Cash-rich with over US$1 billion in revenues after its best year ever, ATI has announced what it calls the world's fastest graphics accelerator. Now sampling, with OEM and retail shipments due in December '98, the company says its Rage 128 delivers a four-fold improvement in overall performance, compared to its previous top-of-the-line chip, the Rage Pro. Indeed, the early numbers are impressive. In both 2D and 3D benchmarks, the Rage Pro is demonstrably faster than all competitors, easily beating 3Dfx's Voodoo2 and Banshee, Nvidia's TNT and the Matrox G200 in Winbench 98 3D results. (Yeah, we know WinBench 3D isn't the greatest, but until we get our hands on a production card to test for ourselves, it will have to do.) In WinBench 3D, the Rage 128 rates 1600, while the Voodoo2 scores 1300), and the frame-rates in games such as Unreal support these numbers. The Rage 128 managed five more frames per second than the TNT, its nearest competitor, in an Unreal timedemo. 2D performance is equally impressive, as benchmark scores of 225 beat those of top competitors Matrox (222) and Riva TNT (220). ATI says the Rage 128 is a full 25 percent faster than Intel's i740.
Pre-announced earlier than it probably should have been on Aug. 27, 1998, the Rage 128 was unveiled accompanied by smoke machines, flash pots and a laser-light show at a gala launch in Toronto, not far from ATI's home-town of Thornhill. There, the company featured demonstrations of its advanced capabilities, including single-pass multitexturing, high-performance 2D and 3D, plus previews of next-generation graphics technologies including Microsoft Direct X 7.0 and Chromeffects. Despite its lack of a few features offered by competing products (notably, it lacks the ability to perform anisotropic filtering -- a capability of 3DLabs' competing Permedia3 chip, as well as the Riva TNT and Savage3D), its claimed 200 Mega-pixels per second peak performance (Matrox's G200 manages only about 100Mpps) should please gamers and business users alike who like to push pixels very, very fast.
The Rage 128 was announced in two flavors, the Rage 128 GL (a reference to the full OpenGL installable client driver the company says it will ship with the product) and the Rage 128 VR (Virtual Reality). Aside from the VR chip's lower price-point, the main difference is that the former is a full 128-bit engine, while the VR -- still a 128-bit processor internally -- uses a 64-bit external interface.
These features, especially the ability to do multitexturing in a single pass and its blazing 200 Mpps performance, add up make this chip ideally suited to both the gaming and workstation markets. In fact, ATI says it will market several products based on the chips. Announced Aug.
27th were three:
Why did ATI elect to use SDRAM instead of faster SGRAM? The dual-ported nature of more-expensive SGRAM didn't pay off, says the company, when twice as much memory could be written to using the chip's bi-directional Direct Memory Execution (DME) capability to produce a similar result. Thanks to the Rage 128 chip design, says ATI, it can offer SDRAM memory on-board instead of SGRAM without losing performance. And, because the Rage 128 uses AGP and DME to store information in system memory instead of local graphics memory, the card's onboard memory provides enhancement to 2D, 3D and DVD applications (i.e., it is not just texture memory).
So, how fast is the fastest graphics chip in the world? Look at these numbers, supplied by ATI:
3D Winbench98/3D Winmark (640 x 480 x 16bpp @ 75 Hz)
Rage 128 = 1600
Riva TNT = 1500
Savage3D = 1400
Voodoo2 = 1300
2D Winbench 98/Business Graphics (1024 x 768 x 16bpp @ 75 Hz)
Rage 128 = 225
Matrox G200 = 222
Riva TNT = 220
Geoperf CDRS
Rage 128 = 65+
Evans & S. Real Image = 64
Permedia2 = 35
Matrox G200 = 10
ATI says that the chip's line and edge anti-aliasing make it ideally suited to the needs of 2D and 3D CAD and design workers. Certainly, the company's aggressive pursuit of both the gaming and workstation markets, where it has not traditionally been strong, speaks well of its marketing chutzpah. Indeed, company reps predict that, with the help of Microsoft initiatives like Chromeffects and the company's work with SGI and HP on the API code-named Fahrenheit, 1999 will be "the year of 3D on the desktop."
Already, business titles such as Computer Associates' Enterprise Management system and Intervista's VR Charts make a strong case for 3D visualization as a next-generation business tool for scientific visualization and data mining tasks. And, as Microsoft's Ty Graham says, "3D grabs eyeballs." On the web, where Microsoft is pushing its Chromeffects tools as a way to evolve the user interface, grabbing eyeballs is a key requirement. With Chromeffects, web-page developers can wrap HTML onto 3D objects and provide TV-quality effects, even over limited bandwidth connections.
On the downside, Niles Burbank, Product Manager of ATI's component marketing department confirmed that neither anisotropic filtering (which smoothes out the picture) nor DirectX texture compression -- both are features in DirectX 6.0 -- are supported. Basically, anisotropic filtering is the next step up in the progression from bilinear and trilinear filtering. And, with its added computational complexity comes an additional performance hit -- usually in the order of four cycles. Usually used to smooth blocky, low-res texture maps in games, it improves the display of textured objects, but can cause text to become fuzzy. However, Burbank downplayed the lack of anisotropic filtering, saying, "it's a check-box on a list, not a feature that we think users are going to miss. Some of our competitors say they're providing the feature, but at what quality? We're focusing on the features that pay off in performance." Dr. Tom Pabst, of the popular Tom's Hardware website, agreed. "The performance hit is too great," said Pabst. "I don't think many people want to pay that kind of penalty."
The Rage 128's lack of support for texture compression is less of a problem, says Burbank, with plenty of memory on-board and the ability to pull from system memory at any time, allowing virtually unlimited textures anyway. In fact, ATI says no games exist that won't display correctly due to this limitation. And, says the company, the full-scene, order-independent anti-aliasing, single-pass multi-texturing, mathematically correct per-pixel MIP mapping and deep (32-bit) Z-buffer, powered by the card's superscalar design will provide an unsurpassed gaming experience by allowing lighting effects, fog and environment mapping effects to be applied with no slowdown in frame rates.
Certainly, some of the demos we saw at the launch were impressive. Finland-based Futuremark (http://www.3dforge.com/) showed off a demo called "Rage Dawning" that was the best real-time demo we've ever seen -- and the first to depict real-time character mophing of a metallic, reflective humanoid, a la the T2000 in Terminator 2.
Also impressive was a demo of a graphics engine called "Any World" that depicted real-time lighting effects such as specular effects, laser lights, explosions, lend flares and environmental light mapping in a real-time walk-through of a 3D room.
Later, Microsoft demo'ed Chromeffects and DirectX, and a number of games, including Quake 2, were shown zipping along at frame rates sure to make Voodoo2 fans jealous.
Finally, Microsoft's Digital TV evangelist demonstrated a real-time digital TV broadcast, powered by a Quadrant-supplied MPEG encoder and Microsoft's DirectShow software running on a host. The MPEG stream, he said, can be delivered by antenna, cable, or disk. The Rage 128, ATI claims, is the first chip to fully support digital TV. The Microsoft rep explained that it handles video at the so-called HD0 decode quality level. As ADSL, satellite, ATM, MDS and other high-bandwidth pipes become widely available, digital TV is likely to become a viable alternative to traditional analog broadcasting. And, of course, Microsoft wants a piece of that.
Composite video and SVHS out are standard features on the two consumer cards. As well, the cards offer VFC/AMC connectors for adding optional multimedia enhancements such as TV tuner and video capture capabilities. ATI says that OEM manufacturers using the Rage Magnum may elect to skip or include the TV/video out connector as appropriate to their audience.
As for the multimedia capabilities of the cards, ATI has announced that its ISA-based ATI-TV and PCI add-on TV Wonder capture and TV tuner options will soon work with the Rage Fury, but the company still hasn't delivered Rage 128-compatible drivers. The company has also announced but not yet delivered an "All in Wonder"-type product based on the Rage 128. The company says it expects to release a Rage 128-compatible update to its ATI Player later in March, 1999, allowing the add-on cards to work.
ATI also provides impressive DVD playback capabilities with the Rage 128. The chip's on-board hardware decoder yields superior performance compared to the often jerky motion of competitors' software decoders. Overall, ATI says it put 200 man-years of engineering development into the chip and has over 50 patents issued or pending on its design.
(For more info on graphics accelerators, see Jo Lux's Comparison of 3D Chips.)
In other ATI news, the company has released a full Open GL ICD (Installable Client Driver) for Rage Pro-based cards and Win95/98. It's available at www.ati.com (or here).
For Further Reading:
Other large enduser ATI sites on the Net:
Also compare: Permedia3 FAQ
Post new comment