ATI RADEON Review

There aren’t really a lot of bad things to say about the Radeon 32meg DDR card. With current games, on current systems, it’s more than fast enough for enjoyable game play. It doesn’t exhibit any of the anomalous types of driver behavior that I and others experienced back during the release of their Rage128 series, so at least ATI is doing better in the driver department. The Radeon’s DVD playback quality, and resultant CPU utilization, are second to none.

What it doesn’t bring to the table, unfortunately is world beating performance. Besting the Geforce DDR, a last generation card, ought to be a given. Only barely besting the Geforce2MX in real-world Q3a performance, and only in 32bit color at higher resolutions, is a tad disappointing. 

Currently, the Radeon 32meg DDR cards are hovering in a price range slightly above that of the cheapest of the Geforce2MX cards, but just slightly below that of the cheapest Geforce2 GTS cards, so the Radeon 32meg DDR is in an awkward position. It’s a shame, but there aren’t really any shipping games that can take advantage of the chips new engine features. 

I feel the Radeon will come into it’s own, once we see a tri-texturing game shipping, such as Bungie’s Halo. Making GPU design decisions I imagine is more of an art than a science, trying to predict what features will be relevant to performance when a product ships. The Radeon’s biggest mistake here is having features nothing can use yet, so in comparison to NVIDIA’s execution this cycle, the Radeon just didn’t measure up. 

While the Radeon is a well performing card, it’s not the best performing card, and NVIDIA’s Geforce2MX is close enough on the low end to make choosing a Radeon over a Geforce2MX harder. If rock solid DVD playback and outstanding 32bit performance are important to you, the Radeon would be my recommendation out of the two. If FPS is all that matters, and you’re the kind of guy that runs in 16 bit, rather than 32bit, for the extra speed, the Radeon’s not for you. At a slightly cheaper price, the Geforce2MX just makes better sense right now, and gives up little performance-wise in comparison.

Pros:

• 32bit rendering speed at little/no penalty over 16bit

• The best assisted DVD playback available.

• Advanced features for future gaming

• Stable drivers. CD and downloaded 7062 drivers were tested. None of the typical ATI driver issues I’ve seen in the past were encountered

Cons

• 16 bit rendering of alpha blending in OpenGL is ugly

• Only barely edges out nVidia’s Geforce2MX in performance, which is cheaper.

• Only slightly cheaper than a Geforce2, which outperforms it.

• Advanced features of the GPU cannot be leveraged by current games.

Rating: 8/10

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