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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!"
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.
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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!