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ATI Radeon 64MB DDR VIVO AGP
By Vijay Anand
Category : Graphics
Published by Jimmy Tang on Sunday, 29th October, 2000
Rating : 4 out of 5 stars  
Price : SGDUS$340


ATI Radeon 64MB DDR VIVO Specifications

Graphics Engine

  • ATI Radeon 128-bit Graphics Processing Unit
  • AGP 4x part
  • Hardware Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA)
  • Radeon Charisma Engine supports Full Transformation, Clipping and Lighting, Vertex skinning and key frame interpolation
  • ATI's HyperZ technology
  • Pixel Tapestry, the Radeon 3D rendering engine (1.5 Gigatexels/sec)
  • 128-bit Memory Interface
  • 24-bit Floating Point Depth Buffer and 8-bit Stencil Buffer
  • Maximum resolution 2048x1536x32 @ 75Hz
  • DVD Hardware Assist

Graphics Memory

  • 64MB DDR SDRAM (Hyundai-5.5)

RAMDAC

  • 350MHz RAMDAC
Video-In & Video-Out Engine
  • ATI Rage Theater companion chipset
  • Full motion video capture (MPEG-1 and MPEG-2) and still image capture
  • Video-out to connect your PC to TV or VCR for recording
Connectors
  • 15-pin D-sub VGA connector
  • Composite Video-in
  • Composite Video-out
  • S-Video-out
Driver and Utilities
  • Driver support for Windows 98/2000/NT 4.0
  • Microsoft DirectX 7.0a driver
  • ATI Radeon Technology Demo
Other Information
  • AGP 1.1 slot required
  • 1 PCI-assigned IRQ Required



Introduction

Remember the times when there were no '3D' games? In those days, we were familiar with cards like the Diamond Stealth-64, Matrox Millenium, Number Nine, S3 Virge, the humble Trident and of course, the ATI-Mach64. Oh yes, the good old Mach-64 made a name for itself just like its Diamond and Matrox counterparts. A little later, when 3D came into the picture, the big boys from Matrox, ATI, S3 and Number Nine were caught off guard as their share of the graphics market decreased and went to 3dfx, Diamond and STB.

Those left out of the race tried to make a comeback, but only ATI and Matrox were successful enough to recapture part of the market. Number Nine completely departed from the market and so did S3.

Between ATI and Matrox, I would say Matrox had a stronger selling point in each generation of its product as they always have a large array of features to satisfy every need. Matrox has been doing well although it was not the greatest in speed. When Matrox released the G200, it had the finest looking 2D and 3D visual quality with decent performance (although driver support was lacking). The G400 had better performance with good drivers along with other spear-heading features of its own like Dual-Head and Environment Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM). It generated so much hype that it sold by itself. Now that is what I call, innovation!

ATI, on the other hand, is the largest graphics manufacturer and supplier for the OEM market. A lot of on-board graphics were supplied by ATI, and a large percentage of notebooks used ATI graphics. It was also Apple's main external graphics card/chipset supplier for Macintosh computers. With such deep roots among many OEMs and branded computers, it was no surprise that ATI coped well in the retail scene during the days of its Rage and Rage 128 products.

ATI chipsets were also ground-breakers in certain areas, but they were lacking raw performance, especially for the hard core gamers. OEMs loved their chipsets and you can see ATI's graphic chipsets integrated into numerous motherboard products. It was what everyone wanted since it supported DVD playback, TV-Out and Video-In features without the need for expensive third party hardware. Above all, it had decent performance too. Until today, we know that ATI's hardware support for DVD playback is unmatched in terms of quality and performance and this was their main selling point.

Not long ago, ATI came up with an undeniably good innovation called Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR). This technology required 2 chipsets with their own memory set to work effectively. AFR's purpose was to allow each chipset to render alternate frames separately. This effectively doubles processing power using the same chipset and actual performance increased about 50% to 100%. This feature was introduced with the Rage Fury MAXX 64MB product and has been well accepted in the gaming community for its power to compete with the nVidia GeForce. The only hitch was that its drivers only allowed it to work flawlessly in Windows 98. I guess the Rage Fury MAXX 64MB was just a sneak preview of what ATI just introduced a month back to convey to the PC world that ATI is back, bigger and better than ever before.

The Radeon is a new Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) that combines all the features of nVidia, 3dfx and Matrox to become the "jack of all trades" along with a few more of its own innovation. It brings with it hardware T&L (Transform & Lighting) support, FSAA (Full Scene Anti Aliasing), EMBM, Vertex-Skinning, Key-Frame Interpolation, ATI's HyperZ Technology, hardware DVD support, and much more. ATI made quite a breakthrough here and it is ATI at its best. Thumbs up to ATI!

The product we received was an ATI Radeon 64MB DDR with Video-in/Video-Out (VIVO). It looks like a complete retail product but the drivers shipped to us looked like Alpha drivers. I am not sure if these are the full shipping drivers but as you will see later, these 'Alpha' drivers performed quite well in our tests.


Initial Impressions

The card we received was an evaluation unit and we did not get to see the original package that came with the entire product. Anyway, the card is pretty impressive, with a silver heatsink on the Radeon chipset. Here's a closeup of the card.


The Radeon is no bigger than an average GeForce card.


The back portion with more RAM.

The Radeon 64MB VIVO card is fitted with a DB-15 output, an S-Video Out and Composite In/Out connectors, just short of a TV Tuner to make it an ALL-IN-WONDER product. Just a note, the All-In-Wonder Radeon product scheduled to be out in retail will only be a 32MB DDR part.

The Radeon chipset itself is hidden behind the robust looking heatsink and fan. We can see a trend in new video cards such that more expensive higher density memory are used to reduce real estate space taken up by these RAM. It is also an indication that more high density memory parts are being manufactured today. Anyway, the exact DDR-SDRAM part used is as below.


Oh look, it's everyone's favourite Hyundai! I am sure you are getting weird ideas now!


The companion ATI Rage-Theater chip that adds VIVO functions.

The memory chips are rated at 5.5ns, effectively equating to 183MHz which is the speed of the memory and core set by ATI. Their original plan was to release the Radeon at 200MHz (core) / 200Mhz (memory). Unfortunately, memory chips rated at that speed were expensive and rare which was why plans for the 200MHz Radeon was dropped.

The heart of the VIVO functions is located at the ATI Rage Theater companion chipset. It is able to output high quality TV signals from graphics display modes ranging from 320x200 to 800x600 with full support for legacy VGA modes as well as the newer, low-resolution game modes required by Microsoft DirectX. For video input, it supports PAL, NTSC, SECAM and other VBI services that includes Teletext, Closed Captioning and Intercast. If you match the ATI Rage Theater with a powerful Pentium III or Athlon CPU, you will be able to capture any video source to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 format using ATI's capture software. The software also allows you to perform light editing on those MPEG1 and MPEG-2 clips.

Setup and ATI Driver details

Once again, I have dedicated a separate page on this topic (click the link above to read more about the Radeon setup and driver details). The most important point I would like to convey is, on certain systems, you may need to disable the AGP 4X support in the BIOS in order to get this card to function properly. However, when I checked the properties section of the card, it was listed as running at AGP 4x. Weird, how could AGP 4x be enabled when it is turned off in the motherboard BIOS? Hmm...


The Test

I performed our standard 3DMark 2000 benchmarks as well as the Quake-III Test 1.08 demos. I compared the Radeon 64MB DDR results with my Creative GeForce DDR. This initial round will contain results without FSAA. Here is what I got with 3D Mark 2000.


Running these synthetic tests, the Radeon performed terribly in Direct3D games without any Hardware T&L support.


Transformation & Lighting made the results shoot right up and went beyond the GeForce DDR.

3D Mark 2000 Game 1 scores without hardware T&L.


3D Mark 2000 Game 1 scores with hardware T&L enabled.

Just by comparing the game scores in 3DMark 2000, the Radeon equaled the GeForce DDR in Game 1 and it excelled further in 32-bit colour gaming with hardware T&L enabled. Without T&L, the results were lower than the GeForce DDR, but came very close to being identical for Medium detail setting and above. That was not too shabby at all.


3D Mark 2000 Game 2 scores without hardware T&L.


3D Mark 2000 Game 2 scores with hardware T&L enabled.

In Game 2 without T&L, the Low-Detail results were much better than Game 1, but there is still a good 10 to 15 fps difference. At Medium detail and above, the results were again quite close. With T&L turned on, we saw a huge increase in performance. Now for some OpenGL performance with Quake3.





In Quake3, both demos showed similar results with the GeForce DDR taking an average of 3 to 10 fps lead over the Radeon in 16-bit colour at all resolutions. In 32-bit colour which is ATI's stronghold, the Radeon leaped over the GeForce DDR by 3 to 17 fps on average at resolutions above 640x480. The performance at 1280x960 in 32-bit colour went beyond 60 fps. Cool stuff!

FSAA Results

It is time that we found out how ATI's hardware based FSAA perform as this was one of ATI's key features. Remember now, the Radeon only support FSAA in Ordered Grid Super Sampling format (OGSS) at 4 subsamples (4x FSAA). If you need further details on FSAA, please refer to the earlier 3dfx Voodoo5-5500 (Part 2) article. To summarize the results, the Radeon was speedier than the Voodoo5 with 4x FSAA, but we have to note that Voodoo5 uses the RGSS method for FSAA. In that view, ATI's 4x FSAA equaled Voodoo5's 2x-FSAA in terms of quality and Voodoo5's 4x-FSAA quality was vastly superior than the Radeon.

Radeon on an Overclocked CPU

This above section was to investigate the performance of the Radeon with an overclocked processor. Click the link above to find out how it copes with higher bus speeds and the results with a faster CPU.


The Ups

You think your nVidia GeForce card is pushing the ambient casing temperature a little too much? Well, you will not encounter that problem with the Radeon. The Radeon runs really cool! After a round of intense gaming and you would still not feel the heat. In fact, it is cooler than the Sound Blaster Live's EMU10K1 chipset. This is a tremendous feat on ATI's part (or is it with their silicon supplier?). With such cool characteristics, it can be easily integrated on to motherboards. It would be great to have an on-board Radeon, don't you think so?

The overall performance of the Radeon was not bad. It performed really well in the 32-bit colour department at high/ultra-high resolution gaming. Not only that, with its huge list of 3D features, the Radeon would probably take the top spot in 3D graphics quality. Please read the ATI Radeon Overview for a complete explanation of the Radeon's 3D features.

From overclocking my CPU and in effect, raising the system bus speed, I discovered that the Radeon coped a lot better than the GeForce or the Voodoo5 and was very stable throughout my testing unlike the other two that failed during initial 3DMark 2000 tests. Overclockers, this could be the next generation of video card that you need in order to cope with high FSB overclocking.

Equipped with VIVO features and an ATI-Rage Theatre chip on board, the 64MB DDR Radeon doubles up as a multimedia card as well. Big screen TV-output, hardware assisted VCD/DVD playback, video-capture in MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 format and still video captures are some of the unique capabilities offered here. VCD and DVD playback quality from ATI is still perceived to be the best in the consumer market.

Packed with such advance features, it is of no surprise that Apple decided to soon equip the new Macintosh G4 with the Radeon, which is an upgrade to the present ATI Rage128 Pro. On a side note, Apple was offered the Radeon from ATI and GeForce2-MX from nVidia for their new G4s. nVidia support on the Macintosh was a first with the GeForce2-MX, but Apple did not want to let go of ATI's long established support for the Macintosh. Hence the decision was obvious, Apple chose ATI even though the Radeon were more expensive. Since the G4 was such a niche product, it would do well with a powerful graphics processor like the Radeon.


The Downs

The performance could have been better if ATI offered the 64MB DDR Radeon at its intended 200MHz core and memory speed. Unfortunately, ATI was not able to get enough 200MHz DDR chips and had to settle for a more readily available 183MHz part. Hopefully, future 64MB DDR Radeon will carry the 200MHz DDR memory.

Although the Radeon carried a host of features, it is unfortunate that most of its features will have to wait until Microsoft's DirectX 8 releases officially. In addition, game developers will need to fully utilise the Radeon's capabilities before we can fully gain what the Radeon has to offer.

Though the initial drivers performed well overall, I encountered a few glitches while playing Need For Speed 5. The game would work perfectly sometimes, and at other times failed to execute correctly. Let's hope ATI will provide better driver support for the Radeon. You do not want to be caught with an expensive card like the Radeon without good drivers support.

Finally, this board still carries a premium price and I do mean it! It is currently retailed in US at about US$399. That's about S$700!!! The price somewhat ties with the current GeForce2 GTS with 64MB DDR, but the price is still a tad too steep. I can imagine why 3dfx chose SDR over the DDR RAM for the Voodoo5-5500. However, 3dfx is already suffering the consequences of using SDR memory as it is bottlenecking the performance. On the other hand, the Radeon 32MB DDR version is still a bit pricey at S$370+.

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