RageII, RageII+ DVD, Rage Pro patch and benchmarks

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Rage II, II+ DVD, and PRO info... ..

News for AGP LX motherboards and AGP ATI RagePro cards:
The drivers/servers provided Xfree have been extended by a group in Germany called X.S.u.s.e which has provided a recent driver (later than 3.3.1) to address some of the problems seen by people with the AGP LX chipset and the AGP based ATI cards. Go to here

Bad News:

The Rage II and Rage Pro based boards require slightly different programming support within the Mach64 X11 server that currently does not exist. The situation is due to the difficulty in meeting the demanding bandwidth requirements and arbitration of high resolution monitors(1600x1200@ high refresh) and video sources(MPEG etc) simultaneously. The only way around this are architectural changes which nessecitate corresponding changes to the original Rage chip and to the orignal Rage driver. The latest drivers need to be a superset of previous drivers for compatability with old hardware. There is standardization afoot via VBE that will provide a software layer between the hardware so that one accelerated X11 driver should be able to support all cards.

Good News:
The GT-B (Rage II) chips provide a significant (10%-20%) speedup in performance increase to support the display requirements of higher resolution monitors at high refresh rates. The Rage I chips went up to 1280x1024 and if you do not need more than this...get yourself one of these.
Some of other new features in the Rage II chip are increased 3D performance and support for bus mastering(which the Triton-FX does not support).

The XFree86 3.3 supports RageII, RageII+ DVD and the latest Rage Pro(Rage3). The "XF86Config" file must have the following two lines added to the Graphics Device Section [Section "Device"] of the accelerated Server:

    ChipId  0x4754
    ChipRev 0x01

The "Device" section should look like the following:


#Device configured by xf86config
Section "Device"
    Identifier  "My Video Card"
    VendorName  "Unknown"
    BoardName   "Unknown"
    VideoRam    2048
    ChipId  0x4754
    ChipRev 0x01
# Insert Clocks lines here if appropriate
EndSection

The 3.3 driver should work on 3D Xpression+, 3D Xpression+ PC2TV, and the 3D Turbo Pro.

3.3 Release of XFree86 releaaased on June 4, 1997...

Support for the all RageII chipsets (II+ DVD, and PRO) firmed up with the 3.3 release released on Jan 17, 1997. Thank you again Kevin and Marc. To find out more about 3.3 FAQ

===========================included header==============================================


3.11. Mach64 server

     Support for 3D Rage II based Mach64 cards is included. 
     Various problems with support for some revisions of CT, VT and GT chipsets have been fixed. 
     It is strongly recommended that all users with CT, VT, GT and 3D Rage II based Mach64 cards upgrade to the 3.3 release due
     to the problems that were fixed. 
                    
        http://www.XFree86.org/beta.html

Performance Comparisons of RageI, RageII and RageII+

I have run a comparison between the RageI chip and the RageII chip using X11perf . The RageII+ improves upon the RageII and results below are preliminary. The test were run on the same motherboard. Unlike the WinMark number used in the DOS/Win31/Win95 world, X11perf is a dissected test which does not try to assign an individual lumped number to gauge performance.

Here is an excerpt from the "man" pages for X11perf:

DESCRIPTION
       The x11perf  program runs one or more performance tests and
       reports how fast an X server can execute the tests.

       Many graphics benchmarks assume that the  graphics  device
       is  used  to display the output of a single fancy graphics
       application, and that the user gets his work done on  some
       other  device,  like  a terminal.  Such benchmarks usually
       measure drawing speed for lines, polygons, text, etc.

       Since workstations are not  used  as  standalone  graphics
       engines,  but  as super-terminals, x11perf measures window
       management performance as  well  as  traditional  graphics
       performace.   x11perf  includes benchmarks for the time it
       takes to create and map windows (as when you start  up  an
       application);  to  map  a pre-existing set of windows onto
       the screen (as when you deiconify an application or pop up
       a  menu); and to rearrange windows (as when you slosh win-
       dows to and fro trying to find the one you want).

The numbers below are expressed in terms of operations/second...Higher is better performing.


PeAk [7] bin % x11perfcomp ragei rageii rageii+   
     
   

 1: ragei
2: rageii
3: rageii+   65MHz 1:1

     1         2         3    Operation
--------  --------  --------  ---------
   706.0     707.0     976.0  500x500 rectangle
   704.0     705.0     971.0  500x500 stippled rectangle (8x8 stipple)
   703.0     705.0     971.0  500x500 opaque stippled rectangle (8x8 stipple)
   704.0     705.0     971.0  500x500 tiled rectangle (4x4 tile)
   142.0     195.0     337.0  500x500 stippled rectangle (17x15 stipple)
   139.0     191.0     338.0  500x500 opaque stippled rectangle (17x15 stipple)
   140.0     192.0     320.0  500x500 tiled rectangle (17x15 tile)
   261.0     289.0     285.0  500x500 stippled rectangle (161x145 stipple)
   257.0     288.0     285.0  500x500 opaque stippled rectangle (161x145 stipple)
   153.0     200.0     443.0  500x500 tiled rectangle (161x145 tile)
   162.0     225.0     523.0  500x500 tiled rectangle (216x208 tile)
 30100.0   29600.0   32700.0  500-pixel line segment
165000.0  163000.0  174000.0  500-pixel horizontal line segment
 25800.0   24700.0   26900.0  500-pixel vertical line segment
  3000.0    3000.0    3410.0  500x50 wide horizontal line segment
  2660.0    2460.0    3150.0  500x50 wide vertical line segment
 31900.0   31100.0   34600.0  500-pixel line
  1150.0    1120.0    1140.0  500x50 wide line
 11000.0   10500.0   11500.0  500x500 rectangle outline
  1550.0    1450.0    2210.0  500x500 wide rectangle outline
  4220.0    4620.0    4690.0  500-pixel circle
   489.0     478.0     503.0  500-pixel wide circle
   623.0     563.0     788.0  500-pixel solid circle
  5090.0    5170.0    5170.0  500-pixel ellipse
   676.0     661.0     688.0  500-pixel wide ellipse
  1040.0     944.0    1250.0  500-pixel filled ellipse
  1210.0    1050.0    1470.0  Fill 300x300 trapezoid
  1050.0    1900.0    1260.0  Fill 300x300 stippled trapezoid (8x8 stipple)
  1050.0     915.0    1260.0  Fill 300x300 opaque stippled trapezoid (8x8 stipple)
   293.0     294.0     309.0  Fill 300x300 tiled trapezoid (4x4 tile)
   204.0     205.0     211.0  Fill 300x300 stippled trapezoid (17x15 stipple)
   205.0     206.0     209.0  Fill 300x300 opaque stippled trapezoid (17x15 stipple)
   347.0     236.0     240.0  Fill 300x300 tiled trapezoid (17x15 tile)
   105.0     103.0     104.0  Fill 300x300 stippled trapezoid (161x145 stipple)
   104.0     103.0     104.0  Fill 300x300 opaque stippled trapezoid (161x145 stipple)
   323.0     357.0     359.0  Fill 300x300 tiled trapezoid (161x145 tile)
   345.0     411.0     414.0  Fill 300x300 tiled trapezoid (216x208 tile)
   167.0     209.0     592.0  Scroll 500x500 pixels
   166.0     224.0     593.0  Copy 500x500 from window to window
   106.0      97.7      98.5  Copy 500x500 from pixmap to window
    17.4      20.7      21.3  Copy 500x500 from window to pixmap
    91.4      85.9      85.8  Copy 500x500 from pixmap to pixmap
   344.0     359.0     357.0  Copy 500x500 1-bit deep plane
     2.5       2.4       2.5  PutImage 500x500 square
     2.2       2.1       2.2  PutImage XY 500x500 square
   105.0      95.1      98.6  ShmPutImage 500x500 square
    11.0      10.4      10.8  ShmPutImage XY 500x500 square
     7.6       8.2       8.3  GetImage 500x500 square
     0.6       0.8       0.8  GetImage XY 500x500 square

...as of Jan 15, 1998

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