Report on Business: Technology
GAMES & GADGETS
ATI chip accelerates 3-D rivalry
FRANK LENK
04/22/1999
The Globe and Mail
Metro
Page T4
All material copyright Thomson Canada Limited or its licensors. All rights reserved.
For years, serious gamers have relied on 3-D graphics-accelerator hardware made by 3Dfx Interactive Inc. of San Jose. But now a new product from Markham, Ont.-based ATI Technologies Inc. signals the end of that de facto standard.
The first card powered by the Rage 128 3-D accelerator chip, the Rage Fury is a milestone product. It is ATI's first 3-D accelerator card to grab the top spot on standard 3-D performance tests. An excellent graphics adapter in general, the Rage Fury is a very attractive choice for gamers in particular.
Graphics cards in all desktop computers include powerful 2-D accelerator chips that handle most of the work of displaying everyday applications; 3-D accelerator cards do the same for 3-D animations used in games, taking over much of the burdensome work from the main processor. The result is faster, smoother, more colourful and more enjoyable game playing.
The Rage Fury's specs are totally leading-edge, with an amazing 32 megabytes of memory as standard equipment, allowing for sharp screen resolutions of up to 1,920 by 1,200 pixels.
The most immediate benefit of installing the Rage Fury was also the most unexpected for this reviewer; the standard Windows desktop display became so much sharper, it was as if a blurry haze had been wiped off the monitor.
Given ATI's strong position with computer makers, it seems inevitable that a lot of PCs will ship with this card as standard equipment. However, since 3Dfx's Voodoo-brand standard has been dominant for so long, there are some drawbacks for people thinking of buying the ATI card. Unfortunately, a few games still work exclusively with the 3Dfx standard.
But most new games support at least one of two open, or non-proprietary, 3-D standards: OpenGL, originally developed by Silicon Graphics Inc., and Direct3D, the default Windows gaming standard from Microsoft Corp. These standards act as translators, to ensure that the game software and 3-D hardware can talk to each other, and the Rage Fury works with both.
ATI's Rage128 is the first accelerator chip designed to run at full speed in 24-bit mode, which means that millions of colours can be displayed simultaneously. However, many games still use 16-bit mode, with a palette of about 65,000 colors. Since some shades are created by mixing fine dots of pure color, this can produce a grainy look.
Overall, the Rage Fury seems to handle colour blending a bit less gracefully than Voodoo accelerators. Newer software from ATI may reduce the speckling effect. By the end of this year, most new games will be running in 24-bit colour, meaning the Rage Fury should clearly pull ahead.
On our test system, installation went smoothly, but resulted in intermittent crashes in Windows 98. However, ATI continues to improve its software drivers, and downloading a newer version of the driver at www.atitech.com cured all the problems.
Aside from scoring well on basic performance, the Rage Fury also gains extra points for its nice range of bonus features, including digital-video-disc acceleration for smooth playback of movies, and the ability to output to a TV set rather than a computer monitor.
Of course, things move quickly in this business. Early in this month, ATI announced that the new Rage 128 Pro chip will be available in July, and claimed it was 50-per-cent faster than the chip used on the Rage Fury. About a week later, 3Dfx shipped the first graphics cards based on its own next-generation Voodoo3 chip. Such intense competition will drive 3-D further and faster than ever, throughout the rest of this year. Frank Lenk can be reached at flenk@we-compute.com
Site seeing
www.atitech.com www.3dfx.com
RAGE FURY
3-D Graphics Accelerator ATI Technologies Inc. www.atitech.com $299
PROS: Leading-edge 3-D performance Very crisp Windows desktop
CONS:
Software drivers may need update Won't accelerate some games |
