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ATI Radeon 256
snack writes "FINALLY! ATI has released info on their new graphics chip, built to take on both the 3dfx and nVIDIA. Reading through the press release it says that it has Windows, Linux and Mac suport. There are no benchmarks yet on the Web site, but reading through the tech specs it seems that this chip will blow everything else away. It also says that over the summer, this will implement the MAXX technology. Two of these chips working in parallel... Oh, my God!"
Let's solve the "support for Linux" issue once and for all, and just port Linux to this card! :)
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Oh. Wow. Yet another press release expounding the miraculous abilities of some upcoming piece of hardware that has yet to see the light of day. I am so impressed. Maybe, just because I am sooo totally impressed by this, I'll put off buying that GeForce now. But then again, I'm sure we'll have some new announcement a few months after that telling us about the next great achievement in hardware. At this rate, I'll be stuck with this EGA card for the next 20 years!
Seriously, I wish that Slashdot and all of the other sites that repost on computer hardware would start dropping crap like this in the trashbin. Post reviews of released products, post reviews of soon to be released products, but if I never see another review of a product that only exists on paper, I'll still have seen too many. Posting this kind of stuff just encourages these hardware companies to write more of it.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
i was reading a review of the Radeon located at Thresh's Firing Squad and i can't help but be impressed. maybe ati finally has got it right...their other cards have had some...problems. the 3dfx benchmarks of today were kind of disappointing, but maybe there still is hope. i'm a big 3dfx fan, and i appreciate their linux support-but it's good to see other companies grab ahold of linux. there's nothing like playing Quake3 on a system on which you used du -s * | grep "M" just a minute ago. it's really quite liberating. here's to good graphics cards and linux support! yay technology..
Odd... I submitted this hours ago, yet my writeup was rejected...
Anyway, the ATI Radeon can do 1.5 gigatexels per second. The Voodoo 5 can only do 667 megatexels. So, the Radeon will far outperform a V5. And it has T&L! What a deal! The funny thing is that 3dfx is hyping the V5 based on its fill rate...
Now, on Wednesday, nVidia is going to announce the GeForce 2. It will have a fill rate of 1.6 gigatexels, just a bit higher than ATI's offering. On the geometry side, the GF2 will do 250 million triangles per second. I don't know how fast the Radeon is as far as geometry, but if anyone else knows, please share! It is also rumored that the GF2 will be in stores on Friday. As in, THIS Friday. Whoah.
Back on ATI's side, the Radeon looks like it will have more features that the GF2. As a game coder, I like that. :) Also, ATI is likely to have better Linux support. I also like that.
It looks like choosing between these two cards will be tough, but I'm leaning towards ATI right now. One thing that I know for sure, however, is that 3dfx is not in the running. Their only hope right now is to drop their prices very low. I would not like to be working at 3dfx right now.
Oh, here's some links:
Again, nVidia will be announcing the GF2 on Wednesday. Check their site then for details.
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It's nice to hear that it will be released supporting all of the major OSes. Let's hope that this isn't just a marketing ploy, and, that most new hardware will follow this plan.
Things seem to be swinging back to the way that it was in the '80s with many different OS's. This time, however, we have standardized hardware (mostly).
Making Linux into an adequate gaming platform also depends upon immediate support when hardware is released. I think the ATI Radeon is a step in the right direction.
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> I can't understand why you would have ever bought an AMD
> CPU in the past (I certainly can now with the Athlon, however).
First point: I bought an AMD K6-2 because, at the time, it was the only reasonable alternative to supporting the Intel monopoly, a monopoly I found just as odious then as I do now. The K7 Athlon was six months or more away, and I needed a computer sooner than that. And, I wasn't going to buy Intel on principle--they'd been handing us slight modifications of the original Pentium, without much true innovation, for far too long. Amazing how the underdog AMD, with comparatively few resources, was first to market with a true "786" processor core... But, back to the point, I bought AMD on principle, and their price/performance ratio at the time was very competitive with the Celeron (differing clockspeeds for equal performance, of course). It'll still make a damn fine file server when I build a new Athlon/Thunderbird system at the end of the year.
> The main reason why ATI cards have problems on Super7 is because
> Super7 is a bad, bad hack. If you actually look around, all of the
> cards were having problems around that time.
Yes, but you're missing the point! *ALL* of the other major manufacturers fixed their drivers to make their products work with Super 7, *EXCEPT* for ATI. A TNT2 will run well on Super 7, and has since a couple months after introduction when the drivers were fixed for VIA Super 7. Ditto for G200/G400. Even a shiny new GeForce runs well under VIA Super 7. But still, after an eternity, not the ATI Rage 128 based cards. *That's* the point. All other important players run well on VIA Super 7 chipsets now, except for ATI which has had well over a year to fix their driver support. So, the problem is with ATI's protracted laziness. Nowadays Super 7 may not be the best platform to bother with, but it was for most of the over a year in which ATI ignored driver dev for it.
> And the REALMagic is a PCI card, right? And your ATI card is
> AGP? Again, this is more a problem with Super7 than the manufacturer
> of your graphics card.
No, no, no, no. The video card is a standard PCI model; I have an AGP slot which I wanted to save for an nVidia or 3Dfx card when I could save the money to upgrade, then use the ATI strictly for its multimedia functions live Video Desktop and vid capping. Look towards the future, I always say, and I wasn't about to waste my AGP slot on a card featuring an ATI chip which was already a year old. So, it isn't a problem with VIA's AGP implementation, it's, I repeat, a problem with ATI's substandard hardware support/driver support. So, if the REALmagic card has no problem doing DVD over my PCI bus, the ATI card shouldn't either. It's that simple. REALmagic took the time to write drivers which would handle DVDs well from a Super 7 mobo, but ATI Multimedia didn't. Their driver support is consistently substandard when compared to nVidia, 3Dfx, and Matrox, and I mean even on Intel mobos--read the posts on the Rage Underground help boards if you doubt this. But the driver support is especially bad for AMD/VIA solutions. There is *ZERO* excuse for blaming a chipset instead of fixing your drivers to work with it, especially when every other important player in the graphics industry has managed to make their cards work quite well with it. And before you try again to lay the blame elsewhere, yes, the latest VIA drivers have been installed and configured properly.
And, a final note: especially since a PCI-based Rage 128-based card could not play well with X in standard SVGA mode, ATI has absolutely no business calling a VIA chipset non-standard. It's ATI's cards and drivers which are non-standard.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Concerning useing two cards running in tandem, it is also possible to run this card in quads. Each card will render every other pixel of every other scanline, thereby quadrupling the effective frame rate. That is, only if you have 4 slots.
With Mac OS X and more and faster Power Mac G4s in the wings, I really hope ATI looks forward when developing Mac drivers. The Rage II, RagePro, and Rage128 drivers for the MacOS in the past have left a bad taste in my mouth and at this point I wouldn't be too heartbroken if they were to develop their next set of drivers for G4/Altivec and Mac OS X only. Perhaps they outta consult with some Linux and NEXTSTEP/OpenStep/MacOS X experts for help with their non-Windows drivers. Omni has done miracles with NEXTSTEP and OpenGL in the past for Carmack and id, perhaps someone outta give them a call.
Rant, Rant, Rant
You have overlinked this article. Just because you know the URL of Linux doesn't mean you need to use it.
I'm just skimming through the tech specs here and I'm just gonna comment on a few things...
:P
Note, I'm no graphics professional. I am merely an interested individual. Repeat: I am no John Carmack!
The first thing that jumped out at me that ATI seems to be doing in the "new and cool" area (rather than just adding more horsepower to today's GPUs) is adding keyframe interpolation. Not *2D* interpolation, but *3D mesh* interpolation. The idea has a good illustration at the bottom of this page.
Voxels seem to be cropping up here. It's cool to see that they are adding support for them at the hardware level. I know that John Carmack has been skeptical about using voxels due to the sheer amount of processing power they need.
Most of the stuff I saw in the specs, however, is mostly just fluff covering various graphics technologies and what they do. While the specs hint that the chip will have support for them, it doesn't do too much more than hint at it.
Maybe there'll be more information soon...
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Free music from Jack Merlot.
You're absolutely right...
Everyone is going to announce their latest chip with guns blazing, claiming that it will be the fastest thing ever, with the most features, bla. blah blah.
And, I'm surprised slashdotters are falling for it. "Look at those specs!!! It must be good!!! I can't wait to buy it!!!" The marketing folks there must be already patting themselves on the back.
If anyone's suffered through ATI's past chips (and their [lack of] relationship with the Linux community) they will already know to stay away from anything ATI puts out in the future.
When shopping for hardware, especially video hardware where the competition is downright cutthroat, here are some do's and dont's:
Don't rely on online reviews.
Or at least hit reload every once in a while to make sure the site isn't financially supported by one of the card companies reviewed. Let's not forget the fiasco where a chip company's ads were running on "you know who's" Hardware Guide a few months back when they were trying to do an "unbiased" review.
Don't rely on benchmarks created by a graphics chip company.
Of course NVIDIA's card will run the NVIDIA tree demo faster than anyone else!!! What unbiased information does this tell you? Nothing. I personally find any benchmark that is not part of an actual application totally useless. Quake is an OKAY benchmark if youre into gaming, and many CAD applications come with their own benchmarks. I'd put a little more trust in these.
Test all resolutions and color depths
Remember: low-resolution and/or high-poly tests guage the driver's performance and efficiency, while high-resolution, low-poly tests guage the card's fillrate. Don't trust a Quake benchmark that is only done at 640x480. Beta or low-quality drivers can make a card look bad at this low a resolution.
Test on multiple CPU's
Make sure the graphics chip's performance scales well with better CPU's. Drivers can also be optimized for Pentium-2 and -3 class machines.
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... called answer the question.
I've got a graphics card by some manufacturer (it really doesn't matter who) that has a 1.6 Gigatexel fill rate. Now, given the propensity for developers to use 32-bit textures, that means that each and everyone one of the 1.6 billion texels I process every second must be accompanied by its own 4-byte read. Now, how much memory bandwidth does this require? And how much bandwidth is on the card?
Now, let's start expanding on this... 30 million triangles / second, given triangle lists equates to about 16 million vertices. At 3 floats (x,y,z) per vertex, and 4 bytes per float, that's another 192MB/sec of bandwidth we don't have. Now, in order to actually use textures, each of those vertices also needs texture coordinates, which add another 2 floats, or 128MB/sec. And then for lighting we need a vector normal to each vertex... that's another 3 floats, so 192MB/sec. Now, in order to actually project these coordinates onto the screen, every vertex needs to be multiplied by a 4x4 matrix, or 16 more floats. Whooppee! That's another GIGABYTE of bandwidth down the tubes. Then to actually display this, since I have 2 texture units per pixel pipeline, my card delivers 800MegaPixel fill rates, which at 8 bytes per pixel (24-bit RGB + 8-bit alpha, 24-bit Z, 8-bit stencil) is another 6.4GB/sec of bandwidth.
So, when all is said and done, to reach the theoretical maximum of my card, I need 14.3GB/sec memory bandwidth minimum. Add in things like texture filtering (multiple texel reads per texel write) or alpha blending and you can break 20GB/sec easily.
Multiply all this by about 10 for Microsoft's X-Box (which somehow claims to shovel 14.4 Gigatexel performance across a 6.4GB/sec unified bus), and you'll know why any and all paper specs for the X-Box are completely ridiculous.
There is only one architecture currently available or in production that actually has the bandwidth to support its theoretical maximums, and there's no way in hell it'll fit in an AGP slot. It's manufactured by Sony, can currently be bought in Japan for about $400, is slightly larger than a bread box, and provides 48GB/sec of bandwidth, albeit at a slight hit to the actual frame buffer size.
So, in the spirit of the industry, I'm announcing my new video card. It has 400Gigatexel performance, and can transform 100 billion triangles every second. Unfortunately, due to current memory and bus technologies, you'll never see more than about 500 megatexels and 2.5 million triangles, anyway.
Yes, it *sounds* fantastic on paper. So did, a-hem, the original Rage Fury, what with its groundbreaking new chip and whopping 32 MB of memory. But, ATI has always had one fatal flaw, and that flaw will doubtless plague them still: their drivers absolutely suck. It took a good six months after the original Rage Fury was released for it to get the performance it should have and could have had from day 1--by that time, TNT2 was mopping the floor with it in both performance and image quality, and especially in price. It was outdated by the time it was performing up to par with its specs.
This has always been ATI's main problem. Unlike nVidia and 3Dfx, ATI releases drivers slowly and never ever advertises them; in fact, its own driver download pages warn that the drivers are only supposed to be for people experiencing problems, etc., and might cause new problems. They go beyond a "standard disclaimer" and try to actively discourage driver updates--no wonder then that sites like "Rage Underground" are the center for the ATI guys into performance, sites which have their own *unofficial* performance-optimized drivers because ATI drivers suck.
So, I'm convinced that no matter the potential of ATI's new chips, they won't live up to them until it's too late. The other ATI problem is also driver-related: lack of hardware support. If you don't have an Intel processor/mobo, think twice before plonking down hard currency for anything made by ATI. I myself got an ATI All-in Wonder 128 card this Christmas, and it refuses to play well with my VIA based motherboard/K6-2 processor. It's not like the Super 7 platform is either too new or too old for ATI to have supported it in the Rage 128 based cards, or that the VIA MVP3-G chipset is so uncommon. ATI, quite frankly, just doesn't care about supporting non-Intel platforms, because they don't have to. They're the company of choice for Intel-based OEMs. So, they don't care about performance-loving AMD-using geeks like a lot of us here.
This is in stark contrast to nVidia and 3Dfx, which release new drivers all the time and which try to support every viable platform. When GeForce cards were having a problem on Athlon mainboards, nVidia released new drivers to fix the problem. Yet, ATI would probably have done the same thing they did a year ago with K6-2 and K6-3 platforms and the Rage 128 cards and blame the problem on the chipset vendors for being non-standard--i.e., non-Intel.
This is a serious attitude problem on ATI's behalf, and until they can prove that they'll provide adequate enough driver support at least for Windows, I'd recommend staying away from anything they offer because the drivers will kill it. Let alone Linux. I tried installing both Corel Linux 1.0 and Linux-Mandrake 6.0 with my A-i-W 128--based on the same year-old chip from the Rage Fury--and couldn't get it to work with X even in generic SVGA mode. ATI doesn't support all common platforms under Windows, so forget about decent Linux drivers.
I am satisfied somewhat with the multimedia features of my All-in-Wonder 128 under Windows--Video Desktop is a godsend--but even then DVD playback was unbearably awful. Of course, ATI blamed it on my VIA chipset. Funny then how the REALmagic Hollywood+ I got after the ATI's performance bit delivers flawless DVD performance on the same VIA chipset, with CPU usage averaging under 5%. Yeah, ATI, blame it on the mobo chipset instead of your own laziness when it comes to drivers...
As I said, I like the multimedia features of my A-i-W 128, even though DVD playback won't work because of shoddy drivers the rest of it is great. Video capture is flawless, and Video Desktop for TV viewing always wows my guests and provides me with hours of entertainment during my long visits to pr0n--er, tech sites. But never, ever, ever, buy an ATI card for its performance stats. It won't live up to them until the card is outdated, and even then it might never live up to them unless you have an Intel mobo and processor.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Wow, ATI says their chip is fastest? GET OUT! I thought they were going to say it sucks. And ATIs benchmarks prove it? NO WAY!