ATI Rage 128

Months before the introduction of the TNT, nVidia hyped the product launch beyond belief, a mistake they're still paying for every time a TNT owner tries to run their chip at 125MHz and fails.  In contrast, Number 9 didn't hype their product enough among those in their target market, resulting in a large amount of buyers left uninformed about their product, as well as a selection of gamers who were nothing less than extremely disappointed to find out that their Quake 2 benchmarks rivaled those of their older Riva 128's.  Where does ATI fall into the great scheme of things?  They didn't make any promises of the key to the elusive Voodoo2 killer, while at the same time, they never let the market forget that they existed.  Stemming from the popularity of their original 3D Rage II and 3D Rage Pro Turbo chipsets which quickly found themselves into the hands of most OEM's, ATI took their chances at the mainstream gaming consumer market with the Rage 128, and in doing so, set themselves up for a challenge they had never faced before.

A Heart of Gold

Ok, maybe not literally, but the Rage 128 is the "golden heart" of ATI's upcoming product line consisting primarily of the ATI Rage Fury and Rage Magnum cards.  The 0.25 micron core the Rage 128 is built upon, starts off by removing a great problem most of 1998's "next-generation" 2D/3D accelerator chips caused, heat.  By mimicking S3 in the use of one of the first 0.25 micron cores to hit the Rage 128, at the end of 1998, is really the beginning of a new era in 3D accelerators (this you will see proven in a more detail later). 

The core itself includes both a texture and a pixel cache in order to achieve a more efficient usage of memory bandwidth which is oh-so-precious in any situation.  A result of this is an extremely effective control and performance boost for the memory bus, and an interesting dependency on L2 cache performance.  As you'll soon see from the benchmark tests, older Celeron (0Kb Cache) users will be given performance that is noticeably slower than their Celeron A counterparts (128Kb Cache), especially at lower clock speeds. 

The 0.25 micron chip does remove a considerable amount of the heat production associated with most next-generation accelerators, while at the same time, conserving space on the board as well.  A unique feature on the evaluation board AnandTech received was the presence of 4 - 8MB SDRAM chips to total the 32MB of memory on the board, instead of the 8 or more chips present on most competing products.

Multi-Texturing

The Rage 128, like the TNT, allows for single pass multi-texturing.  For those of you that are clueless as to what multi-texturing is, we can use this example AnandTech used in the Maxi Gamer Phoenix Banshee Review:

If you look at 3D rendering as painting a wall, a single coat of paint can easily be accomplished by virtually any brush, while that same brush will require two strokes to place two separate coats of paint on the wall (multi-pass, multi-texturing).  Now imagine a brush capable of placing two coats of paint on a wall in a single pass (single pass, multi-texturing).  By using the latter type of brush you are essentially doubling your productivity. 

In 3D gaming and rendering situations the application of such a technique is a bit more complex, yet it follows the same basic principle.  If a wall in a game, such as Unreal, happens to have a texture placed on it, such as a brick texture, followed by another layer, say a reflection from a nearby fire, you basically have two textures on that one surface. 

A chipset that can "paint" those two coats of paint on the hypothetical wall in a single rendering cycle, or pass, is effectively twice as fast as a card that requires two cycles or passes to "paint" the same wall.  Multi-texturing is already used in some of the newer games you've probably already become addicted to, Half-Life, Quake 2, and Unreal (Unreal being one of the most multi-texturing "happy" games I've ever run into) just to name a few.  Upcoming games such as the highly anticipated Duke Nukem Forever will also make use of heavy multi-texturing, as well as a number of other features supported entirely in hardware by the Rage 128.

Bump Mapping

A feature that'll quickly gain popularity as more games make use of it is bump-mapping, a feature which is hardware supported by the Rage 128 without a performance penalty to your system.  Let's use the same painted wall example from above in describing bump-mapping.  Take a minute to get up close to one of the walls in the room you happen to be reading this article in right now (be sure to shut the door as you might look a bit funny staring at the walls in awe).  Assuming that you are staring closely at a painted wall, you will notice that the wall isn't perfectly smooth.  In fact, the wall happens to have a bit of a texture to it, something that could be described as somewhat "bumpy."  Bump-mapping allows for this "bumpy" textured effect to be introduced into a 3D world to provide a greater level of realism, and when supported in hardware, enabling such a feature provides very little or no performance decrease to the gamer which is always a plus.  Before you assume that you'll never live to see a game to make effective use of bump-mapping, at the E3 Expo last May in Atlanta, after speaking to a representative working on the game Duke Nukem Forever, it seems as if Duke will be roughing up the baddies in bump-mapped worlds as the upcoming game will make use of the technique.

32-bit Color Rendering

Out of all of the features the Rage 128 will become famous for, probably the most well-known will be its support for 32-bit rendering.   If the TNT and G200 can also render at a 32-bit color depth, why on earth would the most popular feature of the Rage 128 be its 32-bit rendering support?  Unlike the TNT and G200, the Rage 128 can render at 32-bit (aka True Color) color depths without the 20 - 50% performance decrease all other chipsets come with.  In fact, the Rage 128 can render at 32bpp (versus 16bpp) in many cases, without any performance penalty at all.   In the tests AnandTech ran, the largest performance gap between 16bpp and 32bpp rendering was no greater than 3 fps. 

Rendering at anything greater than 16bpp (bits per pixel) isn't really a necessity with today's crop of gaming titles, however in the future, speaking from the point of view a game developer would most likely share, you can expect many more titles to receive a visual benefit in 32-bit modes as compared to the "older" 16-bit standard.  For now, the difference is nothing more than future security, but in the world of computers, we all know how quickly the future can hop upon us.

Hardware DVD & TV-Output

Just as you thought that Hardware DVD was becoming a thing of the past, ATI brings back to our attention that CPU utilization is still an important factor to consider, especially when a part of the tweaking population considers multitasking an absolute must.  The quality of the DVD playback on the Rage 128 is virtually identical to just about any other hardware DVD decoder out there, with a major difference, the Rage 128 doubles as a 2D/3D video card, whose CPU utilization isn't high enough to cause a significant drop in performance while multi-tasking with a DVD window open. 

While AnandTech didn't have a suite of DVD decoders to compare the Rage 128 to, the test systems, ranging from an old K6/200 to a high end Pentium II 450 machine, AnandTech played around with all exhibited virtually identical behavior in terms of DVD playback with the Rage 128.  So long as you have a decent processor (Super7 users included!), the DVD playback on the Rage 128 isn't bad at all, and an excellent alternative to buying an external unit.  Although, personally, I still do prefer a regular DVD player outside of my computer to do some serious movie watching, simply because there is still no experience like going out, renting a few movies, then popping a few kernels of microwave popcorn without the "soothing" buzz from your computer in the background. 

The Rage 128 cards that'll be hitting the store shelves shortly will have TV-Output as an option, in comparison to the output on the Marvel/Mystique G200 boards, the Rage 128 is maybe a step or two behind in terms of quality.  However the picture is still good enough to play a quick game of Quake 2 or Half-Life from a distance on a 35" TV without becoming disgusted at the quality too quickly, just don't plan on typing any word processing documents on your TV though.