Striking 3-D Graphics.(ATI Rage Fury graphics card)(Hardware Review)(Evaluation)
Nick Stam
05/25/1999
PC Magazine
COPYRIGHT 1999 Ziff-Davis Publishing Company
The ATI Rage Fury graphics card has finally arrived--but is it too little, too late?
Nick Stam
The wait has been long, but ATI's Rage Fury graphics card ($140 street), based on the Rage 128 accelerator, is finally here. This card is targeted primarily at high-end entertainment and gaming applications and secondarily at low-end OpenGL workstations. But though this card is indeed flexible, it faces serious challenges from competitors, particularly with 3-D.
Chip specs
The Rage 128 chip comes in two flavors: the GL (tested for this review), which supports 32MB of memory with a 128-bit memory interface, and the VR, a lower-cost chip, which supports 16MB of memory with a 64-bit memory interface and is intended to be integrated on motherboards of mainstream PCs.
Both versions have a 128-bit 2-D/3-D graphics engine and support all functions of 2X AGP including texturing, pipelining, and sideband signaling. They use ATI's Twin Cache Architecture, which comprises an 8K texture cache plus an 8K pixel cache. The Rage 128 also supports single-pass multitexuring (or single-pass trilinear filtering), and various special effects including alpha blending, video textures, reflection maps, and bump mapping.
This product is also the first graphics chip with both DVD motion compensation and iDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform) support for DVD decode assistance. This feature allows for much lower CPU utilization when playing DVD movies.
The Rage Fury GL incorporates the Rage 128 GL chip and 32MB of SDRAM; it supercedes cards based on the company's Rage Pro Turbo chip. Beyond the 2-D, 3- D, and DVD features supported by the Rage 128 chip, the card integrates composite NTSC and S-Video-out jacks to connect to a TV, as well as the ATI Media Channel, which can be used to connect ATI's optional TV tuner and capture cards (including the new ATI TV Wonder).
The Rage Fury GL supports Windows 95, 98, and NT 4.0 (with Service Pack 3) and includes an OpenGL client driver. With 32MB of frame-buffer memory, the card also handles very high 2-D and 3-D resolutions and color depths. Its maximum rated 3-D setting is 1,920-by-1,200 at 32 bits per pixel, double-buffered, with a 32-bit Z-buffer.
Test drive
We tested on a 500-MHz Pentium III-based Dell Dimension XPS T500. Surprisingly, the Rage Fury GL wasn't as fast as the STB Velocity 4400 RIVA TNT using nVidia's new Detonator reference drivers (Version 1.09, available for download at www.nvidia.com). On our ZD 3D WinMark 99 tests at multiple resolutions and color depths, the Rage Fury trailed the Velocity 4400 card by as much as 20 percent.
We also compared the Rage Fury performance with that of a preproduction version of a Diamond Viper V770 card, based on nVidia's forthcoming TNT-2 Ultra chip, which was clocked at an incredibly high 175 MHz for the core and 200 MHz for memory; we tested it with nVidia's new Detonator driver, which is still in beta (Version 1.72). The Viper card's scores on our 3D WinMark tests were more than 70 percent higher than the Rage Fury's. On the Quake II Crusher multiplayer demo running at 1,024-by-768 32 bpp using OpenGL drivers, the Rage Fury outperformed the Velocity 4400 card but wasn't as fast as the Viper 770.
Excellent Visuals
The Rage Fury GL exhibited stunning 3-D visual quality. Game scenes were vivid, colorful, and artifact-free. We were unable to run our 3D WinBench quality tests with a 24-bit Z-buffer, though, and one of our texture-heavy scenes locked the system once, but we couldn't duplicate the problem.
On our DVD playback tests, we couldn't tell the difference between a top- notch dedicated hardware decoder card based on C - Cube 's ZivaPC chip and the Rage Fury assisted-software DVD decoding--a first in our labs. On the ZD CPU Utilization test, we measured approximately 20 to 25 percent CPU usage while watching DVD movies on our test system.
If this review had been conducted four months ago, we would have been astounded by the Rage Fury; at this late date, you should also consider cards based on the upcoming Voodoo3, TNT-2, Savage4, and Permedia 3 chips. But if you want a great 2-D/3-D performer with excellent visual quality, TV connectivity, and built-in DVD decoding, you'll still get plenty of satisfaction out of the ATI Rage Fury.
ATI Rage Fury. Street price: $140. ATI Technologies Inc., Thornhill, Ontario, Canada; 905-882-2600; www.atitech.com.
HEADS UP, GAMERS: The Rage Fury card is a great 2-D/3-D performer.
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