ATI RADEON Review

This is a basic retail package. No TV-Out is available on this model board. No pack-in games are included (whoopee, no more pointless CD’s!! :D). Board comes with ATI 9x/2k Driver sets, and ATI’s Multimedia Center, including playback support for DVD, VideoCD, mp3, avi, ect. Also included, is a nifty, if somewhat of a ram hog technology demo called “Radeon’s Ark”, which dramatically showcases the rendering capabilities of the Radeon. 

The core and memory clocks of the Radeon 32meg DDR are set at 166/166 by default, and are tied together. Populated with 6ns DDR ram, I was able to get the core/memory clocks to a maximum stable speed here of 187/187 Mhz, but at least in my testing this had little meaningful impact on performance.

New features abound, in comparison to the last ATI chipset, the Rage128Pro.

• Transform & Lighting. Roughly equivalent in features to the Geforce2 core, the Radeon offers full on chip acceleration of transform, clipping, and lighting functions. It also offers features that are unique to the Radeon, notably vertex skinning, and keyframe interpolation.

• Hyper-Z. Claiming to boost effective memory bandwidth by roughly 20%, ATI’s HyperZ technology attempts to eliminate some of the disadvantages of traditional z-buffer, polygon based rendering. Losless Z-buffer compression is used, along with early rendering triangle culling (removal of triangles that will be overdrawn during the scene render) to reduce the overall bandwith taken up by z-buffering.

• Charisma Engine. The “Charisma” engine offers some new features that require DirectX8 support, and DX8 aware games. The ability to handle 3D textures, and to natively process 4 matrix vertex skinning should ensure that the card has some future potential. While it’s primary competitor, the Geforce2, utilizes 4 pipelines and 2 texture units per pipe (and it’s sibling the Geforce2MX makes do with 2 pipelines, and 2 texture units), the ATI Radeon offers two pipelines with *3* texture units per pipeline, making single pass 3 texture rendering possible. Alas, there isn’t a shipping game that utilizes the third texture unit, which relegates the Radeon’s pipeline design to the same league as the lower end Geforce2MX for all practical purposes at this point. We’ll see how this relates in the benchmarks.

• Hardware iDCT. Not a new feature at all, but one that has been present since the Rage128. By natively supporting discrete cosine transforms in it’s hardware, ATI still offers the best software assisted DVD playback available. Along with my experiences in the past with the Rage128, I would have to say there is nothing that can currently touch the DVD playback quality of the Radeon, short of a hardware decoder card, something which the Radeon makes largely unnecessary.

Next page: Image quality

[Page 1] [Page 2] [Page 3] [Page 4] [Page 5] [Page 6] [Home]