dedicated hardware decoder, this strikes us as quite a feat.
The package includes
Our tests included:
The Image quality tests of Open GL and Direct 3D acceleration revealed no unpleasant surprises. Unlike the 3dfx Voodoo3 we had been testing, the AIW128 is able to run in 32-bit "True Color" mode, and we conducted most of our tests at 1024x768 in this True Color mode. The ATI driver provides a convenient taskbar icon that allows you to change device or display settings, enable the television display, or launch the DVD/CD/audio CD player, video editor, or other tools. There's also a "Launchpad" program that displays a toolbar along the right side of the screen, for one-click access to these tools. Mercifully, this can easily be disabled or automatically hidden with a couple of clicks.
Thanks to its 32-bit color support, the AIW128's image quality is excellent in true-color mode. As we noted in our previous review of the Rafe Fury, the chip or driver seems to produce slightly grainy images in 16-bit mode, due to what appears to be a stochastic dithering algorithm, but this does not appear in 32-bit mode.
Video capture and playback. So, how does the AIW128 compare with the Matrox G200-TV, another leading TV/capture card? Well, for starters, the OpenGL Installable Client Driver supplied with the AIW128 is 700 percent faster than that supplied with Matrox's card. The Direct 3D driver is 250 percent faster, and ATI's video capture hardware and software encode images as MPEG, as opposed to Matrox's choice of Motion JPEG. While Motion JPEG is well-suited for detailed editing, the files are much, much larger than those captured by the ATI card. We were extremely impressed by the image quality of the AIW128's MPEG captures.
As with previous versions of the All in Wonder and ATI-TV products, the AIW128 also has the ability to display video on the desktop or in a window without digitizing it. This means that you can watch TV or videos while you work -- ideal for learning a new software product with the help of a training video.
Also like previous models, the AIW128 provides a closed caption decoder, with a keyword search/capture feature that can automatically save text to disk when a specified word is encountered in the closed captions of a TV news story. Another cool feature is a "TV Magazine" mode that captures closed-captions as word-processor text along with periodic snapshots from the video, formatting them together in an Rich Text format document you can then print out.
A Color Calibration utility is also supplied with the video card, allowing gamma (brightness) control that can help desktop publishers or graphics-oriented users better match on-screen displays with printed results.
Overall reliability. Almost exactly a year since the chip on which it is based was first announced, it is little wonder that the drivers for the AIW128 are so stable and mature. This also means that the AIW128 isn't the fastest card on the market. Expect ATI to release a Rage Fury Pro later in 1999 with TV in/out, followed by a card with two Rage 128 chips onboard and a whopping 64MB of RAM to address the needs (?) of those craving ultimate performance. For the rest of us, the ATI All in Wonder 128 (16MB, pending the late 1999 release of a 32MB version) is currently the best choice in "do it all" video capture cards for the PC.
The most serious problem we noted is a compatibility issue. This issue affects only Windows 98 SE, and it only affects users who want to run Microsoft's WebTV for Windows program. ATI notes that a fix is possible, but the workaround is awkward, and likely beyond the capabilities of some users. The original release of Windows 98 (build 1998) does not have this problem.
We also noted a few other issues with the Rage Fury that apply to the AIW128. The Open GL driver is not as robust as those from nVidia, 3D Labs and some other manufacturers. This means that some programs that require a full "Installable Client Driver" may not run properly and some titles, such as Discreet's 3D Studio MAX R3, won't run at all when the Open GL option of the standard ATI driver is selected. Fortunately, the company has made a special purpose driver available that fixes the problem. It also provides optimizations for the Pentium III and improved performance in some other titles that require Open GL, such as Quake III. Unfortunately, this driver is unsupported, so you're on your own.
The DVD Player supplied with Rage 128 cards has trouble with some discs. The Matrix, for example, has a special features section that does not play properly on the DVD players supplied with ATI cards (or, indeed, most other software-based drivers we've tried). It does, however, work correctly if there is a hardware decoder in the system such as the Creative Labs Encore or Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus.
ATI, on Nov. 8, announced a new version of the All in Wonder. products: dubbed the All-in-Wonder 128 Pro multimedia board, the. product is based on a faster "Pro" version of the Rage 128 chip and offers 32MB of dedicated memory. The AIW 128 Pro, expected to ship in Dec. 1999, will retail for C$449. The Rage 128 Pro, claims ATI, yields up to 40% better performance in 2D, 3D and video acceleration than the previous generation product.
Most recently, the company has released a beta version of a complete driver set for Windows 2000, including the Multimedia Center and a DVD player upgrade. Read more about the latter item here.
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