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What's new... is old again

April 1999 News

  • April 25, 1999
    A new version 1.53 AGP driver for Super7 boards based upon the ALI Alladin chipsets has been released and cross tested against many video chipsets including the Rage 128 chipset. Read about it in the following PDF file. The driver is now said to be AGP 2.0 compliant.

  • Alan Dang has posted a All-in-Wonder 128 review that should be read by anyone trying to understand DVD, MPEG-1, subpicture buffer, IDCT and how these features are used to seamlessly record and playback video streams.

  • April 22, 1999

  • The future is so bright... you gotta wear shades. It is a line that reflects the mood of an era gone by and is somewhat difficult to imagine today in view of recent events surrounding Kosovo and locally with the Littleton shootings. The United Nations approach of using trade sanctions has done little for the region known once as Yugoslavia. A PBS documentary dating from 1992 to 1996 documented the loss of 500 years of Muslim culture in Bosnia under the guise of democratic rule by Milosovicz The reality of the situation was that movements for independence via democratic vote in 1992 in multicultural regions, such as Bosnia, were a convenient excuse for Milisovicz to lend/send the region an elite group of professional mercenaries with the orders to instigate, kill and exterminate. It showed the mass execution of all citizens in a town (men, women, children) in two days by SWAT like teams of these elite killers. Think of real people being pined off in their houses, driveways, walking to school as these teams of killers were given orders to shoot on sight. Think of this event being repeated again and again and you realize that the only sanctions that would have been effective would have been those of military trade. It is sad today that a madman can control and hide behind weapons of mass destruction (elite soldieres trained to carry out cold blooded murders) violating all rights of prisoners of war. The world has stood buy for the last five years and watched the civil war evolve in former Yugoslavia. NATO has invented new rules and has bypassed the security council of the United Nations. Emotion seems to have taken over reason but the reality is that the current bombing strategy will fail as the U.S. realize that they cannot reason with a madman. The scary part is that the U.S. alreay knows this and the elmeents with it are just strategically defusing the weapons base of a madman.

  • Phil has tagged Part II of his Rage 128 review to the end of his previous review and has put down his thoughts regarding general application and use and games. He is a software professional primarily running Windows NT using applications such as AutoCAD 14, Bryce 3D and Caligari Truspace in his day to day work and depends on OpenGL. Be sure to read his FAQ for some down to earth advice about selecting a video card.

    His system presently allows him to have both an Xpert@Work card and a Rage 128 in the system at the same time. Depending on who's eyes you trust the most (Anand's or Phil's) and what monitors are used, Phil's opiniion is that the image sharpness and detail for general use are astounding and have better image sharpness/stability than either the Banshee or Millinium. Some quotes from Phil:

  • April 9, 1999
    For some, buying or updating their computer systems on a continuous basis is akin to a hobby of sorts. Some might agaonize for months about their next video card purchase by reading reviews, talking to friends, and dropping by their local computer store to help with the decision, but for Allan Cole, it is almost like any everyday process of eating and sleeping. Since September of last year he has evaluated the TNT and the Banshee products (not to mention Rendition, S3, Cirrus, i740, Millenium, etc products before that) and here are his comments about Rage 128/Banshee/TNT2/3500 in the Rage 128 testimonials section. They just want to experience first hand the advantages and disadvantages

  • Hallelujah....ATI has been seriously following the lead made by Compaq, Dell, and IBM in officially selling and supporting Linux by announcing TV Tuner support that is to folded into the proposed Linux standard called Video for Linux. I have been getting a fair amount of mail about confirming this bit of news and can only comment that I do not watch a lot of TV and that most of my participation will is on getting the 2D GUI aspects supported for Linux. Rage 128 is on course for 2D X11 support with Register specifications given to developers. Question: Does DVD constitute Video ?

  • All-in-Wonder 128 reviews are now up at ZDTV, Anand and Sharky's Extreme.

  • Anand has posted some interesting and orginal recommendations regarding which video card he recommend for Super 7 motherboards. His basic conclusion was that he would prefer a PCI based Video card until the AGP stabilizes. This means more experimentation on the part of AGP Super7 motherboard manufacturers with various AGP graphics cards and release of new AGP GART drivers and possibly BIOS updates.

    The Rage Fury comments have me convinced that his results are not based upon the CD93/6076 drivers allow for BIOS settings AGP TURBO and VGA FRAME BUFFER to be enabled. The Intel open AGP standard deployment has seemingly worked to Intel's favour under Win95/Win98. VIA and Acer chipsets lack the overall simultaneous joint development efforts with Microsoft, motherboard vendors, and video graphics developers and AGP on Super7 very much remniscent of overall 3DNow development. While there are certainly examples of individual excellence in any one area in any particular time interval, there is a lack of enough events like the Plug Fests to help co-ordinate development activities. The AGP standard is complex enough, it seems, to need the support and codevelopment of motherboard, chipset, graphics and operating system. All four areas are owned/controlled by Wintel duopoly. The Super7 AGP compatability issue will certainly clarify in the future as AGP chipset vendors now have a good cross section of video chipsets and motherboards upon which each will cross test against. Fundamentally, this is the next hurdle that internet review sites have the potential of sorting out. As much as I admired the effort of Anand, it is still important to state the assumptions of a study and the equipment. In this case, the video graphics drivers and AGP driver releases are critical. This is all the more surprising as Anand's fellow reviwer, Michael Andrews, pointed out that he had updated drivers that he was about to try on his All-in-Wonder 128 about the same time Anand wrote his Super7 Video Card review. I still cannot believed he picked the PCI card in the form of a Banshee Chipset: 256 bit textures, No AGP main memory access features, No DVD, and blocky image quality. Alan Cole wrote in to 3DGaming Forum stating that he tried out the Banshee for a while in the form of a Diamond Fusion and found it be prone to crashing and random hanging. Go Figure.

  • Where was the graphics industry a year ago ? Both WinHEC and CeBit had just finished. The i740 and VooDoo2 had just been released. The G200 emphasized 32 bit image quality and showed what features beyond adequate framerate could be added to improve the overall gut feel of visual quality. The TNT was still being promised at 125Mhz memory interface speed but had yet to released or sampled. The G200 sat in the middle of the framerate curve between the VooDoo2 and Riva 128. The G200 was proclaimed as the integrated video chipset performance champ that could get you near VooDoo2 performance with much better visuals and every chip on the retail shelf was proclaimed slow in "relative terms". The truth was that demanding games,such as Quake, could run on Pentium 233 MMX chip on a Rage Pro could run at 24 fps. Today it continues to drive Dell's stock upwards and is found in 5 of its six best selling systems. The conclusion from this is that people/OEMs want stable drivers and good 3D performance on the order of about 24 fps. Beyond this point, it is the game of diminishing returns for most modern day parents who lease their cars and pay a mortgage on a house. . So why the Rage Fury and not last year's car of the year.

    Actually there is nothing wrong with last year's car of the year except for the fact that cars serves as a good analogy when framerate is the focal point, but, like the top speed of a car reaches a certain level it becomes almost a non issue. A better analogy is...are you ready ?... "laundry". If a new machine could take a 1/2 hour wash cycle and reduce it to 15 minutes, most people and laudromat owners would say neat. If this new washing machine could also have your clothes all come out looking like freshly pressed and ironed, it would be a knockout seller. Why ? Because freshly pressed shirts are significant in human terms. Personally, you would not care if your floppy disk drive has remained unchanged for over a decade, despite its slow(relative) speed due to its acceptance (in human terms) as a perfectly robust low cost and convenient medium for transferring information in our computerized world. It has reached and fulfilled a certain mminimum level of performance. The CDROM took over from the floppy and won over as a software delivery vehicle in an era of ever increasing disks and installs, but the lack of low cost CDROM write features guranteed the floppy's future on new platforms New human wants and desires/needs are more permanent and higher quality storage of family albums, pictures, home VCR movies and archiving Super 8 projection film. Imagine taking home a DVD of your 4 years of high school from your graduation ceremonies courtesy of your year book committee. Moving the MPEG decode and DVD decode away from the CPU and putting them into video hardware will have signifcant impact and utility once the large storage of DVD is brought to bear on a promise once known as mulimedia grows up.

    The Rage Fury offers significant benefits allowed by new silicon technologies the essentially offer the capability of offering more transistors/logic/processing power at about the same price as last year's chip. The Fury's 3-4x 3D performance improvement is a significant jump over previous generation designs and offere significant gut feeling visual improvement and potential for tomorrow's games such as Quake3.In addition, MPEG hardware support will a interesting partnership with an emerging DVD video revolution. DVD on a PC can now be had at about one third the price of conventional DVD players which backward compatable with CDROM. Remember that games are one application of 3D hardware. Workstations and engineering based applications have been using 3D under OpenGL for over the last decade and this long term development of engineering, drawing, and graphic tools can now utilized by most individuals working out of their home. Yep, it can run games as well. You may decide to wait and play the CPU game of Pentium 100, 133, 150, 200, 233, 266, 300, 333, 400 but the each of these successive jumps is not equivalent to 100 to 400 jump found in the Rage128 over previous products from the previous generation. The CPU successive jump game be played out now with yet to be released accelerators suchs as TNT and 3Dfx, but these successive jumps do not address the fundamental improvements offered in the Fury with regards to DVD IDCT and OpenGL hardware features. Today, even the Rage Pro offers better performance capability on DVD playback than the TNT upon which the TNT2 is based upon. The Fury offers even more DVD performance than the Rage Pro with the IDCT hardware assist to eanble the whole system to multiprocess games, business applications, and MPEG video simultaneously. Just like hot rodded dragsters focussed on top speed only, reliability is a critical a factor to people who lease their cars to get to work each day and one of the strongest suits of ATI in terms of lack of hanging and system stability. Watch out for the Mario Andrettis who race from stop light to stop light.

  • April 4, 1999
    There has been a lot of very favourable testimonials on pertaining to the 6076 drivers praising the finishing touches added by the driver in terms of stability, 16 bit quality, 20% speed increase(up to), and the elimination of mouse lag in the OpenGL driver. Some excerpts are from below:

    The DVD revolution is beginning. Here are are a couple of articles/posts about the the potential of DVD and why the advanced IDCT DVD capabilities argue for the Rage Fury.

  • It is now just the beginning of April with the birth of the Rage Fury onto the Retail scene having just occurred over a month ago. With Baby Fury officially a little over one month old in terms of language development, the drivers have now reached a level of maturity with the 6076 drivers that reflect the potential and enthusiasm seen in the early previews and being being echoed by both high interests levels by end users and critical praise by developers, alike. Basically top tiered visual quality (DAC pixel quality and 3D rendering quality that are often used viewed as interchangeable but are in fact completely different issues). The early teething problems and very high expectations levels by ex-TNT/ex-VooDoo2 owners and new Rage Fury owners, who read the January previews, has ultimately resulted in a solid new dirver (6076 version) and a very good LightSpeed end user FAQ. This FAQ captured almost all of the issues dealing with Non-Intel chipsets and CPUs and some very real issues dealing with 16-bit ditthering driver algorithims and missed mouse lag driver issues exposed under high resolution 1024 gaming. The recent 6076 drivers show that the sqeaky wheel does indeed get the oil.

    The relative lack of problems by previewers and the above FAQ show that a fair percentage of the problems were due to the the simple fact that review sites often test with the lastest revisions of BIOS, motherboards, DirectX, and Win95(think USB/AGP supplement=Win98) which have been pretested more thoroughly and do not address the transition problems inherent code in need of patches and supplement releases. The availability, increasing interests, and large number of Rage 128 cards bought within the last month in the form of the Rage Fury and Xpert 128 cards will both motivate and enable motherboard, sound and sound card manufacturers to flush out remaining compatability issues in the upcoming release of their respective WHQL drivers.

    The Lightspeed FAQ is a distillation of wisdom gleamed from author following various threads of discussions on the unified ATI 3DGaming web site while the 6076 is a product of this and Rage Fury users who used the on-line telephone support and e-mail support.

    DVD will be a definite wave in the future of PC developement but like other hardware features in the world, it will not make a difference if the accompanying software (DVD in this case) is not available and this is sadly where commentary is needed. Many of gaming centric ("highest number is best,Dude, type of reviews") have too a narrow focus to be expected to provide answers about future and prospects of new developments such as OpenGL (not game subset rendering only mini-GLs but full ICD implementations capable of running Workstation class applications for architectural, PCB, and 3D animation), DVD acceleration using IDCT, and creative uses of 32MB frame buffers.

    Just as CD revolutionized the encyclopedia with the release of Encarta, DVD's speed and capacity will have an impact on MPEG decode storage, and Hard Drive backup. The recently released All-in-wonder 128 will bring this into greater focus with its unique capability to efficiently encode and decode video sources. This will be especially evident with Digital Broadcast TV technology within the Rage 128 Chipset that has yet to be activated. It does not exist in any other chipset at the present time. Responsible PC journalism must lead and guide the end user to appropriately weight and value of new features and current implementation of conventional 2D and 3D features. The internet community is fortunate to have sites that have a mission statement to the provide neutral and unbiased reviews by the use of traditional publication approaches of copy editor, use of multiple individuals, internal reviews, formal testing guidelines for beta products and final reviews performed on individually purchased units from retail stores. Part of the attraction of internet reviews and the "walk on the wild side" is leading to an understanding that more standardization of reviews are desperately needed in addition to the "datapoints" provided by more non-conventional reviews. As always, the truth is always in the middle and the sites in my opinion that have hit the middle consistently are Anand, Avault, and Sharky's Extreme. The latter despite the fact that independent inner factions oscillate on the "Hey gaming dude" side from time to time. Kudos to all of them them. The Fury (my opinion) is truly one great product that strikes the balance. In February, I used the words Drop Dead Dorgeous and I stand by that statement when I speak of fundamentals 2D speed, pixel and text clarity, 3D image quality (colour and saturations, 32 bit rendering, large texture support) and advanced DVD features. For those who like to continue to like using brute force techniques such as using overclocked memory parts and fans, I like to refer you to an article discussing the " zero margining" written back in September 1998. Fans have been a indispensible to maintaining the temperature and reliability of CPUs. The introduction of the i740 began a trend of using heatsinks on integrated graphics controllers. They can also be found on recent TNT2 and VooDoo3 cards and indicate to me that current consumption and heat generation have increased overall despite the more efficient 0.25um technology. Earlier generation TNT cards were able to run without a fan on some designs but I have yet to see TNT2 designs that do not require them. A simple experiment of disabling the fan answer some questions very quickly about heat generation of this generation compared to last generations. My guess/opiniion is that it has increased due to the priority being placed upon higher frequency clocking operation. Designing for higher frequencies incurrs a cost in power dissipation due to the wide internal busses and increased pipelining and the cost in silicon area can never be recovered even in chips which are clocked at a lower frequency. Last I like to take this opportunity to thank the webmasters at Rage3D for his continued good work at digging up Rage 128 material and tidbits across the wide internet land.

  • April 1, 1999
    The Angelfire server has been down for about the last week and just came back up today. A lot of late breaking news can be found at Rage3D regarding a preview of the new April WHQL driver in the form of CD93. I was already to tell you about Rage V,VI and VII and then I look at the calendar date :) . Later.

  • The Rage Fury has long had the AGP DIME implemented in D3D but not in the OpenGL driver allowing it to handle large textures without significant performance drop. Thresh's FiringSquad review indicated that the transfer/performance was nearly twice that of the TNT. For the coming generation of games, it will be more difficult at 32-bit resolution as much more of the 32MB local memory is allocated for increased double buffering density requirement and increased z-buffering demands. The local memory will need to perform a slow transfer to main memory when it finds that the data it needs is often not available locally. AGP provides a high bandwidth pipe to reach this information. Here is a graph from from Tom's outdated review with the AGP DIME not enabled in a pre-release driver using S3's extra large Mon2 (see old results under Rage 128 column) and the new results run on a Celeron 450.

    Quake2/S3 Large Texture Mon2.dm2 Demo Performance

    1024x768@16 Bit
    CPU Rage 128

    (old 6060 driver / new 6076 driver)

    		 TNT

    (Detonator)

    		 TNT2@125/150

    (Detonator)
    Celeron 450

    NA / 49.4 (CD89)

    NA

    NA
    Pentium III 500

    17 / 60 **

    38.9

    64.7

    The estimate 60 fps estimate is for Rage Fury running on a Pentium system with the new 6076 driver clocked at 110 MHz core. This is based upon a conservative factor of 32.5/29.5=1.10 that uses existing framerate increases of a P2-400 and a P3 -500 as shown in Tom's Crusher charts and the 110/100 factor from scaling of the core engine speed.s in the Fury. There have been many successful reports of scaling the Fury's core to 110 MHz and memory to 140 Mhz. The TNT2 obtaines it performance by adding many more additional 128 wide pipeline stages and silicon area. The net result is much more silicon area, more heat, larger die size and less features available for useful features such as DVD decode hardware and and OpenGL hardware features found on the Rage Fury. Just as any Pentium Class processors have satisfied the computing needs of most people in the last five years, The Rage Fury offers a class of performance that obviates the need for any upgrade in the foreseeable two years despite the best efforts of marketers to argue ever largers textures applications and faster memories for what i call marketing generations. The Fury today hits the sweet spot in terms of costs , performance and useful features that ready you for the video and 2nd digital revolution about to come bought on by DVD's capacity and power. Despite all of this, I doubt many could tell a difference in between 65 fps and 50 fps and if you do not understand why click on the following links describing marketing generations and the concept of 4x/making coffee. 150/175/200 Mhz memory not required.

    It is noteworthy that the Celeron results with the new CD89 driver outperform the Pentium III using the TNT with their new Detonator drivers. It would be nice if Tom's Hardware page updated the Rage Fury Review with the newly released Candidate drivers that address mouse lag and 16 bit dithering issues. With the driver's issues clearing up, driver speed improvements, Solid and Fast ICD OpenGL and the best NT performance to date.