First Look at ATI's Rage 128 - THG.RU

Waiting for the Rage one hundred and twenty wait

Impressive was the presentation of the Rage 128 back then in Toronto at the end of August. The upcoming Rage128 3D accelerator chip would be an amazing 2D/3D solution, including dual pixel pipelines, an almost complete MPEG2 decoder and even support for digital TV.

Since this time we were waiting for ATI to finally bless us with this new little miracle and we were waiting for a considerably long time. ATI doesn’t have any reasons to rush. Of all companies in the PC mainstream graphics area, ATI is the only company that is making really big money.

1998 will be their by far best year in history, companies like NVIDIA, Matrox, Diamond, Creative, STB and also 3Dfx can only dream of the revenues ATI was making this year. The reason for this success doesn’t come from nothing. It does not take the fastest and shiniest chip on the market to be successful in this business.

What it takes is a decent product, reliable shipments, good prices and an excellent customer support as well as a smart strategy. More than 60% of ATI’s chips are ending on a motherboard, most of them for lower end systems. Many OEMs are using ATI cards in their systems, helping them to offer a decent system at an attractive price point. High end 3D chips are a nice feather on every 3D chip maker’s hat, but it doesn’t have to be what it takes to be successful.

From 100 down to 90 MHz core clock sounding familiar?

Now what has happened since the presentation of the Rage 128 more than 3 months ago? Well, you certainly remember the embarrassing retreat NVIDIA had to go through.

In March 1998 they announced RIVA TNT with great performance data, but finally they had to take back this data because TNT wouldn’t run at the expected 125 MHz but at only 90 MHz instead. Many people laughed about NVIDIA when that happened, but still the TNT is now the best performing 2D/3D-solution available.

The same seems to happen to ATI as well now, and we should show as much or as little mercy with ATI as we showed with NVIDIA. Initially the Rage 128 was supposed to run at 100 MHz core clock. The Rage 128 cards that went out to many reviewers now, are running at only 90 MHz core clock and this although the chip is supposed to be produced in .25 micron technology, as opposed to NVIDIA’s TNT still using .35 micron and running at 90 MHz also.

Looking back at the 100 MHz expectations from before August 1998, ATI had to retreat just as well as NVIDIA had to, only that ATI has less of an excuse, since the Rage 128 is using the later technology already.

Nice Specs

Now what have we got with Rage 128? It’s another dual pipeline 3D accelerating unit, just as TNT able to render 2 bilinear filtered pixels per clock or to render one dual-textured or bumped mapped pixel/clock. Thus the fill rate is identical to TNT, 180 Mpixels/s.

The additional features are what makes the difference. Rage 128 has several stages for the MPEG2 decoding process included and ATI claims that 85% of the MPEG2-decoding is done by Rage 128. This is certainly interesting for DVD playback in any kind of system, regardless if it contains a fast or a slower CPU.

Rage 128 does support up to 32 MB of local (onboard) memory, giving a possible advantage in games that are using a lot of large textures, because those textures can be stored locally, instead of transferring them in and out main memory via the AGP. There is a whole lot more nice little features, but opposed to all the other reviews of the Rage 128, I prefer to not copy the whole spec sheet, you can find it at ATI’s website as well as in several other reviews of the Rage 128.

All in all you can say that there is no reason to expect miracles of Rage 128, in 3D it should be pretty close to NVIDIA’s TNT.

Rage 128 Is Really Hot!

A lot of fuss was going on about the heat produced by the latest 3D chips. TNT is great for heating your complete office or living room and thus also consuming a considerably large amount of current.

3Dfx’s Banshee is not much different either, it also reaches over 70 degrees Celsius and more when running 3D software.

Rage 128 is supposed to at least seem different. ATI was being very courageous, they shipped the review cards without a heat sink, maybe due to the fact that it’s winter in Canada. Some of my reviewer colleagues from other websites concluded very sharply, that thus the Rage 128 doesn’t get as hot as its competitors.

Well, sorry to destroy this myth, but my measurements showed that Rage 128 reaches no less than 91 degrees Celsius (!!!!) when running Quake 2, almost enough to boil water. Therefore I would like to kindly advise ATI to do something about it, unless they want to risk some kind of meltdown in consumer systems, particularly on motherboards.

Compatibility

The Rage 128 card ran fine in all the Slot1-systems I tried, however, I cannot say the same about its compatibility with Socket7 systems. Trying the Rage 128 in a Asus P5A motherboard was completely unsuccessful, the system never reached the Windows98-desktop.

The same happened with other Super7 motherboards based on ALI’s Aladdin V chipset. VIA’s Apollo MVP3 chipset seems to like the Rage 128 better, but when switching the ‘Game Engine Performance Booster’ to OpenGL acceleration, the screen would remain black after rebooting as well.

This is not very pleasant and shows even more that ATI has all reasons to delay the release of the Rage 128 until January 1999 at least.

2D Performance

ATI’s Rage Pro was already doing pretty fine in 2D, but now Rage 128 has to fight against some real kick-ass 2D performers, 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee and NVIDIA RIVA TNT. Most of you won’t bother too much about this, since 2D performance seems to have almost reached the theoretical maximum.

OEMs still like to have this information though, simply for the almighty marketing. You know that I detest Winbench’s 2D tests. They make you believe that one card is double as fast as another, but once you are running an application you don’t notice a difference.

I prefer running real world tests as e.g. the new Winstone99, and the results show that TNT has got a slight edge over Rage 128 in 16 as well as 32 bit color mode. The quality of Rage 128’s RAMDAC seems to be fine, but I haven’t done any in depth testing of the 2D quality yet.

I came across some strange display errors once in a while though, proving that the driver deserves the name ‘beta’ well. Choosing the refresh rate is also a bit difficult, but ATI is aware of the problem with the DDC and it’s supposed to be fixed ‘soon’.

The tests ran on a PII 504 (overclocked 450 MHz version) system, with 128 MB SDRAM, Asus P2B-LS motherboard, IBM DGVS 09U ultra wide SCSI hard drive.

Game Engine Performance Booster

Before we get into the 3D benchmarks I have to explain a few things. On the search for the highest 3D performance ATI is adding a little tool program called ‘Game Engine Performance Booster’, which can improve performance in Direct3D or OpenGL based games.

You can choose between no frame rate acceleration, Direct3D acceleration or OpenGL acceleration. This little tool wouldn’t be too bad, if it wouldn’t require a reboot each time you switch. It also screws up Super7 systems based on the VIA Apollo MVP3 chipset, once you try switching to OpenGL acceleration. I may be allowed to ask what this tool is supposed to be about though. NVIDIA doesn’t need an acceleration switch for different games and I am pretty happy about that. I consider it as a nuisance if I have to reboot to make sure that my 3D accelerator works as fast as it can, it’s also dangerous forgetting to switch back to ‘no acceleration’, because the ‘booster’ says itself:

‘When you finished playing, turn off frame rate acceleration before running other applications or you will experience system instability. The proper acceleration for each type of game must be selected or system instability will occur.

Well, ‘system instability’ is one of my favorites. I love putting my system into this condition. My second advice to ATI is getting rid of this ‘booster’ before the cards will ship.

3D Performance

How does Rage 128 stick up against TNT now? Well, let’s not expect a huge difference between Rage 128 and TNT, the 3D engine specs are too similar.

The test were all done on a PII 400 system, with 128 MB SDRAM, Asus P2B-LS motherboard, IBM DGVS 09U ultra wide SCSI hard drive.

3D Performance – Direct3D Games

Under Direct3D, even when using the ‘Game Engine Performance Booster’, Rage 128 is slower or just as fast as TNT in Forsaken, Incoming and Expendable, at least as long as you are using the common 16 bit color depth.

3D Performance – Quake2

Quake2 has a lot of different ways of benchmarking with it. There is the simple way of using ‘demo1’, which doesn’t have much to do with game play reality, you can run Brett ‘3 Fingers’ Jackob’s ‘massive1’ and get some realistic average frame rate for multi-player gaming, or you can use Brett’s ‘crusher’ demo, showing 3D performance under Quake2 at worst case conditions.

The latter is obviously the most important one, since we 3D gamers want to be sure that the frame rate never drops too low when we are having some heavy rocket fights with several opponents at the same time. Of all three different demos, ‘crusher’ is using most CPU resources, ‘demo1’ the least.

Comparing Rage 128 with TNT shows some interesting results. In ‘demo1’ Rage 128 runs 13% faster than TNT, this difference gets less running ‘massive1’ and comes down to only 3% in ‘crusher’. These results are taken from a PII400 system. As you can see, the difference of Rage 128’s Quake2 performance between the frame rates in ‘demo1’ and ‘crusher’ is much larger than in case of RIVA TNT. Rage 128 is going almost as low as TNT in ‘crusher’.

These results do already lead to the conclusion that Rage 128 is more CPU depending than TNT. The mon2 demo from S3 is a very good test for the ability of a chip to handle large textures and shows the performance of the AGP transfer rate or texture compression, if available. The Rage 128 looks a lot worse than TNT, suggesting that the AGP interface needs a lot more work too.

32-bit Color Rendering

The picture is changing when running the D3D games in 32-bit color mode. TNT is experiencing a 40% performance hit and Rage 128 gets a penalty of less than 10%!

This means two things. Rage 128 will indeed let you play most games in 32-bit mode, but die-hard gamers will still not use it because there is some performance hit.

The most important thing about Rage 128’s 3D performance under 32-bit color is that is proves Scott Sellers and whole 3Dfx wrong. When Voodoo3 was presented 3 weeks ago, 3Dfx apologized for the missing 32-bit color rendering ability of Voodoo3 by claiming that 32-bit color rendering was ‘anyway a frame rate killer’ and thus pointless.

I guess Scott and his colleagues have to learn a lesson from ATI, 32-bit color rendering is NOT a frame rate killer. ATI’s engineers are up to it and seemingly the technicians from 3Dfx are not. Anyway, in 32-bit rendering Rage 128 is currently as good and as fast as it gets.

CPU Dependency

The results under Quake 2 with ‘crusher’ were already suggesting it, ATI’s Rage 128 is more CPU dependent than TNT. This is shown in the Quake2 results below, unfortunately Incoming doesn’t show much of a difference. K6-systems are better off with TNT when it comes to 3D gaming performance.

3D Image Quality

The differences between TNT and Rage 128 aren’t huge. TNT is currently the image quality master and Rage 128 is in many cases just the same. However, there is one game where I found a real flaw, Rage 128 has problems drawing the bridge in Expendable. It also seems as if Incoming looks a bit corny in 16 bit color mode compared with TNT’s quality.

Download the full size BMP image (1024×768, 618kB)

Problem Summary

There are quite a few good reasons why ATI is not ready to start shipping yet. Driver problems as well as some hardware difficulties are still waiting to get sorted out.

The chip is getting way too hot. ATI told me that the case temperature of the Rage 128 can go up to 115 degrees Celsius without causing damage to the chip. The only question is, who wants to have such a hot part inside his computer case, heating up everything around it and causing possible problems for other components. Heat doesn’t come from nothing, it takes energy in form of high current to produce this heat. Thus the question is what power consumption the Rage 128 has. ATI is aware of this problem, which is particularly touchy for the Rage 128 chips that are supposed to go onto motherboards. Thus ATI has done a re-design of the silicon and hopes that the next revision will not produce as much heat.
Driver problems! ATI hasn’t got that much time to make Rage 128 work on all Super7-motherboards as well. Currently I’d leave my hands from the Rage 128 if I’d own a system with a Socket7 CPU. There are still some flaws shown on the desktop, e.g. the nice blue sky in the upper left corner of each folder displayed by Windows98’s Explorer suddenly turns to dark green, looking very shagedelic, groovey babey! The bridge in Expendable is certainly not the only flaw that’s in the D3D driver, so that’s another problem. You can’t choose the resolutions 1152×862 and 1280×1024 in Quake2, unless you want to risk a system crash, so that’s driver problem no.4.
The ‘Game Engine Performance Booster’ is rather annoying and dangerous than cool, so I’d prefer doing without it. TNT is always delivering top performance and so should Rage 128 as well.
The AGP interface seems to need quite a lot of work still. Rage 128 looked pretty bad in the Q2 mon2 demo.

Advantages

Rage 128 is a step into the right direction and ATI will most certainly do very well with it. Here are some reasons why:

Best MPEG2-decoder implementation available inside a 2D/3D chip world wide. With the Rage 128 DVD decoding becomes a breeze, the CPU can do other things, e.g. take care of the stuff offered by interactive DVDs.
Best 32-bit color 3D-rendering of all 2D/3D chips, showing the state of the art. Maybe that’ll make 3Dfx wake up a bit.
Support of 32 MB of local memory, now also done by 3Dfx and their upcoming Voodoo3.
Available as version for motherboard implementation with 64-bit memory interface, offering a very attractive solution for onboard 2D/3D in lower cost systems. This is very interesting for OEMs. The Voodoo3 will e.g. only come with 128-bit memory interface (as far as I know), requiring a huge space on motherboards and thus making it a lot less attractive.
Support of digital RGB out for flat panels, becoming very important in 1999.
Support of DTV, no other 2D/3D chip is able to do this.

Conclusion

The Rage 128 will have to overcome the current problems and it could be a very serious competitor to NVIDIA’s RIVA TNT. However, right now there’s no reason for NVIDIA to become nervous. Rage 128 is not really faster than TNT, considering the results from the ‘crusher’ demo and the Direct3D performance. The additional features of Rage 128, the 32 MB memory support and particularly the impressive performance in 32-bit color mode could be a good reason for preferring Rage 128 over TNT, once the problems have been sorted out. Then ATI should also have an answer to TNT-2 though.

All in all I’m absolutely convinced that ATI will continue its success with Rage 128, there’s hardly any doubt about it. Rage 128 plus ATI’s highly successful way of doing business in the retail and particularly the OEM market are an almost unbeatable team. So it may be that you will never buy an ATI Rage 128 card in the shop, but get a complete system with it instead.