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What's new... is old again
October to December 2000 News

December 2000 News

Wednesday December 27, 2000
The Radeon SDR board coupled with Hyper-Z cache provides a compelling to much more expensive cards running with DDR. DDR solutions for the MX lose the "doubling" of data transfer rate per bit of memory bus width by offering only a bus width that is 1/2 as wide (64 bits vs 128 bits for the Radeon SDR). I'll be adding a new section for the SDR boards soon as the number of very positive reviews mount for the cost conscious buyer who is still looking for performance. Read the Radeon SDR Review put up by X-bit labs.

  • I picked up this link from Anandtech Forums on judging the quality and loss of information using compression on texture information. What better way to do this but by presenting a lot of pictures, RMS noise measures and plots of the residual errors. A most amazing and complete texture compression article.

    Sunday December 24, 2000
    December Issue: Maximum PC A present to and from Maximum PC in the form of a cover view for the first issue in 2001. As some sites go from hot to cold to hot on their interpretation of of the Pentium IV, print journals with their monthly issues get a chance to discuss, re-think, and then state conclusions that are probably more valid that some well known web sites. The other thing is that they have writers supervised by "Editors-in-Chief"...just in case the writers forgot to take their daily dose of Adult strength ritalin. Enjoy it...I buy the magazine to save myself from the expense and need of cable modem and getting a CD with a sampling of the latest system software, utilities, and I guess to avoid download rigor-mortis. The other thing is they are a crazy bunch of guys that can laugh at themselves...quite useful in this insane industry.

  • The last news I'll leave you with for 2000 is a news item concerning the operating system Linux that gave birth to this bit of space on the vast web, just shy of 4 years ago. The site intentions at the time were to ensure support for Mach64 derivative based architectures adding on bandwidth enhancing features for simultaneous video overlay and motion compensation capability. While these features were instrumental to OEMs choosing ATI in overwhelming numbers, making it one of the most sold graphics chipsets in graphics history, slight programming differences crept in which made existing drivers non-forward compatible. My basic plan then was to run prototype cards on Linux and report whether or not they could put up a GUI under Xfree86. When the "Rage Pro chipset debut in 1998 with the new AGP slot running on the new Pentium 2 processors, a system was setup ("after hours") and a demo of 5 separate windows of Id's Doom ran flawlessly. This was the result of 6 brief e-mail exchanges with David Dawes and Kevin Martin who are now principals of Precision Insight and who are now bringing "module" based extensions to Xfree86 to support 3D. With version 4 of Xfree86 we now have a official support of the Radeon cards. It has been an eye opening experience this year to work on a couple of handpicked issues alongside field support engineers, but if the site counter (count = 82,898 as of this post), I hoped I have made their life easier in Linux land. Win95/98/ME/2000/NT are important aspects in most peoples life and in mine by osmosis. I hope to have been able to in some way sort out the hype and show some of you excellence that exists at ATI.

    ATI exited year 2000 with a bang. The Radeon SDR garnered the PC Editor's choice award in the December issue of PC Magazine doubling the score of the nearest budget competitor. Two of ATI's cards made the Top 10 (Radeon SDR and Rage Fury Pro) on PC World's top 10 graphics cards.

    I predict next year will be a most amazing year for ATI on many fronts and I look forward to installing the XFree86 4.02 driver for my new Radeon graphics card and running the newly hatched version of Doom that John Carmack is working on. "So John, how about your dream about one code development platform in the form of OpenGL that can be migrated to Win95, Linux and Apple's hardware. Hope we were of some help".

  • I have had my suspicions for a while and experienced professionals in the art of 3D have pointed out that the 30% increase in Nvidia Detonator drivers was indeed and amazing jump. It turns out that it was more or less a somewhat desperate act to maintain their King of the Hill status when the Radeon began to routinely post better framerate numbers in high resolution modes in high quality 32 bit mode. Their have been rumours about decreasing the Z-buffer to 16/20 bits and causing perspective errors with distance objects and of using only 16-bits of information with compressed textures when in 32 bit mode. The result is a 6:1 compression in data size instead the 4:1 or a 30% reduction in the amount of textures to transmit and process. Apparently this performance enhancing mode was not used initially because the 16-bit texture bug introduced artifacting in images containing gradual transitions from dark to light in the form of banding, such as skies. In most games, these "simplifications" are not noticeable but are readily apparent to the trained eye or in side by side comparisons to the untrained eye. So you can have your cake in one of two ways:
    1. Less image quality(16-bit z-buffer and 16 bit compressed textures) with the Detonator drivers but improved (30%) performance.
    2. Pre-Detonator drivers without the 30% peformance improvement but with better texture compression accuracy. The jury is still out whether these improvements can be seen when obcurred by the 2D degradation caused by the blurry output section of the RGB interface.

  • As Radeon makes wider and wider adoption and is tested by games developers, patches will emerge to fix code problems that were not flushed out with orginal development platforms such as VooDoo5 and Nvidia. So far the following application patches have been reported to fix problems with the following games:
    1. Sacrifice
    2. Midtown Madness 2
    3. Giants

    Friday December 22, 2000

    The Friday before the big break. The Penguin is dressed in his annual seasonal attire and wishes Merry Xmas to all and that good will and peace be your ally this holiday. On logging in this morning I got a pleaseant surprise from Angelfire/Lycos when I noticed that they bumped by disk space allocation up to 50MB from 5.0MB. Presently, all the images and text on this site occupy 2.7MB. It is a testament to the design of HTML and JPG that in three years of on and off entries onto these pages that text and a 20MB hard drive served as a useful computational platform back in the late 80s.

  • I just joined the Radeon Revolution with a gift AIW Radeon 32MB DDR unit from none other than ATI. I know that my ASUS P5A-B (AT form factor) is dated but I just love the idea of keeping an AT style case that was home to motherboards going as far back as a 486 SX processor. It ran Linux just fine. The cases today are flimsy contractions compared to cases from five years ago which were built like tanks. It supports TMDS digital flat panel interfaces right out of the box (using the DVI adapter interface that supports both analog and digital video information). I think it marks the beginning of lower cost/weight and slim Display LCD monitors becoming a consumer reality much like the advent of Multimedia sound cards, CD-ROM drives, and PCI/AGP video cards.

  • "Drivers...new ones at that...I want drivers". Is it the tip of an iceberg or the drug like crazed addiction of certain individuals to continually fiddle with "widgets"...be they electrical, mechanical or computational? It is a complex situation with the both the application and the driver at the end of the consumer chain. Today, features conceived that were conceived by the 3D gaming application industry are much more likely to be "turned" on and "used" (actual working AGP chipsets and MS support, AGP video to AGP chipset(ALI, Intel, AMD, VIA) compatability, associated drivers, applications making sense of it all). Even in the era when AGP and AGP2x, many systems behaved like PCI video cards for the most part due to older non-AGP supporting versions of Win95. It reminds me of little brother who screamed out "I want Nintendo, now" in the middle of a department store when he was just a tot. He was very emotional, probably hungry, and it must have felt like god was sending him a message or that is way he interpreted his angst. Today's version of this angst is seen in everyday adults in normal environments at Wal-mart...only the words are "I want my new Video Card/DX8/FPS/No install problems/100 FPS Now!!!...and you can bet I'll be upset if not by Xmas. As my friend said, either get mad in life or reset your expectations.

    I'll be the first to admit that users are not blameless. I have a friend somehow manages to take a easy task and somehow convert it to an olympic event with a degree of difficutly equal to "10". To get an understanding of what happens when DirectX gets a major overhaul and the churn caused in driver development(leaked drivers and special purpose drivers) and games development (patches), go back in time two years ago and read this informative article from authors of WinBench (3D) on virtual improvements in updating. When you are done...learn how Tom's Hardware Site became one of the most read hardware sites with the indadvertent help from ATI in the form of Rage Pro Turbo driver release to next version of DirectX.

    December 10, 2000
    There is a lot of accumulated junk in my bookmarks that I'm more than happy to clearout from a month of surfing. Hope it keeps you busy over the holidays. Season's Greetings.

  • With increasing convergence of television broadcast with computer data bought about by the emergence of the internet, Video rental software in the form of DVD, and the cellphone explosion, here is an article which will help you understand the pioneering work ATI established in the Rage 128 generation and found today in the Radeon in terms of video's minimum frame rate, quality, DVD, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.
  • Want to know about DVD as it pertains to the PC....then take a look at Oleg's PC SoftDVD site.
  • AccelratedX's own Linux/Xfree86 commercial Radeon driver updated its information page
  • Developer's on DirectX8 ...take a look at what developers of this year's hottest titles have to say about DirectX8 and T&L.
  • Texture thrashing is that bothersome effect that occurs in rich environments when you play a first person shooter and suddenly get transported to a completely different environment where new volumous new textures are needed and not in your frame buffer memory. Here are John Carmack's comments on this and new algorithims to get around it. In Unreal, texture thrashing results in a stutter/jerk where the minimum framerate drops suddenly. Take a look at this link that talks about turning off "fog" to prevent texture thrashing in its patch errata. Another workaround is to configure your Windows setup to look like a network server (even if it is not) to workaround the thrashing. and also this one for some suggestions on setup from the developers of Unreal Tournament.

  • Got about 45MB for a great pretender to the DoomIII crown? Take a look at these screenshots for Doom style great that looks and run pretty on Rage Fury and Radeon hardware.
  • "I wish I knew what was in all those upgrades to Windows that Microsoft suggests" is the lament of many users of this operating system when it does not work. With just a few clicks you can now access the world's most thorough external resource on the Win95/98/2000/NT operating systems. Rejoice, your search has just ended...or has it just begun?

    November 2000 News

    November 30, 2000
    December Issue: Maximum PC

  • Been down over the last few days with this years flu...me missus takes pity on me and picks up the December issue of Maximum PC. On the front cover in the top right hand corner, I do a double take and see

    ATI Radeon: World's best budget videocard!

    A juicy quote from the feature article:

    The issue is a comparison of budgets cards under $150 including ELSA Gladiac MX, 3dfx 4500 and Matrox G450. Included on the CD are playable demos of

    1. Crimsom Skies
    2. Cataclysm
    3. Escape from Monkey Island
    4. Age of Empires
    5. First Contact
    6. NHL 2001
    7. ...more...
    The review itself is not available but see why Maximum PC came to the same independent conclusion as another review comparing budget cards by reading Sharky's conclusion and his review.

  • With the increasing "modularization" of the Linux drivers and the mass migration to Xfree86 4.0, many users face a significant upgrade path from their present 3.3.6 versions of Xfree86. Will it be worth it? The simplest approach would be a fresh install from new CD releases of the lastest Linux kernel but customizations made to the existing setup may be lost. Probably the best thing to do (for Red Hat Users) is to wait for an RPM which will install 4.0 over your existing install of 3.3.6. I will report when I find out more. For those users who have questions about Radeon running on Linux, here is a sample of Radeon (vs 128 Pro vs GF2) results that you can expect from a commercial driver from AcceleratedX that is running today.

  • Ever get the feeling that benchmarks and timedemos somehow miss the real value of feature rich video cards? Take a look at this new review at Hardware OC on the Radeon 64MB VIVO.

  • How many FPS are needed until diminishing returns set in? I put down my own thoughts on this about two years ago to explain some of the fuzziness/blur/motion sickness that people saw at higher frame rates. Here is an interesting (and long as usual) thread about minimum framerates from Slashdot. My opinion, today, there are a lot more other more relevant problems to solve today in home computing but even more so in the world at large. It comes down to expanding the meaning of "sharing".

    November 19, 2000

  • Product fan sites...you cannot say enough about them. Fanatical devotion by some can lead some down the path of a soured relationship due to small misunderstandings in installation, configuration, or use. When I check for when a friend's arrival time at an airport, I no longer wait on the phone line and ask the Airline company the very same question as the previous person "What is the ETA and terminal number of the next flight from London?"...instead I look up the Airline companies web site for the information.

    A central Forum serves a similar purpose and can help solve people solve many of these problems by allowing the user to help himself. How many times have you seen the same question repeated in a help forum? Part of a good Product Forum page is that it is "moderated" and read by its designers. They set rules that eventually lead the forum to moderate itself. In the case of Rage3D, the designers have come up with some brilliant ideas:

    1. Well organized Forums
    2. Forums that can be searched
    3. A large database of almost 20,000 threads/posts.
    4. Helpful users who recognize a very good product. Thanks to all.
    5. All posts must come from registered users.
    They also have a great Radeon Kickstart Page covering installation, FAQs, Registry information, and known problems found in today's games (so that you do not have to pull out your hair...someone else has done it already). How well does this all work. Here is a test case involving a newly acquired Radeon on the problematic KX-133 chipset running on a ASUS K7V.

  • OK, with Xmas just around the corner, it is time I put on my ATI hat and put down some thoughts on the "buzz" for ATI products. A price poll has indicated that people are willing to pay a significant amount for video upgrades in increase overall system performance. 52% indicate that they are willing to spend between US $100 to $200 (or about $150 to $300 in Candian dollars). Many people have been reading the glowing reviews on the Radeon based boards and some have been enticed to test drive them courtesy of a combination of their friendly local electronics superstore and liberal refund policy. Many said "Gimme Radeon. Owners of past Nvidia TNT2 and even current generation GeForce2 products switched over due to The stability of the overall product is in part due the driver development and many have said this is the best launch of a new ATI product. For some of the reasons behind this, read the interview with ATI's Chris Bentley talking about OpenGL and driver development stability. For those who wish to play Quake and Unreal Tournament at decent framerates but are looking for more value, there is the Rage Fury Pro that also offers good 2D, but not at the standard of Radeon. In addition, Video-in and Video-out are supported along with excellent DVD. It makes for a very useful appliance come Xmas time at a very reasonable price point.

  • Where do happy smiley people come from ? I was perusing a couple of forums mostly dealing with Radeon based products and came across this link from one of those happy/smiley people. Forget the prozac, give them Radeon! A Radeon User's testimonial

    November 11, 2000

  • DX8 Mini-FAQ: myths, expectations, truths and some questions

  • Is it possible to have a web page and technical support for a $15 ($10 US) product?

    I recently purchased another Hewlett Packard 6S calculator. I upgraded to "HP 6S Solar" from the stock HP 6S. What happened to the old one ? I gave it away to a budding "superstar" analog designer on his last day of work at my company. Cannot blaim a guy for taking up an opportunity to return to school while getting paid for his thesis topic at the same time. Born at the right time?

    Orginally, it came in a "trendy" spice-girl metallic blue colour which made some of the purple function labels perform a "chameleon" dissapearing act under dim lighting. I hope you are enjoying you calculator, Tony. With my fading eyesight, carrying a cool coloured calculator in the high school hallways didn't rank and the silver metallic "Solar version" turns out to be a much better match to the the purple lettering. Onward.

    Fact: The solar version requires only 1 battery whereas the non-solar 6S requires two batteries. I know what you're thinking and keep it to yourself. To preserve battery life, my original unit would power off the display after a few minutes. When I found the "6S Solar" in the store, it was ON . Being the frugal engineer that I am (read cheap/practical/battery conserving), I figured that the unit might turn off automatically when things got dark and turn on automagically when the ambient light was bright enough. A read through the instruction manual revealed nothing about expected battery life/auto-power down information. Step 2: Try an experiment where masking tape is placed over the solar cell powering the calculator. Go watch the X-Files and periodically check on calculator to see when it powers down. Nope, like the energizer bunny, it just keeps displaying. Thought: Daaang...does this mean that I need to change batteries every 3 months ? Time to surf the web. Read on brave surfers.

    What you get for $15: A thin but very solid feeling calculator that is well made. Bring out an HP calculator at any company meeting and expect your "nerd factor rating" to go up a notch. In a crowd of PALM toting marketing types, fellow engineers and, yes, lawyers, you know your place. Watch out for the HP 12C toting Real Estate agents, though. Despite being only a 1/4 inch thick, it is feels more like a piece of 1/4 inch steel plate in its heft and rigidity. The keys could be better. The unit meets my minimum standard for a calculator with binary/octal/hex/decimal conversion and all the other standard scientific functions that I've engineered with. What about my power question ? Turns out the answer is contained in their HP 6S Solar FAQ (free to the surfing) that states "An HP 6S Solar can run for three years in total darkness". Why the disabling of the autopower down function/OFF button in this model ? I figure the permanent on state presents a minimum load to prevent the solar cell from over-voltaging the CMOS circuitry and causing damage. The truth will be revealed when HP Calculator Tech Support center gets back to me with answer about "why no RPN question?"...all for $15 including case, and 20 page manual. Which reminds me, could tech support tell me about neat colours coming out this fall?

    Novermber 7, 2000

  • Human factors engineering by the "big" guy has resulted in us having a number of built in eye processing algorithms. We have very good sense of changes near the periphery of our sight to warn us against impending danger. The down side is that as monitors get bigger and begins to occupies more of our peripheral vision. The result is that we notice refresh rate more readily and the headaches/eyeaches begin to to tell us that things are not exactly right.

    The combination of big screens and high refresh rates combine to produce pixel clocks higher than the FM carrier (350Mhz vs 108 Mhz). Another closely related quirk is our sensivity to pacing whether it be audible or visual. The human brain has an amazing internal time clock that can perceive minute "deltas" or changes. It is this that allows to appreciate a virtuoso violinist solo but to also be senstive to variation in framerates. It is far better (my opinion) to aim for slightly lower but more stable frame rates as found in Radeon products. Benchmarking using the "biggest" number should also become by the standard deviation...bring out your statistics books.

  • 3D image vibrancy or just plain better looking games...is there a secret? The Radeon was conceived to manipulate information accurately. The term image quality is a confusing one which is also a product of 2D quality that can be judged using programs making heavy use of text such as WORD and EXCEL. In the 3D world, when 32 bits of colour depth is used, acceptable roundoff error in the 16 bit world by using mathematical approximation (Taylor series approximations of sine, cos and exponential functions) are not as acceptable. The Radeon chip contains a math accurate IEEE-754 computation unit. Can this accuracy be determined ? Yes, it turns out as we can compare the math unit in the graphics chipset to the one in the CPU. In a recent roundup, the Radeon proved to have the most accurate graphic computation unit.

    There have been a number of confusing notions floating around about stability. This is especially the case in light of Win2000. Many games will not run on Win2K as it provides a more restrictive environment of things the programmer can do to "ensure" that the blue screen of death/operating system or crash does not happen as often. Some games may begin to run on this system, but they will be kicked out without any side-effects on the operating system itself. This causes some to say that such-and-such a graphics card under Win2K has poor (games) stability. The operating system actually protected itself from poor/questionable programming practices of writing "rigth to the metal". You get a bit of performance but you risk losing the spreadsheet you are running behind your afternoon session of "Quake". Over time, practices and experience will allow programmers to re-invent methods to speed up code in applications and drivers that will stabilize the operation of a computer. Think of powering up your computer and leaving it up for 30 days in a row as you play your entire game collection without a single reboot. That would be a pipe dream on todays systems using Win95/98/ME.

  • Great "outta da box experience" means in-house testing, co-development, anticipating, and then staging well in advance of product hitting the shelfs. The Gimme Radeon Experience has for the most part been a very good one. AGP, USB, IRQ conflicts, mini-port drivers are all part of a massive communication party amongst the CPU, harddrive, peripherals and your favourite graphics card. Flash BIOS updates have been instrumental in smoothing hardware conflicts/incompatabilities but sometimes it comes down to install order, using this driver with this BIOS and "shucks" just clocking your CPU down a bit. Here are a few FAQ pages to smooth the installation and ultimately to get "RadGal" jumping hoops on your monitor.
    1. Radeon Installation FAQ:answers to your issues
    2. Intermittent operation issues with Via KX/KT-133 based Athlon systems
    3. Abit KA7 Installation FAQ: Via's KX-133 chipset for Slot-A Athlon Hints
    4. Abit KT7 Installation FAQ: Via's KT-133 chipset for socketed Duron Hints...much less problematic but watch out for the soundBlaster Live
    5. RadeonGuide...End users very own guide
    6. Win 95 USB/AGP supplement/errata... those of you who suffered from and endless boot/re-boot cycle after adding in the USB supplement should read this.
    7. Microsofts version of the AGP/USB issues...technospeak to convince you to buy Win98
    8. AGP4X, AGP driving value of 68, CPU voltage, Fast Writes and the KA7
  • Year end surplus...not when you are paying about 10% interest on a national debt on the order of several hundred billion dollars. It has been said that a lot of problems (homelessness) can be solved by increased "sharing". Expensive sports cars, SUVs, big houses pat the ego but engineers could do more with their skills by mapping out a plan for debt reduction. Put in another light, at least 25 cents of your tax dollars is used to service the interest on the debt. Each man and child's share of the debt amounts to about $20K over their lifetime. Doctors, lawyers, union boys, pensioneers with more yearly income than they need...what is the solution? Smaller houses, more volunteer work, less services, pay per use, garbage limits, and toll roads are visible changes. Gosh and I thought graphics chips were complicated. Hard to believe that taxes were introduced as a temporary war measure and then stayed on to be a temporary rebuilding stategy. Here in my Toronto, our mayor wants to attract the next Olympics and build us up into an even larger world class city. I like the low key and smaller Toronto that I had but then again I'm one of the whiners and, as yet, not a doer at the infrastructural level. Gives you something to look forward to when the 12 year olds that we build these chips for get satiated with enought 3D performance...a definite maybe!

    October 2000 News

    October 31, 2000

  • Balanced design as my dad put it is knowing the boundary between diminishing returns and respecting it. Ecologically, it is a sound practice and the "practical" engineer lives it day to day. Just as most of you purchase Fords, Hondas and Chevys (for those of you over 50), computer hardware has a sweet spot and beyond this point cost starts to become a factor. The cost issues that govern high performance cars also govern graphics cards (or should I say "cars ?"). Heat, mechanical assembly, and marginal stability. Heat removal means large expensive heatsinks. ATI has managed to use its "laptop" technology to squeeze more performance out of its chips for a given amount of power consumption than a well known compeititor. The ATI chips could in fact run without a heatsink without destroying itself...just in case the fan failed. The other aspect is stability and margin. ATI chips are always very conservatively rated. In a recent review of the GF2 Ultra, Anand spent a very good chunk of a review analyzing a heatsink and fan. Go figure ? But that is what happens when you spend upwards of $500 dollars for the last 10% in performance with marginal stability issues begin to unbalance the design and hamper the "visual quality". Reviewers are caught on whether to report the bad aspects of a new product when the true and tried aspects of a review that generate web traffic are "fps" are the easy mark. Magazines should be better off with their longer times to distribution, but I have seen reviews where a single FPS mark in a little known game allow a reviewer to justify a negative review. The best way to gauge the balanced design of a card is by both word of mouth, general review consensus, and reading some balanced overview reviews. I rather (hint...hint) a reviewer spend a sentance on "2D visual quality" than a full page on a heatsink...it is afterall a visual output device...not a winter heater that we are shopping for. In a more realistic setting of Tercel, Focus, Escorts, Civics, Accords, and "the like" buyers...imagine buying a dream Ferrari but everytime I get out of the car, the bottom of the door scratches the curb...ouch!!! A more telling review focussing on balanced design showed the ATI Radeon 32MB to capture the sweet spot for performance, costs and quality. Belows is a graphic summary:

    Linux Penguin

    If you examine the graph above, you will notice that the 2D text quality is just a shade below top notch. There will be a facility within a future driver release (post 7049) to allow the user to "dial in" the 2D quality to account for issues dealing with the following:

    1. Variable noise of power supplies found in computer cases
    2. Motherboard regulation
    3. Impedance mismatch of cables and monitor termination
    Different combinations of power supplies, motherboards, and cables may or may not see any problems with the same monitor. The current Radeon tradeoffs have been design to account for this interaction with a wide variety of systems but tradeoffs need to be made for some monitors. To resolve this, a user enabled option will be provided in the driver to select slower edge rates to accomodate non optimal cable/monitor interfaces. There may be some small tradeoffs in resolution for fast tracking (very high bandwidth) monitors. The user can choose the setting that best suits his system. It is all to do with effectual sets of priorities and tradeoffs. Again, both modes have their advantages...it is up to the user to decide what works in his particular system.

    If you examine the chart above and rethink the ranking process, a card with the best performance but a blank screen should get a "0" score...it is not a graphics pipe to your eye. With this in mind, you can

    1. Take the scores in each column and ignore the video score to get a score out of 90.
    2. You can then take this score and multiply by 10/9 to get a score out of a 100%. This number does not take 2D Video Quality into account.
    3. The last thing to do is take video quality in effect by multiplying the above result by "2D Video Quality"/10.
    So what are the modified rankings and score when this is done ?

    Rank Card Score
    1 ATI 32MB DDR 78.5/100
    2 ATI 32 MB SDR 75/100
    3 Matrox G450 68.3/100
    4 Elsa Gladiac MX 68/100
    5 Herc Prophet II MX 57.2/100
    6 Leadtek GeForce2 MX 56.8/100 ** tie
    7 MSI 816 56.8/100 ** tie 
    8 3dfx Voodoo4 4500 56/100

    So if you want the best GeForce2 MX chipset based card...take the ELSA version. This seems to line up better with the tone of the reviewer's subjective comments. Ever wonder why Matrox has such a following...look no futher than this modified table....but the Radeon cards stand a shoulder above the rest and this explains why it is presently the best selling aftermarket upgrade graphics card.

    October 13, 2000

  • Reveiw-Zone offers a round up of every card from this generation and the last using the same two motherboards looking mainly at framerate. The Radeon provides about 90% of the performance of a overclocked GF2, with 1/3 the heat, no memory heat sinks, better visual quality, better text quality and better computation of colour values for more realistic gloss, texture and object detail... and a minimum of 50 fps in 1600x1200 in 32 bit mode in that game called Quake3...now that is balanced 3D graphics design.

  • If you want all the dirt on the Radeon based graphics cards (just in case you have been living in under a rock like me with a Socket 7 based computer), then go take a look at a compilation of about 30 Radeon Reviews....low heat, most efficient FPS/watt, sharpess, most accurate 3D computing, and smart graphics technology. Because you buy a graphics card ultimately for visual realism (aka fps > 30) and for accuracy (2D sharpness and realistic rendering of hue, saturation, and highlights), the 2D sharpness and colour quality are important. Here are some links covering this with respect to the Radeon:
    1. Sharky on Radeon's 2D quality Review
    2. Maximum PC Review of Radeon and visual quality
    3. Savage News on Radeon Sharpness
    4. Gamecenter comments on Radeon's outstanding visual quality
    5. Avault's on Radeon 2D quality
    6. Radeonic sees stunning 2D quality
    7. Chris Angelini sees "crystal clear text at high resolutions"
    8. PC Monkey sees "clearly the best image quality"

  • The 1 GHz and overclocked systems for a benchmark craze attracted comment from "Charles Moore" about unbalanced systems. Makes one sort of comfortable in the knowledge that the dark rock that I crawled away from this morning is supported by a Pentium 233MMX and I'm very happy with it. Go Charles Go.

  • Linux is not just a very adaptable Software Platform but something that has made inroads to future consumer appliances and if this is the case, then key simplifications in the BIOS can be made to speed up the booting and to decrease the ROM memory size. Go see the first diskless X86 platform with a LinuxBios
  • It looks like ATI's multimedia vision has finally gone mainstream. The "kid" at Anandtech has an article focussing not on 3D but the DVD decode aspects of graphics cards. Maybe one day Video-In and Video-out will be given its just emphasis...but I may have to wait for the next 14 year old wunderkind that grew up making home videos.

    While I am on the topic of wunderkinds, I might as well cover lost innocence. I can see Tom (Pabst) growing older and having the benefit of a successful income stream (web site) that his reviews becoming more insightful and perhaps more neutral. Heck, who would have ever thought he pick "smart" as an adjective for ATI over brute "Ge" Force. Anand on the other hand has had the gift of writing well and often erring on the side of being politically correct, but that does not mean he cannot show a bias and I sense it is a Nvidia one at that or a ATI dislike. One example of this is his selective emphasis and de-emphasis of the metrics used to judge the overall rating of a card. To see this, if you look at any of the recent reviews, 2D quality and 3D computation accuracy/visual quality are not mentioned at all for the Radeon cards or in the recent GF2 reviews. Back up one generation to the TNT2 and Rage Fury Pro (or two) and these aspects are emphasized as being very important. What gives ? Build quality is always mention in any car review even if electric cards are the latest fad. The most interesting aspect to this is that it is again mentioned in the Matrox G450 review, partly because of the products slower than previous generation G400 product which garnered 2D praise. Go figure.

    There has always been the aspect of getting free hardware from manufacturers. Beyond the standard NDA agreements, there are no restrictions on a code of ethics for internet review sites other than the end reader. A well designed and popular internet site cannot ignore a good product but it can still show "favourtisim" over two similarly competing products. When one or two performance aspects are completely overlooked, your "spider" senses just pick up a vibe. "So Anand, why the complete lack of statements about visual quality in recent reviews ?"...hopefully you do not have the some of the genetics of that Serbian leader who never quite grew out of his biases. If Tom can, so can a young wunderkind.

    October 5, 2000

  • To see why the Radeon garnered a "Kick Ass Award" in an era where the GeForce2 has been out for about a year, click on the link to the Radeon review in October 2000 issue of MaximumPC. Included in this issue is a CD-ROM with a Quake3 engine based game combining elements of Lara from Tomb Raider with lifelike joint movements, rich environments, and great game play called Heavy Metal FAKK2

    Is this 2D visual quality and 3D visual quality "thing" of the Radeon cards for real? I took a browse through some early reviews of sites that regularly feature TNT, TNT2 and GeForcce2 cards and as early as July 19, Joel Durham Jr of CNET Gamecenter Review had this to say

  • A couple of things. For raw Linux beginners, have a look at Redmond Linux who aspire to a version of Linux running in tutorial style under Win95...sort of cool. For those Linux newbies who are not graduating beyond the text mode or have a cool new monitor (like me) to support and are having trouble setting up your monitor with Linux/Xfree86? The modelines for defining the timing of vertical sync can be found can now be easily determined using the Xfree86 modeline calculator.

  • ATI's quarter ended on a much better note than predicted 3 months ago by 1/2 the predicted loss partly due to the great success of the Radeon program. Hear president and Chief Operating Officer of ATI talk about the latest quarter end. Two additional new ATI centric sites have come across my beyond the Radeonic site in Euroupe. These two sites are found in France:
    1. ATI Scope link to english machine translation
    2. Pusces 3D ATI section link to english machine translation.
    The last site has an extensive review of the Radeon with benchmarks shown for different CPU and different clocking.

  • The Koreans are coming...the Koreans are coming ...My NEC 15" 5FG retired itself and left me monitorless/computerless for about a week and in search of a monitor. I used to partake in the birth of new graphics cards and in particular in the coddling and feeding of monitors by tweaking register settings and output filters for the greatest visual acuity. Some very high end reference and high quality monitors (usually big) are used to gauge the final visual quality of monitors. As a result, I have always regarded japanese products as top tier when it came to design and quality of manufacture. What I will pay and what I will tolerate on my desktop is not a TV size 21" unit but something more like a 17" unit. When a friend of my bought Samsung about two years ago and recommended them highly. I went out and checked them out and ended up buying a 17" Samsung SyncMaster 753DF monitor for $289 (after rebate) from Promax Computer Systems Inc and just love the edge to edge sharpness and extensive controls. Here are a couple of reviews:
    1. Samsung SyncMaster 753DF Dan's Data and I have similar tastes in monitors
    2. Samsung SyncMaster 753DF Flat Screen Monitor Rocks by DJ Eshelman, May 9,2000
    3. SyncMaster 753, the all in one monitor by JD Zoerman, May 31, 2000
    4. 4 more user reports