^/\^ PeaK /\^/\

What's new... is old again

April 98 News

• April 30, 1998 Trademarks are carefully nurtured symbols. ATI is a pretty cool company to work at but as pretty as I think the ATI logo is and as proud as I am to display it, it is copyrighted and I am using it without consent. To someone having clicked onto my page that sits on a external site with a weird path that reads https://www.angelfire.com/ca/rchau, I would think that most will realize that this is a personal page that happens to discuss Linux Advocacy on ATI hardware. Two ATI logos taken from the real ATI website have been removed becuase their is always the possibility that someone/somewhere will miscontrue the use of the copyrighted logo in association with views (some quite radical) expressed in the Web page as those of ATI Technologies Inc. This is not so and has never been the case.

The stickier question is whether there is a conflict of interest between what I say and what the official ATI web pages say. Most people reading these pages realize that all of the information within is often accompanied by a link to the original source of information. In the year and a half that this page has existed, I have been asked to modify less than ten lines by my company about comments (fairly tame and innocent IMHO) that might be interpreted as official statements about future products and direction. Let this be clear: In my employment so far, I have never been called upon to suggest what my company should do or not do about 3D with respect to hardware design or API usage. Do not hold my company responsible for anything I say. The above will be added to my disclaimer. I am a "wannabe" just like many of you who have interests in areas not within their official capacity. I cherish this disassociation because more often than not I feel ATI products are not given fair reviews by web sites (with nothing to lose other than their readership) and that I should be able to comment freely on a site/review on my own . To make this dissoication more clear I will remove mention of my employment at ATI from my disclaimer and also remove present message in a few days. This message is purely for the benefit of those who strongly associate me with ATI in some sort of official marketing/planning activity. See me for what I am....just another "wannabe" who likes good design and recognizes good design when he sees it. This includes practical design and recommendation of components for computer usage and counterspeak against those who hype two seater sports cars to working class families who need to haul their kid from one hockey practice to another. Of course I could always be wrong and come to think of it I did see a number of Miatas with hockey sticks hanging out of the back seat.

. This page is meant to provide end user support in areas that are not covered by ATI. Write to me if you have any suggestions.

• April 27, 1998
  Note: These are the personal opinions of mine and not those of ATI. This page is not in any way associated with ATI and should be treated as such

Tom has fallen for another card with the latest flavour of the month being the Matrox G200 (there are legitimate issues related to pre-release silicon regarding tweaked drivers ? fast silicon ? overlocked silcion ?32 bit only Win95 driver ? overheated heatsunk silicon ? so reader beware). Matrox has a good part and their re-emergence is welcomed. My main beef has to do with giving practical product advice to people rather tell someone to buy the fastest minivan because I drive a red sports car. For most people, price does matter, P200MMX units are already overkill for most people's needs, Graphics cards running at 24 fps work for most games/people, 3D is overhyped.

Last month's rave is will be in this month's dog house....does anyone remember VooDoo2 being crowned 1.5 months ago ? Tom's latest roundup has no mention of VooDoo, reviewed one month earlier in his overview. He said " ...this chipset still runs most games wonderfully, fast... " . I think it would have been useful but ultimately hypocritical to show the VooDoo results alongside the RagePro ones in the latest review: The VooDoo would have had to been classed as slow by Tom's ever changing "standards" because the RagePro would have outclassed the VooDoo under the benchmarks and system hardware used in the latest review. Suddenly wonderfully fast has become slow. Tom writes a good read but lacks consistency in his own comments. For his own benefit he really should send pre-releases of his reviews to the manufacturers of hardware products. Since they have the most to lose, they will spot the most glaring inconsistencies and help him edit out and make the review more useful. This is done for high end Audio equipment reiviews (Stereophile) where things are very subjective and highly variable due to component interaction. The omission of the VooDoo results is...well... unacceptable....it has been the metric/yardstick by which all other companies have aimed at and of which numerous comparitive reiviews are available. That is my journalistic hat and I know Tom has tried it on at least once. I'm just going to keep reading Anand's Tech Page cause a find this 15 year old sense of balance is just way beyond his years.

Enough editorializing and back to the G200...the framerates are impressive for the G200 and it will be interesting to see how this number holds up when ATI plays there next hand. Most game developers will be targeting to run on hardware of the likes of Permedia 2, Riva128 , Verite 2100, RagePro, and VooDoo which have performance on the order of VooDoo at very reasonable prices. Only ID has announced a more ambitious engine in Trinity(proprietary) to run Quake3. There will be a slew of Quake2 engine based games while Trinity will address the question of what next in 3D. My view is that present 3D hardware offers legitimate useable choice in terms of just gaming. It is overhyped because computers are versatile appliances where business apps, video playback, Television in a window, DVD playback, are useful toasters. Of course none of them hold a candle to something as simple as hiking.Even my little 5 year old nephew tells me that.

New hardware should not obsolete the adequacy of the industry's effort and success(my opinion) at meeting the needs of today's gaming software and users. On the contrary, they should all be applauded alongside with big OEMs, like Dell and Compaq, for bringing in VooDoo-like performance in mainstream systems. I wouldn't mind an Alpha processor in my machine but frankly it's hot, does not run most of my software, uses special memory, and equivalent versions of software cost more.

Tom should read my End User section to get a feel for what are the other important issues when picking a card. Maybe our workplace will move over from the networked Sun/HP workstations next year and run our $80K/seat graphically intense IC design software on terminals based upon the G200/Rage128....now that stuff could use performance and probably more to boot. For 90% of the rest of us (those who want practical and capable hardware for Today's games running at Nintendo64 speeds) Forsaken and Incoming have shown that games can be efficiently coded with good (sufficient) quality levels on Todays hardware.

Tom's latest report confirms that (putting on my Rage Pro hat now) the RagePro is a very viable solution giving 24+ useful/pratical frames per second acroos all Direct3Dgames and up to almost 3x this level on well coded ones. The Quake scores are subject to improvement due to both a Win95 issue(16 bit code legacy) and an OpenGL issue (pending multi-texture support).These should both be addressed within the next few months.

Tom's results were released on April 27, 1998 and are the first published ATI OpenGL results (by him) using ATI's Beta2 OpenGL drivers(Released March 30, 1998). The Beta3 drivers have been available since April 16, 1998 and Tom should have used those in his review as the AGP card he used would have benefitted from optimizatons for this bus. Here are Tom's results in efficiently loadeable text ;-)

P2-233 Framerate Results( Forsaken/Incoming/Quake Massive/Turok)
        640x480         47/30/23/21             P2-233
        800x640         34/24/NA/NA             P2-233

        640x480         58/38/24/27             P2-400
        800x640         44/29/21/na             P2-400

If you go to his Tom's review, you will find that the review is not very useful reference point for the purposes of comparison to other reviews: (These tables could load much much faster and be just as effective in text.) Few people run Massive and most run Demo2. There is a simple scale factor to map between the two. There is a lot of mention about the great inherent quality advantages of hardware anti-aliasing support in the G200 hardware but not any combinations of cards+demos in the review to illustrate this.It is, for now, a "vapour" 3D effect mentioned in a spec sheet. Run Winbench, I'm sure they will add appropriate marks for these quality features in a format that is easy to compare. Other vendors who have it (ATI) are deciding whether it will be worth the framerate/quality hit. I care about fluffy clouds in my wedding pictures but not in a game....we'll I guess I would if I had to justify spending >$300 on a piece of hardware to my wife :)

On a related note, ATI announced the Xpert 98 Rage Pro based card that will have 8MB of fast SDRAM memory selling for $98. Think of it as a Xpert@Work with 8MB memory option and slightly slower SDRAM vs SGRAM. Efficiencies in "Only 32-bit" drivers and multi-texture support (ICD OpenGL and DirectX-6) will make the RagePro a practical solution for games giving more than adequate performance for todays games at a reasonable price.

Reminder:I better go out today and pick myself up a MMX chip before they get extinct or I'll never exercise those mutipliers on my motherboard.

The comments above are not those of my employer ATI and are purely my own views.



• April 25, 1998
  Added a link to "page of links" to reviews by End Users to the Review pages of Rage Pro based cards.
  
  The release notes for the latest Win95 RagePro driver (2312) discusses the changes/tradoffs for future drivers and applications:
• In order to take the fullest advantage of ATI's graphics capability it is necessary to start a process to move many of our driver components to fully utilize the inherent advantages of the Windows 9x use of 32bit code. All future shipping versions of ATI Windows 95 Graphics drivers will continue in this direction. You may find a small number of older versions of applications written using the Windows 3.x, 16 bit model, which had hooks directly into the display driver that, will fail when accessing our 32bit driver components.


What does it all mean ? My guess is that the elmination of support of legacy 16bit code will speed things up considerably. It looks as if now may be the time to get a Pentium Pro that runs with L2 cache at the CPU rate. Win98 will probably also drop legacy support on the sly. Recent benchmarks were run at Tweakit to confirm either the lack of 32 bit code in recent Win95 releases using Winbench to gauge the Xpert@Work. The 2312 (alias Turbo Driver) was the first of the ATI drivers to start this migration path. If you want to continue running 16 bits applications for Win3.1, use the 2278 driver. My suspicion is that some of the performance gains made by the competition have to do with them trading off 16 bit compatability in their drivers for 32 bit speed. Will the real Turbo driver please stand up :) .



• Happy Birthday, Sis! Enjoy your the company of friends today. I finished a long overdue update on framerate numbers for the ATI Beta OpenGL drivers based upon various posts around the Web. By no means definitive, it has gone throught the heavy filter of time and I think it is somewhat respresentative.
• Last week I mentioned that one of obstacles towards more widespread deployment of Linux was the release of cutting applications for people assumed to Linux literate enough to be comfortable with shell commands and the like. To address this, Red Hat has spun off a separate group called Red Hat Advanced Development Laboratories or RHAD Labs to pursue these issues. Kudos to them. While you are at Red Hat's site, go to their compact and well organized set of links under linux-info
• Want to take Linux out for a test drive on your Win95 system ? This Monkey Linux distribution is a compact version of Linux that will install and run well on even 385SX systems and is self contained on one DOS directory. The definitive documentation source for Linux by Matt Welsh has been updated to include installation notes for all the major distributions including Red Hat, Bebian and Slackware. Matt now has a team of about 8 people generating updates to his classic Linux Getting Started reference.
  
  
• April 23, 1998
  Did you know that the world's fastest rising (maybe even best) hardware sites is run by a 15 year old out of North Corolina. His name is Arnand Shrimpi and he was recently interviewed by USA Today. Anandtech was started in September 1997 and has managed to garner about 2.8 million hits on its server since then. His father is a University professor with common ancestry to Forrest Gump and Arnand is reputed to hang out with Matt Damon.... just :)
  
  
• Prefer the Win3.1 interface over the Win95 interface. It is possilbe to run those applications under either interface of your choice and to also have Linux run its own applications under a similar interface. Take a look at this page where users who need to run both environmnts run Win95 or Win3.1 under Linux. Someone could definitely make a living out of configuring PC's in this way for small businesses. A great summer student job. Have your Linux and Eat Win95, too...cool.
  
  
• DOOM anyone ?...rather DOOM III....Since John Carmack released the source code for DOOM in December 97 (Merry Xmas), various individuals have been working on upgraded versions of the classic game Doom. DosDoom will run under DOS or Linux(X11). It includes,under Linux< any screen resolution (I tried 1000x750), new artificial intelligence, lookup/lookdown, jumping, gravity control.
  
  
• ATI has put out a bunch of Press releases regarding companies such as Compaq, Toshiba, HP, NCR and Siemens slated to release systems based upon the RagePro chip. The RagePro's balance and configuraability, low cost, low heat dissipation, efficient 64 bit architecture and well rounded performance(2D, 3D and video) make it the ideal choice for the exploding market of low cost PCs. Software upgradeable to support DVD and recent OpenGL support play into ATI's software hand; Fully 1/2 of the 200+ strong engineers at ATI are software development engineers. Balanced performance with Business apps, games, high quality video(Better than TV output).Back in December 97, Boot gave ATI's Xpert@Play it's Kick Ass designation in spite of comments regarding the lack of OpenGL support for Quake and performance below that of the industry darling VooDoo when tested on P200MMX system. Today OpenGL support is here, while P2-233Mhz have push the performance to be roughly equivalent to that of the VooDoo in framerate tests using Quake2.
  
  
• April 18, 1998
  
• I sort of smiled today when I saw Brian Hook of ID complain about paying $60 for Monster Cable speaker cable to wire his car in his .plan file. I sent him a link to the Part's Connection. This place is almost the ideal place for a DIY who wants excellent sound at very reasonable prices....all you need is a soldering iron. I am looking to get a their DAC-3 converter and finishing off my power amp that I have had kicking around for the longest time. Yes, cable makes a difference but you are not going to appreciate this difference while travelling in a car.
  
  My web page is pretty lame as far as Linux is concerned. I have not been a good Linuxen and "kept up"/spread with the Gospel or checked out the really good Linux sites. My Linux sections in hindsight are pretty doggy. How did I come to this conclusion...I surfed around a bit today and came across some really good Unix sites. Now things in Linux land change at a unbelievable rate, in span of six months, since I last made updates to my Linux flavoured pages. It is time for a Linux update. As I said, the activity in the Linux world is at a frenzy. There are three software packages out that are cloning what MS products, like Office, and turning the tables on Microsoft...but on better operating systems that do not have hidden features. You can read about all of the above by browsing some really good editorial at the following sites:
• Linux Weekly News
• Slashdot site Industry news site run by Linux centric fans
• Linux News Page updated daily

Time to watch 60 minutes...I've had enough surfing/htmling for today. Do yourself a favour today: put down your OpengGL games and install Linux on a spare 500MB partition on your Win95 computer. Here is a testimonial for you to chew on

I am going to swear off hardware and gaming pages for the next few months and focus on a HOWTO describing co-existence of Linux with traditional Win95 application. This will describe gradual migration strategies to equivalent applications running under Linux. This obsession with constant hardware development has now resulted in very capable hardware performing under an operating system refined in over 20 years in the face of weaker hardware. Time to enjoy and exploit the machine by having Linux play the software-ace up its sleeve. I'm looking forward to it all.

• The Oscar for visual effects was awarded to Titanic this year. Digital Domain is a special effects outfit that has contributed to many feature films over the year and for the movie they expanded their network to 160 Alpha machines mostly running Red Hat Linux. They had a choice of NT, Digital Unix, but chose Linux for its performance and configurability. Linux also ran the newtwork server that talked to various SGI machines and NT machines. Click here for a behind the scenes story

With MS getting into the workstation/server market with Windows NT, the following looks at Linux vs NT for network servers. See why your medium size company will be running Linux to serve up your Window applications to your desktop.

• click here to skip this Linux rant and go on to next News item
  Instead of a short link on Why you you should install Linux, today ...I getting up on my news pedestal today to elaborate and to scare off all those Win95 folks who have been coming to this page seeking "how do I run GLQuake on my Win95 machine"...We'll OK...you guys can stay...but promise me you will "Give Linux a try" by going out and buy or borrow a Linux CD (all legal) and then installing it it on a free partition....promise!. Now you can chew on this Quake-OpenGL bone for a while as I get back to my Linux rant

OK..here goes...One of the big problems in the Linux communities is that applications can be workaround easily to work. This is taken for granted but is one of the primary strengths of Unix that Linux has inherited. Experienced Unix and Linux users just use the applications and do not make a big deal about look and feel. There is no standard way to do things (as in MSOFFICE) but a variety of different choices and ways that are all equally valid in terms of getting the work done. I think this attitude has developed becuase exposure to Linux/Unix usually results in a Can-do type of mentality and everybody has been focussing on making/porting the Unix parts over to Linux...it is one of those rare products that is literally the sum (and more) of its parts. This has always been true of Unix and is its fundamental strength. There really is no need for monolithic "Office" like applications unless you have already turned off your brain and have gulped down the Microsoft gospel of one button mouses and Wizards(neh ex Multimedia applications) for everyone. If you have not clicked off and if the Wizard animations have not gobled up your entire disk,then, there is still hope for you via the Multi-boot option discussed below. If you still exists on monoliths then the Office-like StarOffice may be for you. Cost of CD is about $10 for non commercial use

Simple applications under Linux can be used effectively knitted together by rich utilities (recall Norton in the DOS days) by useful filters (refined and generalized over 20 years) to realize more complex functionality. Very powerful scripting languages (Perl or your choice of 7 different shells) can be used to generate filters for oft repeated knitting.

This Web site/page is composed ( vi) , graphiced (GIMP) , and accessed (Netscape 3.0) under Linux. I use an Excel 5.0 compatable speadsheet (Xesslite). Linux gaming includes Doom, Quake(any pixel resolution in a window), Tetris and Sasteroids (amazing colour asteroids clone). My Brother HL-630 printer is supported flawlessly under Linux via Postscript.

So why should you go out and pop $20 for a disbtribution of Linux that does all of the above and what do I see as its major shortcomings in Linux ? Well, two activities have made me decide that Linux is already for prime time:

1. About a month ago, I installed the Red Hat distribution that came included in my 6 CD set InfoMagic Linux Developers (includes Slackware and Debian as well) on a free partition (500MB) of my friend's (Linux newbie) Win95 machine so that he could Boot either Win95 or Linux. Installation was a breeze (for me) and the almost Win95-like except for difficult part (for newbies) of configuring the swap partition and configuring the Video card but....much improved over that of the year before when I tried install Linux for the very first time. What amazed me was that some person crafty person had configured the FVWM graphic interface to clone the look of Win95...right down to the colour and pop-up task bar on the bottom...that is if that is what you prefer. You will still need either a Linux savvy friend to sit by you during your Linux baptism or a copy of "Linux for Dummies" (an amazingly well written book...despite the title).
2. Now I am forced to use Win95 software at work due to internal e-mail and docuementation. One of the horrors about Win95 is the incompatability with itself. I was sent an EXCEL spreadsheet from a vendor in Taiwan (they always have latest software releases installed on their machines) and imagine to my horror when I could not read it... Hello Excel 7.0 and MS endless upgrade cycle. Stop the madness. There is no good reason why a simple product like a spreadsheet needs to be upgraded anymore ! We should call this the microsoft upgrade Virus and have Symantec and MacAfee put it on their data file.

One of the long term things that recent Linux releases will offer is stability of running your existing favourite applications today and forever while offering significant advantages to newer software written under ELF libraries.

The major shift from a.out libraries to ELF libraries still allows me to run old applications by keeping around old libraries. ELF allows dynamically loadable kernel modules that allows kernel upgrading without having to recompile the whole operating system...this bodes very well for new hardware to be supported and simplified by Independent Hardware Vendors and should simplify the driver issue somewhat. It will also allow for things modularity and simplicity and just plain better operating system design that is more powerful and compact. It is sort of like having control of driver extention issues in OpenGL rather than in the Direct3D which is not extensible.

To accelerate the inevitable acceptance of Linux, the industry needs an evangelist and a spokesperson to offer something for the "most of us=Win95 users" in the form of Turnkey installation and offering of standardized packages to do word processing, spreadsheet, finance, database with a nice set of bound documentation. The first step of easing installation difficulties has been addressed by Red Hat. The next step of telephone support has also been taken by them for those comfortable with the hand holding approach. Should Red Hat should go public ? For the benefit of users it is the right thing to do. Whether the few people today will continue to make exorbitant amounts of money will change but the world of computing should become a better place. Maybe that is what Caldera has been offering all along but Linux users like hacking by themselves (like me) and keeping all the fun of solving small configuration puzzles by reading HOWTOs, posting on newsgroups, and firing their trusty configuration swiss army knife " vi ". The Internet was given life and nutured by Unix is now giving back and is the prime reason of the rise of of the publicly owned Unix called Linux. Your software support is now the Internet, search engines, and the newsgroups that support and evagelize it I'm pretty sure that Linux hacking is what Redmond boy's do at home when they d'ont have to rake over the Win95 code and need some good ideas :) Really, I hope they do not add anymore animated GIFs for me to look at while their operating system configures itself.

Linux shortcomings are the support of neat hardware such as TV-out, TV-in tuners and multimedia (this included 3D accelerated video support) in general which require detailed register specs to be released. Inexplicably the scanner companies have paralleled the support 2D in video hardware by having their products supported due to the commodity view of the scanning hardware (i.e. If I do not support it then my competitor will...so I better support it). As almost all video vendors view non-disclosure of 3D and multimedia hardware registers as strategic, then, the only way around this is to have them write to a thin standard layer, such as done with GLIDE by 3Dfx, to protect these details. This has been done for scanners under SANE and hopefully this will happen for 3D and multimedia under Linux. Do I hear any takers ? ATI ?



• April 17, 1998
  As Shawn Colvin would say, there are "a few small repairs" made to the Quake OpenGL resulting in the Beta3 driver. This is taken from the release notes:
1. Flashing polygon issues using Beta2 and RAGE PRO AGP boards
2. Improved AGP performance.
3. Hexen II various issues.

Download it from here and send comments to betadriver@atitech.ca

For you newbies, I've notice a lack of information regarding finding GLQuake, installing it, and notes about what to look for...so look no further and follow my installation notes



• April 10, 1998
  I have added a new section linking various comments by owners/users of ATI products. Allan Cole has been one of the staunchest believers/defenders of ATI products within the newsgroup arena over the last few years emphasizing stable Windows operation under business applications and useful utilities in addition to 3D performance...but not at the expense of the former. Thanks Allan.
  
  
• The Rage Pro has proven to be an especially popular chip in the price/performance conscious Euroupean market. Seven of Ten vendors chose to include the Xpert@Work in the mainstream computer offerings in the recent survey/review. Six new cyber reviews of "Rage Pro" based cards were written in March...mostly good. Company stock hit a record $70 on the stock exchange. Strong chip solutions for the emerging Desktop flat screen/Laptop and recent announcements from Fijuitsu and HP's latest Omnibook use of the LT-Pro (Rage Pro with powerdown smarts, integrated TV out, secondary display and flat panel LVDS interface) have made this a very viable solution for the exploding laptop market.
  
  I mentioned legs for the RagePro. Why ? First off are the continuous driver improvements, recent games based optimizations, and pending full ICD OpenGL support in leiu of the present Beta. Sure there are more powerful chipsets coming on stream, but demanding games such as Quake2 run well enough to play today while a slew of OpenGL based Quake2 engine based games are slated to be released by other game developers who have licensed the engine from ID. Will the market take a slight breather and run with today's bairly a year old chipsets and even younger drivers ? Several things are in ATI's favour as far as the RagePro is concerned:
1. BX chipset boards will finally provide the type of excess bandwidth needed to satisfy AGP peak demands in the presence of CPU requests.
2. The 3D extentions offered in upcoming chipsets from Intel, AMD and Cyrix will speed up the ligting and transfrom stages and offer good 3D performance levels with todays chipsets.
3. Stable high quality multimedia video which the market is just starting to embrace for the last year. Intels selection of the RagePro chipset as the pratical video solution over other i740 schemes just verifies that ATI has a very good video solution today.
4. DVD support/capability may be the next killer application...you can get this with the RagePro today at a fraction of the price of dedicated hardware by just adding a DVD driver. How many of the drivers/architectures in todays chipsets are going to break under DVD ?
5. The market will need to make decision between running in games in higher resolution (say 1024x768) under existing engines (say Quake2) or running 640x480 with the more compute intensive Quake3 engine. This transition will be slow (I think) because of the viability of the Quake2 engine ...even if Trinity does become the next killer engine/application...the market will take time to develop.
6. Present framerate levels acheived by the Nvidia Riva are in part a reflection of the competance of Michael Gold (hired asway from SGI) in quickly optimizing for the Nvidia part. Nvidia has recently been slapped with an injunction involving certain coding of their texture mapping alogorithim by SGI. ATI's port is on a slower developmental track that seems to be on target for some significant speed enhancements. It also happens that is comes at a time when the Quake2 engine will be used by many games devlopers. Peformance should be propped up beyond VooDoo numbers with equivalent or better quality levels.





• Before you make the transition to Linux, you will need to find replacement applications for your spreadheet, database, word processing needs. Go to the Linux applications page for a well organized and categorized map to what is available.
  
  
• April 5, 1998
  I have been getting a few queries about Rage128. My official position is that I will not deny or confirm rumours until ATI issues an official press release. My personal opinon is that the Rage Pro design is a pretty decent architecture balancing 3D, 2D, MPEG video playback , video in a window performance that should have legs for a while yet in spite of new chip introductions. ATI is continuing to exploit their software stength by working on drivers optimized to handle 32 bit applications.
  
  My brother dropped off a box of black vinyl dics recently and my wife has been playing a 3 albumn set by Neil Young called Decade off and on over the last 3 weeks...it is one awesome collection. He has an amazing voice that aches, emotes and phrases so well that his lyrics connect in an instant. Harvest, Heart of Gold, Love is a rose... get there fare share of great vocal/guitar/harmonica acoutics. I hope the songs have been issued in CD form caused my needle is wearing a nice groove into the vinyl.
  
  
• April 2, 1998
  The chap with the funny name "RagePro" has recently "perttied up" his web page with frames...I know what you html purists are thinking...but frames do make navigating around easier for those with IE, Netscape, or Opera. Check out his new Rage Pro site If you are still using LYNX...email me and I will accomodate you.
  
  Stefan from Stockholm suggested that I fix up the hyper-text linking style by having new pages open up a new page using base target="_top" HTML statement. Phil from @3D (stole his code again) stuck it in the HEADER section at the top of the main page like Phil said "I like it". Thanks Stefan.
  
  I have been surveying fps numbers from various posts for the the Beta1/2 drivers. PCI systems seem to have improved by about 50% in framerate going from Alpha-to-Beta1. Beta2 drivers are on par with Beta1 with better lighting/quality. On AGP systems, the framerate has has increased by about 20% going from Beta1-to-Beta2. I have not updated the results in my summary page and will probably not do so until the multi-texture stuff happens...sorry I just c'ant get to excited about games and a number that is supposed to tell if the game is fun. What I find amazing is the number of people that find the game fun to play running at around 15 fps on a 166MMX chip when I see all these posts on the webs claiming 60 fps is absolutely required. My guess/expectation for a best case final framerate for the ICD with multi-texture support running at 640x480 with a P2-233 will be around 36 fps. The rest as they say is execution...and dammit... them 3D driver boys have been executing.
  
  Before I forget, Alan has put up a Beta1(Ver. 1.005) review and another site has screenshots of the Beta2(Ver. 1.01) driver running under Quake2/OpenGL.

March 98 News

• March 28, 1998
  Silliness...just being a little reflective today and I want to say a big thank you to Netscape for enabling all this websurfing technology on my Linux Box...I hope your decision to release the source bodes well for you in the future. Mozzilla lives on for those using Netscape Browser...click here to read the words of Mozilla...his presence will be with you as you surf on....
  
  ...more silliness for a Sunday. I've been on the Internet scene for over a decade and if you ever heard someone utter the words Sagan, billions, imagine, and Zen in one sentance...but happened to be going out to a movie to get your monthly dose of senseless violence...you gotta click here.
• An amazing new Cyber Mag covering your guessed it...Linux and 3D. Go to LinuxFocus.
• The lowdown on ICD/MCD implementations from the innovator SGI themselves
• I have seen the almost final Beta 1.01 release and things are looking up .... The light-popping bug that causes sudden brightening/darkening has been fixed. The background lighting that causes "darkness" has now been brighten...the upside is that a lot of you discovered the gamma function in your ATI cards. AGP framerate specific framerate has increased. Optimizations in the OpenGL code for regular Pentium chips just about completed and AMD and Cyrix will be next on the list. Do not ask me about making it available as the home page site does not have download capabilities and I am obligated to keep it under wraps. It should be out by next week. To get a feel for what multi-texture support will give you in terms fps increase...set R_FULLBRIGHT 1 at the Quake console. Multi-texture best chance ETA is 4-6 weeks.
• My OpenGL/Quake runs have had me firing up Win95 an unprecedented number of times in the last month...it crashes, stalls, fires up slowly just like how I remembered it to be but to a degree that I just get relief looking at my text prompt when I fire up Linux. My OpenGL activity, I hope, will ultimately one day evagelize ATI to have OpenGL running under Linux with ATI hardware. Its portability has been proven on Workstation hardware. We will probably not see an ICD OpenGL for Linux running on ATI in the very near term as ATI and most other vendors, as well as ATI, view keeping the 3D register closed as stategic and thus proprietary.
  Some of the dependencies of the latest ATI openGL on the Win95 drivers stem from a thin C coupling layer called the C-interface or CIF that gets updated and distributed with the driver releases. Think of CIF as 3Dfx's GLIDE layer which is a very low level interface sitting just on top of the registers. Traditionally, it was favoured by gamers with a slant towards DOS and people who want to write almost to the metal, it is refine to a point that DOS implementation written under CIF can be punted to D3D with reasonable effort. The shift to D3D in the market probably means that CIF specific games will not take advantage of improvements to the D3D codebase/library base unless the CIF is re-written to take advantage of a an extended D3D common code base. This partly explains some of the questions surrounding the Turok demo native port running slower than the D3D version. For OpenGL to run under Linux, the CIF library would have to be ported to Linux as a library and the OpenGL codebase recompiled to run under Linux...How away is Xmas ?

I found a page about how to make my Cyrix M2 run cooler, faster, quieter on Linux. I am open/looking to suggestions for information you would like to see on Linux. Added two useful new sites to the link section for Linux. Coutesy of www.hot100.com



• March 23, 1998
  Beta OpenGL Driver Info available here. On a related note I have to thank Anand with his amazing turnaround in Benchmarking the ATI RagePro ( ...email...I may never lick a stamp again) using the new OpenGL...without doubt the current work on his home page far exceeds Tom's page in terms of balanced insightful comments about video hardware (I'll still use Tom's definitive work on Motherboards as a reference) . He understands the line between high-end/high price and pratical performance/good value hardware and you can see it in his writing. In his haste to test out the new OpenGL driver, he did not also run the new Turbo 2312 Driver...so his results will be off the mark by about 30%. Go see his 3D review now I have also been told that rumours have it that RagePro hardware may not run as well using AGP-socket7 enabled chipsets using the older version of the VGART.vxd driver file....be sure to use Version 1.7...this is just a rumour that can be quickly addressed by Anand using a regular PCI card which he does not have at the moment.
  Final Note: I have been told that running the timedemos a few times in a row will stabilize the number to a higher value. Seems as if number is affected by disk thrashing....you need at least 100MB free swap space. Disk performance may account for the wide variability in reported framereate numbers...but who cares when the image looks this great...Quake2 is definitely more fun played at 15 fps on a P166 Non-mmx chip than at 30 fps/non-opengl. It "pops" along just fine...sorry but if I hear the word "rock" one more time on the web...I just might pick up my violin :)
  
  
• March 20:
  I am working on a summary of ATI's RagePro OpenGL driver based upon framerates and general comments gleamed from various websites, newsgroup postings and of course FPS-forum. In short, performance within about 10% of Permedia2 (18.3 fps on P2-300) but with quality exceeding VooDoo1. Z-buffer clipping problems exists(try R_MIRRORALPHA 0.3 in GLQuake). Because it will be a ICD, the final release could support texture processing in a single pass a la 3Dfx. I might be wrong on this...so do not quote me... but potential problems centre around how tightly coupled Quake OpenGL calls are to 3Dfx's multi-texture hardware implementation relative to Rage Pro. It would have been great to be at this stage when Quake2 was development so that the ID boys could feedback on the ATI OpenGL engine.
• Updated OpenGL/Quake Page. Installation notes for MCDs and ATIs alpha OpenGL have been added. A section outlining key differences that you can see between regular Quake and OpenGL Quake.If ATI's OpenGL is layered on top of D3d, then data structure holding vertex information (normals, positions, texture coordinates, and colors) could impose up to a 25% performance penalty. The key advantage with VooDoo performance with Quake seems to be the one-two punch it delivers by moving away from Microsofts D3d vertex scheme via Glide and exploitation of single-pass texture processing capability in its hardware. So unless DirectX-6 is a radical fundamental overhaul (read ...not backward compatible to DirectX-5.0)....this performance gain will not be realized. This is the window for OpenGL to exploit as access to the full rendering pipeline is available to OEM IHV and not under the control of just Microsoft.
• PC magazine takes a comparitive look at Rendition, RagePro and Intel's i740....the little guy comes out ahead....less heat....less pins....practically all you need for todays games and applications.





• March 8:
  Yes Virginia...there is an Beta Quake/Quake2-only..l.However,due to the dependency on the of the OpenGL on the Rage Pro Turbo drivers (for AGP only), it was decided that both will be released on March 23, 1998. The FTP download site was inadvertently left open and for those who did download the Alpha...the OpenGL does exist and the two day trial period has shown very good image quality and some good feedback for ATI to take back for the March 23, 1998 release.
• Alan of FPS is running a Minimum Framerate Survey for me. Please send run your TimeDemos at different resolutions as well as playing them at these settings and send your findings to alandang@usa.net. For a look at some of the responses to date.





• March 1
  What happens to a kid who grows up in the GNU environment ? Eric Raymond is one amazing kid. He is giving back to his community by setting up free Internet access within Chester County, Pensylvania. He was instrumental in the generation of key FSF software which now powers all of the Linux boxes. At his site, you can find out how become a cool geek. It was Eric's paper The Cathedral and the Bazaar which was instrumental to Netscapes's decision to release source code for its client browser. Point your kids here...their life will never be the same... I know that mine has taken curve.
• Ziff Davis , the famed authors of WInbench 98 comment on oversights made by Tom in his dimissal of Winbench as a useful benchmark.
• Borrowed Web Layout from @3D web site for my page... I hope you like. I hope the frames make it easier for your to move around. Thanks again Phil.
• Tom has been doing good homework of late looking at the disconnect between framerate and Winbench98. To see what is possible, go to Users RagePro Benchmarks and compare column 3 (2241...orginal high performance driver) to column 6 (present release=2278==2294==2312 in terms of significant differences)...I see a 32% to 36% difference in the ROBOT scene and CITY scene in FINAL REALITY between the two drivers.....
• Mercury Research has updated its Benchmark Results. ATI is at or near the top of hill in almost all categories...whew...They did not use Turok :) Mercury is running the new Turbo driver that offers a claimed 40% increase in speed and is to release by ATI on March 15, 1998.
• My thoughts on Tom's 3D Dinosaur romping roundup based on TUROK ..the visual quality issue is really a driver issue ....
  

February 98 News

• Feb 4 , 1998
  
1. 2312...Turbo...2294...2278...the rash of announcements for driver releases is a bit much....for what it is worth....SORRY on behalf of ATI. Tom has been doing good homework of late looking at the disconnect between framerate and Winbench98. To see what is possible, go to Users RagePro Benchmarks and compare column 3 (2241...orginal high performance driver) to column 6 (present release=2278==2294==2312 in terms of significant differences)...I see a 32% to 36% difference in the ROBOT scene and CITY scene in FINAL REALITY between the two drivers..... Lets hope the TURBO driver looks like the 2241 release but with more testing.
2. The @3D Rage Pro site has moved...click on link
3. Added new favourite link for "Scientific Applications Under Linux" or SAL for short. Here you can find a link to a EXCEL compatible clone called XESS
4. Mercury Research has updated its Benchmark Results. ATI is at or near the top of hill in almost all categories...whew...They did not use Turok :) Mercury is running the new Turbo driver that offers a claimed 40% increase in speed and is to release by ATI on March 15, 1998.
5. Want a fast, efficient, compact browser without bloat....try OPERA . It is well designed and feels comfortable to run right out of the Box. Free 30 day trial.....I prefer Opera may be thw swan song of this really ....really ....nifty Web Browser....try it....I think you will like it....
6. This site started off mainly as a Linux site but I have to confess that that an increasing amount of Win95 links has crept in. I'll stick all this stuff in its own section to isolate people from its grip.
7. My thoughts on Tom's 3D Dinosaur romping roundup based on TUROK ..the visual quality issue is really a driver issue ....try out beta 2312 driver in the hidden directory

• Jan 15, 1998
  
1. Run QuakeGL under Win95 using D3D Wrapper... ...it is not the speed but the look ...better realism by supporting mirroring, water lens effects, shadows, and blending of textures (for smoother looking/less staircase like object edges)...GLQuake gives you a glimpse of how easy OpenGL coded games can incorporate more realistic 3D which would be torturous to code under D3D. Alas, we take a speed hit until new 3D hardware and wrapper support and are optimized for the above extra calculations. I think shadows (lighting) is n ot implemented under present wrapper.





• Jan 2, 1998
  
1. Graphic intensive benchmark/demo Final Reality used bu Boot and Tom's Hardware Page. Rankings are similar to Winbench 98 with Xpert@Work/Play near top.
2. Happy New Year...the PeaK site manages to attract 5024 visitors...thank you loyal readers...especially if you run Linux
3. Gunter points out German site providing updated X11 drivers to support all those people having problems running the AGP versions of the RagePro cards with the LX chipset based motherboards(ASUS P2L97)... The driver is developed by Kevin Martin who works with Xfree but a special agreement has been reached with S.u.s.e to provide download server services. This will provide Kevin with a mechanism provide more timely updates. Kudos to this co-operative effort. go here
4. Yet another ATI website by Alex...see here

---

1997 News....here