ATI's latest graphics engine: ATI Radeon

Introduction

Three RADEON-based boards for the PC were introduced by ATI on July 17, 2000: They range from a high-end model with 64 MB of ultra-fast DDR memory and video capture and video out support (US$399; shipping since Aug.), designed for the power gaming enthusiast; to more economical offerings: a card with 32 MB of DDR (US$279; shipping since July); and a card with 32MB of SDRAM (shipping since Sept.) delivering budget-minded RADEON power under US$200.

However, what the company doesn't say in any of its marketing materials is that these cards differ in their clock speeds. As described in an editorial at HardOCP (and subsequent ATI Response), the 32MB DDR and 64MB OEM cards are clocked at 166, not the 183 MHz rating of the more expensive 64MB DDR. ATI says it doesn't want to confuse consumers, but is working to address this situation. But the situation is already confused. Earlier this year (and posted right on this page!), the company claimed that that initially, at least, it could only get hold of 183 MHz DDR SDRAM. The company said it wanted to run chip and memory in sync; that meant that the initial boards ran at 183/183 MHz. Exacerbating the issue is an ATI Radeon FAQ page that, even at this writing, gives no indication that the 32MB DDR and 64MB DDR cards are clocked differently. Predictably, most if not all of the early reviews that touted the Radeon as "outperforming the Geforce 2 by up to 15%" were conducted with the faster boards.

Let's take a closer look at each product:

The retail boards:

• The Radeon 64 MB DDR features 64 MB DDR SDRAM, Video In and Video Out capability. This board, says ATI, is aimed at the high-performance gamer who wants it all, not only the 3D power of the Radeon chip and 64 MB DDR SDRAM, but as well TV Out and Video In functionality and quality of the ATI Rage Theater chip. This card is clocked at 183 MHz.
• The Radeon 32 MB DDR includes 32 MB DDR SDRAM. It is aimed at the high-end gamer who needs the speed of 32MB DDR SDRAM. This board is clocked at 166 MHz.
• Then, there's a Radeon 32 MB, with 32 MB SDRAM. It's aimed, says ATI, at the value driven high-performance customer who wants the power of Radeon. This card, too, is clocked at 166 MHz.
• Still lower in price is a dumbed-down model announced in Feb. 2001 and known as the Radeon LE. It ships with no "HyperZ" functionality and slower memory and GPU. Interestingly, hackers have discovered that the disabled features can be enabled by adding a single Registry key.

In addition to its retail products, ATI also offers a number of OEM boards:

For the OEM market

• Radeon 64 MB DDR SDRAM with Video In and Video Out or with DVI or with VGA only. (166 MHz)
• Radeon 32 MB DDR SDRAM with Video In and Video Out or with DVI or with VGA only. (166 MHz)
• Radeon 32 MB SDRAM with TV Out or with DVI or VGA only. (166 MHz)

The large number of possibilities in the OEM category means that you'll have to be careful to ensure that you get the features you want from a PC with an OEM Radeon card. For the record, we tested the 32MB DDR version, clocked at 166 MHz..

The Hype

It's a claim that we've all heard before: "... THE FASTEST HIGH-QUALITY PERFORMANCE..." blah blah blah, but ATI managed to pull off what many thought was impossible: upon its release, the RADEON graphics chipset outperformed the high-end offerings at the time from market-leading competitors 3dfx and nVIDIA, at least at high resolutions in true-colour modes. Of course, that was Spring of 2000 and its competitors -- primarily Nvidia, the chipmaker now behind four of the five fastest video cards on the market -- have since caught up and in some areas, surpassed it. And then there's the issue of all that red ink in ATI's financial statements. The power gamers turned their backs on ATI and the stock market wasn't far behind. Thus, a lot is riding on the Radeon for ATI and its investors alike. Does the chip have what it takes to turn ATI's fortunes around?

Of course, the Radeon is fully buzzword compliant, and it manages to throw a few new terms into the mix. Again, we have to separate the hype from the reality. According to ATI, key Radeon features include:

• Patented Hyper-Z(tm) technology delivers fastest ultra-high resolution, true color performance in the industry As ATI explains it, "Hyper-Z is a technology to remove non-visible parts of a scene before we render them and send them into the frame buffer. Once the objects are drawn, we try to determine where they overlap and which part of them is in front of the other. We will then remove the non-visible part to safe rendering power and memory bandwidth." Thus, the "Z" in this case, refers to the so-called Z-buffer. This means that the card's 3-D engine performs calculations on overlapping objects in such a way that it doesn't have to waste its time drawing objects that won't be visible. The upshot is, as ATI claims, the fastest performance at high resolutions in 32-bit colour, of any graphics card currently available in its price range.
• Advanced 3D game features and hardware Transform and Lighting engine for incredibly realistic characters and environments. This so-called "T&L" feature requires specially written software. nVIDIA's recent chips also feature T&L, but games have been slow to implement the required code. Still, it yields terrific performance on a T&L-optimized game.
• Full-screen Anti Aliasing (FSAA). ATI says "we support FSAA in our driver." This means that Radeon's FSAA is implemented at the driver level, not in hardware, as it is in 3dfx's Voodoo5 product. As we've already seen with nVIDIA's latest FSAA, software implementations tend to be slow. Slow is one thing, but we weren't prepared for an FSAA driver that, at least in the four driver versions we've tested since we got our hands on a RADEON card, is so buggy that it is practically useless. And it is s-l-o-w. As our benchmarks later in the article show, performance drops to about a third of non-FSAA rates. Not many gamers will give up that much performance for a slightly better looking image, even if the display anomalies are eventually eliminated.

The Good News

Let's take a look at some of the things the Radeon does right. There are a number of features "under the hood" of the Radeon that help it deliver state-of-the-art performance. Perhaps most notably, it boasts three texture units per rendering pipeline and the DDR card is so-named for its use of double data rate memory, a faster type of memory than conventional SDRAM, as used in the low-end Radeon and many competing graphics cards. This helps the DDR-equipped models achieve blazingly fast frame rates at ultra-high resolutions in texture-mapped games such as Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament.

ATI's chip also provides ICDT (inverse cosine discrete transform) and Motion Compensation features, which help the chip deliver what most users will agree is the best digital video and DVD playback of any currently available chipset. The chip also features integrated TMDS and ratiometric expansion. This latter feature allows custom resolutions that, in essence, allow for continuously variable resolution adjustments. Practically speaking, this feature allows LCD displays to deliver clear, non-jaggy text at various resolutions.

ATI has not committed to any release dates for All-In-Wonder or MAXX (dual GPU) type products, but confirms that it has plans.

Potential Weaknesses

Where is the Radeon weak? It's safe to say that ATI has traditionally been weak in the area of device drivers and, sadly, the initial release of the RADEON does little to sway us from this opinion. We encountered some fairly severe problems during our tests of the RADEON DDR (32MB version), including:

1. No insertion point in QuarkXPress versions 4.0 or 4.1, when using 16 bit or 32-bit colour modes. This makes the card virtually useless to anyone using QuarkXPress.
2. Shadows in dialog box icons are yellow instead of gray (sometimes) in 32-bit mode. This has been a problem with ATI drivers for years! What ATI still hasn't fixed it is anyone's guess. A bad code base is our guess.
3. The Windows 2000 driver displayed pink patches in areas that should be textures when running MadOnion.com's 3DMark2000. There were various other graphics problems in the program, most notably a severe corruption of the display when the program finishes running.
4.  At least on our test system, the DVD installer didn't work under Windows 2000 after uninstalling the MMC from an installation of ATI All In Wonder 128, unless ATI DVD version 4.0 was already in place, or reinstalled afterwards.
5. The anti-aliased mode is virtually useless in all versions officially released as of Jan. 2001. Aside from reducing performance dramatically (by more than two thirds in many cases), it also introduced serious bugs: offset screens, images not displayed properly, lines or other display anomalies, etc. Anti-aliased mode is a washout. (A Windows 9x & Millennium Beta Driver solves several problems, if you don't mind living without tech support.)

This beta driver fixes the following known problems with the RADEON:

• Sacrifice runs without as many flashing textures, mana & health bars fixed
• Giants runs properly with environment mapping on (cubic)
• Better image quality in NHL 2001 (ice reflections)
• The white ball in the XL-R8R program is gone
• Able to record from Composite/S-Video in
• TV Out: OK (you can directly boot on it)
• Better image quality in UT (explosions)
• TV Out settings like position/size: OK
• Carmageddon 2000 works right
• Oni demo works properly
• Quake3 runs smoother
• Diablo2 runs smoother
• Fixed memory leaks
• FSAA working now

Thus, the company has already begun the seemingly endless stream of driver updates that, in the case of our two-year-old Rage Fury or All in Wonder 128 cards, still hasn't resulted in a set of Windows 2000 drivers that is stable or full featured. We can only hope the RADEON doesn't tread down this sorry path, but so far, the evidence is not encouraging.

Indeed, a special  area of ATI's website for "members of the press only" includes updated Direct X 8 and OpenGL drivers, suggesting that the shipping retail drivers aren't as optimized as the versions you'll read about in the press. The company also refuses to release overclocking utilities for the cards, saying that it can't provide a five-year warranty on cards that will be mistreated.

Now that we've had a chance to put a retail board through its paces, we're all the more frustrated by these bugs, because the performance is impressive.

Using a Rage 128-based All in Wonder 128 as the baseline for our tests, the RADEON consistently delivered between 200% and 250% the performance of its predecessor. Here are some benchmarks from MadOnion.com's 3DMark 2000.

Test #1: Windows 2000, 500 MHz Celeron, 64MB RAM Rage 128 Benchmark score: 1147 RADEON Benchmark score: 2332

Test #2: Windows Me, 500 MHz Celeron, 64MB RAM Rage 128 Benchmark score: 1312 RADEON Benchmark score: 3275

Test #3: Windows Me, 500 MHz Celeron, 64MB RAM (Anti-alias on) RADEON Benchmark score: 1109

Test #4: Windows 2000, 500 MHz Celeron, 128MB RAM Rage 128 Benchmark score: 1159 RADEON Benchmark score: 2572

Test #5: Windows Me, 500 MHz Celeron, 128MB RAM (Sync off) Rage 128 Benchmark score: 1330 RADEON Benchmark score: 3376

Pros: There may be faster products on the market in terms of raw bit-blasting speeds, but at high resolutions (up to 1600*1200 at 32-bit!) and in 32-bit colour, the Radeon is fast. Radeon drivers provide support for Windows 9x, Windows 2000, Windows Me and Windows NT (the latter with a display driver only). 2D image quality is excellent.

Cons: Notable by their omission from the above list is Windows 95 and Windows 3.x. ATI says it will not release drivers for these platforms, nor BeOS, OS/2 or even Linux. All officially released drivers so far have some fairly obvious bugs. Windows 98 or Windows Me deliver the best performance from this card.

However, FSAA is currently slow and unacceptably buggy, and owners of PCs based on VIA or ALi chipsets are likely to have significant installation hassles. The card comes with a driver CD, containing RADEON drivers for Windows 98/Me, NT and Windows 2000 plus multimedia center and DVD player software for Windows 98/Me/2000.

There's also a 3D graphics demo that shows off some of the card's new features. There are no games or third-party goodies bundled with the card, as ATI has often done in the past. The card is compatible with ATI's add-on TV tuner, the ATI TV Wonder, but the Multimedia Center bundled with the Radeon is not. You must uninstall the version that ships with the Radeon and install the older software. ATI says it is "investigating alternate solutions." You may be able to live with the above limitations, or you may find, as we did with our QuarkXPress test, a problem that makes the product an unsuitable upgrade. Although we enjoyed its high-performance 3D engine while playing our favorite 3D games, ATI needs to resolve some driver drivers issues before the RADEON earns our recommendation.