What's new... is old again
March 1999 News
There is nothing that compares to releasing a PC product upon the myriad of motherboard/Sound Card/ethernet/chipset/CPU combinations to sort out the driver compatability issues. The next release of drivers will address the dithering issue (missing green bit) and offer the performance glimpsed at in the Mercury Research Winbench testing. Last final thought for a Sunday is an observation that as the games become more sophisticated, my prediction is that the true merit of 3D Winbench as a benchmark becomes more and more obvious. It is a tool that has continually evolved and the true merit of it is the dissected information within it that has yet to be mined by the general 3D gaming community. 3D Mark has borrowed a lot from it and in many ways they are twins. Framerate counters within game's applications continue to be useful both for new developments, new developers and new gamer's alike but less useful as user's discover's Carmack's 3D rule: Users concerned with the immersive qualities of a game,will when left alone, increase the 3D features to give better image quality up to a minimum of about 10 fps. Deathmatchers however run at 320x240, Vsync-off, and basically in DOOM quality mode with the framecounter running :) .
The last battle for computer speak web sites/journals/magazines/editors is the one of standardizing read/writeable DVD. Please, lets have a moratorium on 3D and CPU development for a while. The hardware is excellent. If you want a gazillion number of hits on your web site. Try these topics:
The future of hardware compatable looks very good now that the likes of Compaq and Dell will officially install it on new computers. Additional support will be made available at purchase time by them and is also available from developers such as Red Hat.Some of the new hardware sites are already becoming Linux centric. Ars Technica is one example. Avault regularly runs a Linux column. I hate to say it but even a site like Anandtech is becoming dated due to the commodozation of both technical information and the out-of-the-box nature of hardware.
We'll this is a tremendously long lead in to the fact that ATI is still one of the graphics industries best kept secrets. The games performance has improved to such a extent that it is now top tiered and is only wanting on games that are sloppily written at both a architectural level and implementation level. John Carmack's Id Software continues to show that the mind/software is more powerful than any hardware limitation. The fact that Q3A can run on a Rage Pro with inherent quality/performance tradeoffs built into the design of the engine is just great real world design.
The Rage Fury is a completely rework hardware architecture designed to address both 3D and emerging DVD, satellite broadcast and OpenGL markets. It is (unfortunately) ahead of its time (my opinion). One of the strengths of magazines such as BYTE and PC Magazine was the insightful interplay, software development and editorializing that went on at these two great institutions. They would look at the hot trends today and make informed comments about the state and roadmap of various hardware developments. The internet has sadly diminished their role in similar ways to television having diminished the impact of the New York Times. The driver development will continue to improve as the novelty of the architecture becomes more obvious to software driver designers. Some of the unreal pricing by competitors of complete recent generation 3D cards is to gain market share (a card that is $10 above the cost of a chip reported in John Peddie) is a money losing proposition to boost perceived sales (Remember the dumping of Intel's i740). The Rage GL chipset has silicon area devoted to features that will make a real difference in the functionality of the card over the next year. The support of DDR memories is truly amazing considering that it was offered on prototype silicon back in September 1998. The clock rate is a measure very similar to horsepower and engine displacement. V8, V-12, 5.0L engines have their place in the world, but ABS brakes, air bags, zippy/economical 4 cylinder enginers, interior engineering and finish are five year old features define the modern car. Some of the high memory speeds promised (>150 MHz) are difficult to get right under the normal manufacturing timing variance of these memories. I expect these products to be downclocked at the last moment prior to their product release. DVD, broadcat TV support, DDR will similarly define the Rage Fury and the Rage 128 GL chip.
The bulk of widely available, cost effective memory and fast memories at the present time are the 125 MHz variety (8ns). The 7ns variety or 143 Mhz versions are just beginning to become available in larger quantities and offer 43% more bandwidth than the defacto 100Mhz units that have been found on graphics cards over the last year or so. The 166 Mhz units (6 ns) are in the prototype stage and sourced by one or two manufacturers at a premium. What does this mean ? Expect that some of the newly previewed hotrodded graphics cards to be be delayed, in short supply, and to be priced stratospherically. My guess is that they will mostly come in 143 Mhz versions with smaller memory footprints (<32 MB) in order to meet timing margins. The Rage Fury is currently the only DDR (Double Data Rage) ready chip that uses data aligned clocks (strobes) to reliably buy back timing margin at very high clocking frequencies.
We tested 640x480x16bpp very thoroughly, since this was the lowest common denominator among the accelerators, however we also made a few tests at 1600x1200x16bpp to test fill rate and 640x480x32bpp to test likely operating conditions. Tests were run on a best case machine, a P3/500.
640x480x16bpp (16-bit textures):
RivaTNT2 - 50.7
Rage128 - 48.1
RivaTNT - 48.0
Voodoo2 - 44.7 (Ed: HOLY SHIT THAT'S GOOD!)
640x480x32bpp:
Rage128 - 47.0 (16-bit textures)
RivaTNT2 - 43.7 (32-bit textures)
RivaTNT - untested
Voodoo2 - N/A
1600x1200x16bpp (16-bit textures):
RivaTNT2 - 18.1
Rage128 - 15.1
RivaTNT - 11.7
Voodoo2 - N/A
Gordon: Engineering completed an ICD change to remove the lag issue in Quake2 early this week. Enabling V-sync will not solve this behavior. Until the new ICD is posted, users can enable SYNCH In the video options of Quake2, version 3.20 or greater.
Is there hope for the newbie to separate the hope from the hype ? At the retail level, small shops have always had the ability to judge the relative merits of a new product by in-store testing and matching demos. Most of the good ones in Toronto have demos set up to show what benefit the latest hardware will give running the latest games at popular 1024x768 resolutions which are used with 17" monitors (sometimes 1280x1024). The higher resolutions are there to service the 21" crowd running 1600x1200 on professional CAD applications. This means balancing up the OpenGL performance via features such as direct Vertex walks.
Final Bottom line is to take the Fury for a test drive. Your mileage may vary but you'll probably come back with a big smile and a load of groceries to 3 screaming kids, courtesy of your son and buddies next door. In case you are wondering... yes...I saw the TNT2 review/bias...part marketing...partly technical... and one review was written by someone who has spent far too much time in front of a TV plugged into a Nintendo box. These views are purely my own and you read this page purely for your own information and at your discretion.
, in response to OpenGL doesn't work on my system either., posted by Elameno on Thu Mar 4'99 - 4:43pm
Re: OpenGL doesn't work on my system either.
Are you using an AMD w/ and ALI chipset? There is a known bug in the ALI chipset posting bogus data when coupled with an AMD K6. This can cause hang conditions during bus mastering. There was a software fix for this in the Rage128 drivers, although I'm not sure what driver release the fix is in. You should contact ATI customer support this for the fix.
Here is a list of things suggested to workaround AGP and OpenGL problems with this chipset short of getting a driver fix from ATI:
The ASUS technical support web page (link1 and link2 ) archives might be the best source of current information. Most of the current motherboards using the VIA MVP3 chipset have had the benefit of time to correct problems with older motherboards and chipsets.
ALI Alladin V Motherboard links and user comments:
- high quality hardware. If hardware is very high quality, we're obviously going to work with it very closely. Right now the ATI Rage 128 and NVidia Riva TNT are both high quality, feature complete accelerators with high image quality, support for multitexture, and great performance. It's a joy to work with these accelerators.
Note: The Rage 128 is competitive with most of the non multi-texture games such as Incoming and Forsaken, but the engine comes into it's own once games are written properly for multi-texture support...preliminary reports (see Feb 16, 1998 post on next link) are that it already surpasses the standard bearer TNT 28 fps framerate by 53% running at 43 fps. More hardware details will be released with the release of Quake 3 Arena and other multi-texture games releases...Ahemm...removing ATI hat as I type but just to re-iterate...the best performance engine with the next generation of multi-texture games will be demonstrated in short order. Thanks to www.frag.com/rage3d for the source of most of these links.
Some Common workarounds found to alter the amount of stuttering are as follows:
My graphics card and PCI audio card don't seem to get along. Can the PowerStrip help?
Maybe. Graphics cards can sometimes be too aggressive in holding the bus, causing problems for other bus-master PCI devices, most notably PCI sound cards. Although most PCI BIOSes have an option where you can specify a default PCI latency, many cards ignore or override this setting. The PowerStrip has an undocumented feature that allows you to specify the latency for each device on the PCI bus, individually. There aren't any hard and fast rules on appropriate values (a multiple of 8), but as a general guideline higher values yield better performance at the expense of other devices, while lower values are more appropriate to systems with multiple PCI cards. If you want to experiment with this feature, you'll need to manually edit your pstrip.ini file as there are no visual controls available...
One workaround for the DDERR_HWNDAlreadySet error message when running Rage Dawning is to disable the Sound Card in the Win95/98 device manager for Video, sound and game controllers. Another one is to play a .wav or MP3 sound file and then enabling the "Dawining" demo.
The picture quality of the Permedia2 is also unable to satisfy owners of 21 or 24" monitors and even Number Nine's Ticket to Ride chip can't beat the Millennium's 250 MHz external RAMDAC and its quality.
What counts here is the speed and quality of the RAMDAC as well as the speed of the video RAM, which directly translates into the highest resolution at true color. PeAK's Comment: This is plain wrong. It is like saying a car with a top speed of 200mph is better than a car rate at 150 mph. Integrated DACs need to contend with rejecting digital noise. If not done carefully, wider bandwidth DACs will pick up more of the digital noise and look worse at lower resolutions.
...the G200 2D performance is at the top level of current 2D performance...
The Rage Fury cards where engineered with high quality 2D resolution and clarity in mind at much higher resolutions than the G200. It is indeed heartwarming to hear reviewers independently praise the Fury's clarity without ATI prompting them with regard to 2D quality:
...Color representation the best we've seen. A new high-water mark.
...Excellent. High resolution and color depths no problem, a delight to the eyes. Definite winner here.
...We'd subjectively rank the Rage Fury right with the Matrox G200 and Number 9 Revoultion IV in the 2D visuals pecking order, which is no small praise.
The overall 3D image quality is not just a function of 32 bits resolution, bilinear filtering, or mip mapping alogorithms. The foundation is based upon good 2D quality on which 3D is layered on top. Sharky's last comment about the 3D image quality is telling:
......More and more gamers are beginning to understand that speed isn't necessarily everything. If the images being produced on the screen are dull, washed out, muddied, or pixilated, the suspension of disbelief factor is ruined as the poor image takes the focus away from where it should be: The game itself...We've spent some serious time with the upcoming Voodoo3 over the past month, and the Rage fury literally in image quality.
The unfortunate reality is that even screen dumps today will only show you the 2D quality of your present system filtering the 3D screen dump. The only real way to compare it is to view all resolutions that you are interested in using high quality text and graphic images side by side with other cards you are interested in. The fact that the other famous site has not said much about the 2D of recent "favourite" competitive chips does not bode well for them. ATI had address these issues back in September 1998
