ATI RADEON Review

Before we take a look at the benchmarks, we need to touch on one other issue, that being image quality. Like its predecessors, the Rage128 and 128Pro, ATI has focused its design on bettering 32bit rendering performance. What this has led to is lackluster performance in 16 bit color, along with some “interesting” dithering artifacts when using alpha blending. Take a look at the snapshots below. You’ll have to blow them up to see the difference, but in game, it’s exceedingly noticeable in OpenGL games like Quake3Arena.

 
Quake3Arena Q3DM4 – 16 bit  640x480

Quake3Arena Q3DM4 – 32bit   640x480

You can plainly see the dithering artifacts here, when running in 16 bit color mode, and at least under OpenGL, they are not pretty. They are significantly less noticeable at a higher resolution, but still noticeable nonetheless. Interestingly enough, in Direct3D, ATI has done a much better job with masking these artifacts. They are all but unnoticeable in multiple test runs of 3Dmark 2000 at varying resolutions, so perhaps it is an issue that can be resolved with drivers. Be that as it may, 32bit rendering with the Radeon is strong, and as with the Rage128/Pro, comes with a minimal performance hit. This area is where the Radeon shines with 32bit rendering quality being downright beautiful, and with HyperZ as the resolution increases, the bandwidth savings can begin to come quite apparent. How apparent? Let’s take a look at some benchmarks now.

Next page: How fast is it?

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