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ATI Introduces a Parallel Processing Video Card
bilestoad2 writes " ATI has announced the introduction of a new video card, The Rage Fury Maxx. It uses two RAGE 128 Pro Processors and 64 Megs of Ram.
Follow this link for the complete story.
I don't know about you, but I've got to have one of these..."
How Well would a parallel processing video card split the load between two processors? Would we get one processor overloaded and one doing nothing? If they've done it, they had better have done it well
That's funny, the Rage128 that came with my B&W G3 is working fine... =td=
I have a Rage Pro chipset on my Xpert 98 AGP video card, a Gigabyte motherboard with a SiS chipset and AMD K6-2/333 processor. I also triple-boot Linux, WinNT and Win98. I've yet to have a single glitch or incompatibility with my video card with any of my OS's. I think your problem lies elsewhere.
And having a dual, quad, or n-cpu computer is a really lame thing to do too! Jeesh! Why don't they just put in one of them quantum computers. Then they'd have a decent video board!!!! I want the world's fastest CPU and I only want one of them and I don't care if it costs fives times more than two slightly slower CPUs running in parallel. What we want is exciting new technology just for the sake of it, not just doubling of speed.
But when you say you have a "B&W G3", it's Blue and White, not Black and White.
If any of what you've said about ATI being 'closed' were still true, I'd agree with you completely, but it is not.
If this performs as well as they say it will, do you think this is why Apple (maybe some advanced info) has been so reluctant to change their video chips?
wherein the user will have to wade through over a year's worth of driver updates before he'll finally get the performance that ATI promised from the beginning?
Just curious...
Unless you're running a graphics-intensive 3D game, you'll probably have at least 60 MB of unused memory with this card. Is there any way for applications to reuse this memory? If I have 64 MB now, could I have 128 MB of system RAM with this card? With the high RAM prices right now, it would be a waste to leave all this memory unused. (Even if the memory couldn't be used as regular RAM for some reason, maybe it could be set up as swap space.) It would be intesting to see an open-source Linux driver for something like this, and it would give people a reason to get a new video card (ie. upgrade your RAM and video card at the same time).
I beleive ATI made him an offer he couldn't refuse
AGP was designed to allow video cards to use system memory to store textures, and other items.
Less memory on the video card, cheaper, intel thought noone would need to put more than 4 megs on the i740, since the rest could be stored in system memory.
But then Marketing got involved. Bigger is better.
I still want cheap accellerated GEOMETRY. I might be able to use a card with 32 megs of memory, if I didn't have wait for the damn geometry set-up. Not talking about games.
I've had a Rage pro, and after waiting an ETERNITY for a crappy OpenGL driver that barely worked, I vowed not to buy from them again until it was PROVEN to me that their software wasn't totally busted. Even their Direct3D drivers had all kinds of problems that never got fixed (I couldn't use HW accleration with Grim Fandango, which was most annoying). I've been mostly happy with my TNT2...
AGP allows graphics cards to store textures in main memory (at a significant performance hit.. you have to use the 66 mhz AGP bus to get to the memory). This guy wants to store system programs in graphics memory. Could you use some off-screen buffers to store the actual data from programs as 'pixels'?
If so, then how'sabout some 3D support for Linux?
Yes. ATI does SUCK _hard_! (Sorry, I had to say that. You'll understand why, soon).
:-). The agreement was generally that this was a poor marketing move by ATI.
;-). I moved full windows around with contents in Windows 95, using ATI's own driver (of course), and was amazed that it could only handle refreshing the window once for a full drag. Refreshing was not only visible, but took long enough to time it (about 1 1/2 seconds for a full screen). This is unacceptable, even on the world's cheapest stuff. This is much worse than the performance of the old Trident PCI 9440 cards (ouch! That hurts!).
;-)
;-)
A couple of years ago (or maybe 1 year ago, wouldn't ever want to remember the event if I could) I had the misfortune of buying an ATI 3d video card + 3D accelerator. It was one of the Rage series. The 3D would only work in Win NT and a VERY few (2 that I know of: Motoracer and Whiplash) select WINDOZE/DOS games with support specifically hardcoded in. They refused to make a Windows '95 DirectX 3D driver, and would offer to upgrade you to a Windows '95 compatible card for about $100 or so. Why the hell should I pay for something that should work already? Look, I figure Windows '95 is the Lowest Common Denominator for product support. Jeez, this was a PATHETIC move by ATI. It wouldn't have been so bad if they had begun manufacturing these before Win 95. They hadn't! To put it mildly, I don't buy ATI. To put it strongly: Friends don't let Friends buy ATI. I've told computer stores about this story, and (iirc) one heard about it before (don't remember which. don't care.
Their original 3D cards didn't even try to do trasparency (Icky, and cheap). Perhaps this is why ATI did their above driver move. I guess most DirectX games make use of transparency features, and would look like crap on that card.
I have an ATI Mach 64CT PCI card. Not bad, works fine for me. It was great new technology back in '95. Was kinda slow when I went to top resolutions and colours with 2 MB. So why does ATI put the EXACT SAME processor on their new AGP cards (I checked, it looked the same to me)? I tested these out at our school. They come with 8 MB ram (not too bad for a low end card). They ran them at 800x600 @ 16-bit colour. Perfomance: Not bad. I ran them at a more realistic 1280x1024 @ 32-bit colour. Performance: Slower than ISA
So where does ATI stand right now with me:
- You better make sure the OS you use the card with is supported. Even if it is the most used OS in the world means absolutely nothing to them. Don't expect them to support future OS's with this attitude.
- Find out if the performance is good enough for you. Chances are you'll take one look and move over to something else.
- Test out every feature you need. One or two might be missing.
What do I think about dual processors on an ATI card?
- Does it work with Windows '98? I don't know. I'd have to ask them after they broke their trust with me once. Will it work with Windows 2000? If yes, can you get that signed in blood?
- Did they just find a way to parallel two Mach 64's (joke)? But really, knowing ATI's poor performance can you be really sure this isn't marketing hoopla?
- Are they lying? I mean, saying a card is supported in Win '95 and then having no 3D support to me is lying. Perhaps they'd do it again!
- Is there a lack of necessary features on this card? Perhaps you can only use dual processors for one or two 3D functions (I didn't even bother checking, I dislike ATI so much!)?
Theres my reasons. Flame away, please!
the nv10 (GeForce) has a max potential of 480 MPixels at its default clock speed. S3 claimed 700+ MTexels for its next part. MPixels and MTexels are *NOT* the same thing. MPixels is in reference to pixel output, MTexels is reference to the number of texture passed that can be done on a pixel. You can have 1000MTexels and still have 90Mpixels (voodoo1) in your design, and you will only get the framerates of a voodoo1.
yeah, it's flamebait too, but I think it's funny flamebait.
Dont remember where, or I might just be dreaming, but i thought I read somewhere about a quad processor 3dfx video card. Even if thats vapor, ati doesnt make that great of 3d video chipsets do they?
Sorry, ATI, but I don't subscribe to your "proprietary technology" anymore. I made the mistake of buying one of your cards before when I didn't know better; I'll not make the same mistake again. There are a lot of cards which are better than yours who actively support free development - like Matrox and nVidia - and I'll not be shackled with your wholly proprietary support - or lack of any support - again.
quantum3d.com
To the person who was talking about slow framerates in UT... its not optimized for TNT support yet...
... perfect application for SMP if you ask me :)
Anyway.. on the parallel processing thing... arent biological processors that they are playing with relatively slow, but massively parallel? I can just see it now... one processor for each PIXEL on your screen
smash
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Yesterday's silicon today.
Today's drivers tomorrow.
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It reminds me of an old Radius video card (for PCs!) that had three (read: one more than two) 64-bit video processors. That was a few years ago, and semingly no one cared much. It has to do with something utterly evil most people call "hype".
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
In short, this is Voodoo SLI or Wicked3D's PGC with a twist. Interesting, but with ATI's traditional lackluster performance, it remains to be seen whether this will be the thing speed freaks really want. Personally I expect more from T&L acceleration..
Is it possible to have ATI add multi monitor support by creating a special VGA connector card? Or is this architecturally not possible? Also, is this card backwards compatible with all the ATI drivers for XFree86? Or do new drivers have to be written? Do new applications have to be partially re-written to take advantage of the multiple processors (like SMP on linux, where the OS had to be written with SMP support)?
Well, since at least this doesn't seem to have much to do with the Internet, the Patent Office's "It's Net So It's New" psychosis shouldn't apply.
Of course, they did give 3DFX a patent on Multitexturing, which while more unique than ATI's Full Frame nonsense, is still essentially pretty obvious--and not just after the fact.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Splitting full frame rendering among multiple processors...this is patent pending?
Are you kidding?
It's at least arguably unique to split even and odd lines among two cards(like Voodoo 2 SLI), or to split the image into horizontal strips(Metabyte's PGC), or to evenly split the texel reprocessing load among multiple texel processors(Voodoo 2 core design), but to attempt to patent the process of merely having one complete frame go to one processor while having the next complete frame go to the next processor?
The general reason one doesn't want to use a full frame architecture is simple: Per frame times don't budge. Either you have to build a higher latency into your rendering chain, since the chipcluster has to know the next x frames you intend to render, or you get *no* speed boost.
Don't even get me started on out of order frame rendering on a realtime rendering solution.
Each of the previously mentioned solutions(SLI/PGC/Texel x 2), incidentally, lowers per-frame latency.
Granted, there's probably some degree of multi-frame latency built into most drivers, particularly for games. But the concept of patenting the most basic parallelization solution strikes me as absolutely hilarious. It's very likely most 3D rendered movies use the technique ATI is trying to patent. "I'm done finishing this frame, send me a new one."
It's very likely most WORKPLACES work the same way too. "I'm done with this job, assign me a new one."
That being said, I'm looking forward to trying out ATI's new cards. Ever since I noticed their 128's were supported by Metabyte's excellent Eyescream system, I've been much more interested in them.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
I don't have this kind of juice in my PC!
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Well, maybe it you didn't have an ATI, your G3 wouldn't be black and white...
(Just a joke, i knew what you meant)
The Open GLX project is currently beginning on ATI RAGE drivers for the Pro and soon the 128. This is courtesy of them providing technical data about a month ago to us in the same manner Matrox gave it to us. We're working on a driver for the Pro (since everybody and his dog's got one! :-) and we'll follow up with the 128 once the Pro driver's relatively stable.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
And I've had them for about a month and a half now. ATI just didn't make a big deal out of the release of info. We're beginning the work on the GLX support as I write this.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Writing drivers isn't easy- it takes time.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
We've had them for about a month and a half now. The members working on it were delayed (myself, included- had my vacation in that timeframe, ah Scotland!) and we're getting seriously into it at this point. ATI's rep's been fairly helpful.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
So far to support Linux, either as far as providing open or closes drivers, or releasing hardware specs.
I rag on ATI as much as anyone for being habitually behind the times (and I have used every major video card on the market now except GeForce, which I'm planning on getting fairly soon).
:( ... )
You should know that 3dfx, the recognized performance leader for most of the last 2 years (this of course may be changing) has been using the exact same old technology for quite some time. Voodoo2 is just a someone updated Voodoo1 chip (they added hardware support for the lighting calculation along the edges of the triangle, iirc). Voodoo3 is just an overclocked SLI Voodoo2 (Voodoo3 2000 has exactly the same performance numbers as a V2 SLI rig, as we measured it). Voodoo4 will have some new stuff (tho no one knows exactly what yet), but it is definitely still a direct descendent of SST1, the core Voodoo technology.
Similarly, TNT2 is just a massively overclocked TNT (GeForce does appear to be quite different).
I will give ATI the benafit of the doubt till I see the performance numbers.
Hilariously, the Maxx has 2x as much memory as the high-end Rage 128, for a whopping 64 megs, which is totally absurd. That's as much memory as my entire system! (and of course I can't afford more ram now
You know the weird thing? I just read about Maxx on ATI's webpage yesterday. When I woke up (4 minutes ago) I realized I had a dream about it. Then I came here, and there was a story about it! Man, I must be sad....
Time to go email ATI...maybe I'll ask them for nice open Linux drivers.
Well, I don't know about RC5, but it's possible to implement Conway's Game of Life using the stencil buffer on newer 3D cards (i.e. anything not put out by 3Dfx). There's a wonderful description of it in the back of the OpenGL ARB Redbook. RC5 is probably a bit too complicated to do properly with graphics operations, though...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
I don't know what exactly their patent is trying to cover. It looks like it's trying to cover distributed, rather than parallel, rendering; that is, in triple-buffering, have one chip handle the first backbuffer and the other chip handle the second backbuffer. The law of diminishing returns would definitely apply right away. Right now one of the big bottlenecks in 3D cards is the speed at which the bus can send rendering commands to it. Also, the time it takes to send a rendering command is often longer than the time it takes to execute it on the card; unless each chip is storing a complete displaylist and then post-rendering it (and there's not really much point to that, either), the overlap between the chips' rendering times will be minimal, at best. At the absolute best you could get a doubling in framerate, but the latency would still be just as high, and latency is the real killer in 3D games, not framerate (it's just that framerate is easier to measure and easier to explain).
Perhaps some of their patented work involves trying to 'interpolate' between frames. If that's the case, then that really is a quite difficult problem, and I'd be tempted to say they deserve any patent they get in that area. However, I seriously doubt that's the case.
Basically, this seems like another case of Exxtreme Marketing[tm]. ATI seems to have taken a page out of 3Dfx's book. (I'm sorry, but the Tbuffer is nothing revolutionary - it's a crippled accumulation buffer being marketed as revolutionary, when the TNT and Rage and Savage and the like have had a full accumulation buffer for a couple years now.)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
but that's what nvidia is doing. You can have enough 'room' for 40000 fps in q3 but a game with lots of polygons will still be as slow as a snail. Not so with the geforce
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> but how much will it cost?
$299
You know, reading the article really helps.
Okay, so ATI's MAXX is rendering alternate frames on a different chip. Sounds precisely like a 3dfx SLI setup. And if you look outside of the 3D world, there have already been parallel processing display adapters. I once owned a Radius Firestorm 192 which featured three S3 864 chips. Each one was responsible for a color: one chip for red, one for blue, and one for green. The card was really, really fast in its day, and produced the sharpest picture I have ever seen, including that of my current Millenium II.
Anyway, just thought I'd remind ATI of the past.
-jwb
Actually, I have some *cough* friends *cough* at Bitboys Oy who've told me Alpha silicon engineering amples have been available for about a month and a half..
The fact remains, though, that the speculated release dat is still Q2'00. So you've got 9 months to wait -- Buy a Maxx now, and wait and see the Glaze 3d.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
http://www.bitboys.fi/ 2000x1600x200FPS with all options on in Quake3. Due February, eatcha heart out! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
3D hardware needs to be seen as an enabling technology. The faster the hardware is, the more Carmack can do with it :)
But the 3D vendors can't really advertise with, "Hey, if you buy our board, it will fast enough for some way cool games that haven't been invented yet". So instead, they have to post framerates using current title, something that gamers can relate to easier.
but how much will it cost?
:-)
I recently installed Unreal Tournament Demo and had to find out, that my good old Hercules Dynamite TNT is too slow for that game... same with Q3ATest, I have to use less detail and colors to actually be able to play the game...
I just hope that the support for 3d-cards will improve for linux...
summary:
- nothing new under the sun.
- ATI reinvents pipelining, ignores drawbacks.
Firstly a rant about the press release and its quoted 5% drop between 16 bit frame rates and 32 bit frame rates for this new ATI card: Any manufacturer could do this by artificially limiting their 16 bit fill rate. This number says nothing unless combined with an absolute fill rates at either bit depth.
Now to the deja vu: ATI has effectively shoehorned two cards' worth of acceleration into one graphics subsystem. This has been done twice before in the consumer space: first by 3dfx, with Scan Line Interleave, which allowed two cards to work in parallel on any polygon that spans more than one line on screen; more recently by Metabyte, with their Parallel Graphics Configuration, which partitioned the screen vertically into two independent regions and dedicated a card to handling each of the regions.
Both 3dfx and Metabyte use spatial partitioning to get parallelism. 3dfx could do it finer grained because they had control over the chipset design and could include a mechanism for tight synchronisation of two cards. Metabyte went coarse-grained because they had to do the picture recombination from the two cards in external hardware, and it was hard enough to make this work at all without making it work for alternating scanlines. So why didn't Metabyte save themselves a bunch of hassle and use the "temporal" partitioning (or, in other words, pipelining) approach that ATI is now using? Hmmmm...
One issue here is latency. (For this discussion, let's assume that the video refresh rate is arbitrarily high, so that as soon as a frame becomes ready, we get to see it.) When a 3d card completes the rendering of a frame and swaps the front and back draw buffers, you are seeing the state of the world as it was at the time the game engine _began_ to draw the frame. If the current frame render time is x milliseconds, that's x milliseconds latency between the game state and your eyeballs.
With a spatial partitioning like SLI, both chipsets work in parallel to render a particular frame, and each frame is completed before rendering of the next frame begins; the game state to eyeball latency is simply 1/(frame rate).
With the ATI approach however, each of the two Rage chips plugs away at its frame independent of the other (which is working on a frame either one ahead or one behind.) Frame _render_ time is therefore twice the frame _display_ time, and the latency is twice as high as SLI for a given overall frame rate: 2/(frame rate). For a 60Hz frame rate, SLI gives 16.6 ms game state to eyeball latency, while the ATI approach gives 33.3 ms.
I am not a cognitive psychologist, so I don't know if an extra 16.6ms or so is going to make a noticeable difference to most people, but I wouldn't be suprised if experienced first-person-shooter players noticed a difference. Certainly for modem play the extra latency is probably smaller than the variation in ping time to the server, so I wouldn't expect it to make much difference, but on a LAN it might be noticeable. I have turned off sync to vertical refresh and forgone triple buffering in LAN Q3Test games because the variation in latency between frames was driving me batty, so I think this could actually be an issue. Of course, the higher the frame rate, the smaller the extra latency, and the less this will matter.
There is also the other matter that for this to work, there has to be at all times a large amount of rendering waiting to go so that each chipset stays busy. The drivers will presumably have to do a *lot* of buffering and then spoon feed each chip as its command FIFO is exhausted. I really wonder whether this will fit in well with what currently written applications are expecting from 3d acceleration hardware; if an application wants to have any synchronous interaction at all with the hardware, such as reading back values from a stencil buffer each frame after drawing is complete, it will totally screw this kind of pipelining. Somehow I'm just not convinced.
-Snorbert, somewhere in the antipodes
While everybody else in the industry is working overtime to discover new ways of doing things in order to make their video processors as fast as possible . . . .
. . . ATi has aparantly thrown in the towel on technology and is just gonna put two of their second rate chip on the same card?
Sheesh.
Stuff like this isn't new. Way back when, Radius put out a card for PC's tht used three S3 864's. True, they weren't handling things exactly like this - they were assiging one to each primary color - but hell, even Intel had the good taste to put two pipelines on the same die when they came out with the Pentium Pro, instead of just telling people they ought to build SMP systems instead.
- Eric
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
Yeah...buy an ATI card at your peril - they just *don't work* on motherboards with non-Intel chipsets. Screen glitches galore on your desktop, and poor compatibility with older software.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
the Maxx technology on the card is a good idea but its not something I'm going to think about buying anytime soon just like the GeForce. The chips on this card basically suck, they run hot and don't have anything new but what they do have is a new chipset that has a future. The chipset was designed so when they come out with the next generation of their big and bad chips they can stick them in a Maxx chipset and double the framerate and maybe even performance. The GeForce is the same in my opinion, the idea is sound and will be cooler in a few months but right now it's a waste of money. I think chipmakers are all going to move to a GeForce styling where the video processor is a GPU (or whatever) that takes some of the strain off the system's CPU. My P3 500 with a Viper v770 plays any game I put on the machine damn well but in two or three years it most likely won't. If I want the newest games (assuming that video card technology stayed the same as it is now where the graphics card just handles the actual rendering and output) I would have to update my entire system which would mean I'd build a new one. Then along comes a technology like the GeForce where you can just get a new graphics board that deflates the load on the CPU by handling more parts of the game. I no longer have to completely update my system, I can keep it competitive by replacing the faster and more powerful graphics board. Just look at the games that ran great on a 90mhz Pentium processor a few years ago. If they had a way for more and more of the game to be run on the graphics board then your 90mhz pentium might be able to play Quake 2 pretty decently since it would only have to run the game code and not the graphics setup. Maybe in another year or two we'll see an entire gaming subsystem you could plug into your AGP slot, like having a Dreamcast in your computer. The subsystem could run every aspect of the games and use the rest of the parts of the PC as imput. The CPU wouldn't even have to be involved because DMA devices would mean they could communicate directly with the subsystem without bothering the tired CPU.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
ATI Have actually released specs for their chips recently allowing the GLX team to begin work on some of their chips. Hopefully this latest card will also be documented so the glx-developers can hack up a driver. So far we have hardware acceleration on the 3dfx cards, Matrox g200/400, The Nvidia cards and some prelim support on the ATI's . Hopefully this trend contnues and 3d support in linux continues to grow. Who knows, maybe by the time the Nvidia and the ATI card hit the shelves, manufacturers will be shipping drivers on their CD's
So now Robin Miller "has got to have one of these"?? Wow... hunger for geeky gadgets is infectious in these parts...
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Why does this article sound like an advertisement rather than a review?
my other penis is a vagina
The RAGE Fury MAXX achieves a maximum "fill rate", or the number of textured pixels it can render per second, of 500 megapixels/second.
Pretty sad, really. GeForce 256 has been criticised for its "low fillrate", but it does 480 Megatexels. Meanwhile, the Savage 2000 will do "700+" Megatexels.
Anyone who thinks the MAXX is cutting-edge is fooling themselves. . .
Recently, I sent an e-mail out to several major video card vendors. ATI, DiamondMM, Creative Labs, 3dFx, Matrox, and one or two more (not Number Nine, because their web page shows support)
All the companies either gave me the run around (email soandso - he's the linux guy) or didn't respond at all. ATI sent me a detailed response to my email and actually answered the questions I asked. The sales rep, whose name I don't have handy, was even nice enough to put me on his Linux users list and now I get an occasional update on Linux progress with ATI cards.
I have been impressed with the companies stand and openness regarding their products under non-MS OSes.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
try linux3d.org
I just had to say it.
Heh,all we need now is a quick hack to put all that processing power and memory to use when your not a-quaking. Lessee now , a quick rc5 algorithm made out of graphics transforms , how hard can that be? Slip a couple of these cards in , and you're up there with the best of em!
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
This sounds great, but ATI's tech support is almost non-existant, it took them 2 weeks to even reply to one of my e-mails, they didn't even have an automailer to say that they recieved the mail. It took months to get out the current crappy OpenGL driver for my ATI Rage Pro card, and the card isn't that great for Direct3D either (thankfully I didn't pay for the card). So what if it has two processors? Just think, I get crappy dithered (ATI Rage Pros don't support 32-bit OpenGL) images at double the speed, WOW thats double the crappiness, what a deal!!! I'll never buy another computer that comes packaged with an ATI card in it again.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
Quantum3D made the Obsidian II, that had 2 voodoo2's and something they called "the brick" which contained 4 Obsidian II's, for a total of 8 (!) voodoo2's. I think 3Dfx used this to demonstrate the t-buffer.
I'm wondering if they are going to support this thing for Linux or at least release the stuff needed to make the correct driver for it. I have struggled myself for a long time to get my video working for Linux. Finally a distro Mandrake came with the right Xfree86 3.3.5 that had support and fixed bugs for on board video. I know it sucks but you deal with what you got. I just hope when I save up to move my machine into a different motherboard that I can buy a card like this one and have it supported on my fav flavor of Linux.
Good is never enough, when you dream of being great!
Tom's Hardware has a full preview, although he's not allowed to print the performance results. This isn't SLI or PGC -- ATI is actually having the CPU's draw full alternate frames, so the image quality will be high yet the speed will be doubled. It's even buffered so if CPU0 is taking a long time drawing frame 0, CPU1 can keep drawing 1,2,3,... until CPU0 is done. What I like best about this is that the MAXX architecture will allow them to drop their latest chips in as they are developed, so even if their CPU architectures remain a little behind, they'll be able to keep competitive. I like ATI cards because of all of the MPEG and TV toys they build into them; the only other company that even comes close to offering those kind of toys is Matrox, but they're just too damn expensive for the full-featured cards.
A XFCom X server for Linux is available for the single Rage 128 at Suse. I believe it will probably mainline in the next version of the XFree86 server, it seems quite stable. This should mean that most of the information for the dual processor version is already known, so hopefully a driver will follow quickly.
If you mean DRI and GL support, that's coming in version XFree86 v4.0, which hasn't announced a release date. The next snapshot, 3.9.17 should be available mid-month according to the XFree86 page.
"I know, let's make it twice as fast, then everyone will have to buy it!"
Really, what's the difference between 60FPS and 90FPS? Who cares? Where are the *NEW* features? Where's the EBM? Where's the hardware T&L? Where's the "Dualhead" feature?
I think gamers are tired of cards that promise 50% more FPS ("The game is so fast you can't even see what's going on!!"), and are looking for new features. That's why I got a G400. Dualhead is amazing for work, it's fast with games and the EBM (although i've yet to actually play a game that supports it) is comforting in knowing that it's there. SHOW US SOMETHING NEW, KIDDOS!!
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poop?
Anyway you get my point the 'patent pending' stuff is purely marketting speak to try and get you to buy the thing
PS: I WANT ONE!
SharkyExtreme has a more lengthy writeup, including some initial performance comparisons from a prerelease version (chips clocked to 125Mhz instead of 143Mhz, beta drivers).
I wouldn't mind a 64MB card - but I don't think I'd use it.....or Quake3 and the likes would prolly hook me and I'd never get anything done ever again :P
Does anyone here remember when www.ati.com was run by some company calling itself "Artificial Turd Industries"? The home page featured a very large, very detailed image of rubber doggie doo.
/. and I'm sure the fall of such a rebel would have been noticed...? Does anyone know if the guy finally sold out or if some how the courts decided that ATI should get the site (even though there are many other companies that have the same initials trademarked!)
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The thing that was neat was that this page stayed that way for as long as I could remember. The owner took great delight in posting letters from lawyers demanding he turn over the domain name. Companies like ATI Technologies (the graphics card maker most people are trying to find when they type in www.ati.com), American Tractor Incorporated, Arand Typeset and Ink...and about a dozen others.
ATI ended up getting www.atitech.com which they still own. But now I just found that they also have acquired www.ati.com!
How did this happen? I don't remember reading about it on
- JoeCurious
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Ah, ATI. The acronym conjures up fuzzy images of OEM video products, poor performance, and semi-nifty niche market features.
ATI is also legendary for their abysmal driver support. First-generation drivers barely do anything more than basic GDI functions (i.e. enough to run the desktop and IE) but often crash and burn when you throw complex things at it like, say, an actual program.
Further revisions of the drivers provide minimal levels of functionality, but there are still obscure problems, some of them showstoppers. And we all know how useful Windows from a DOS prompt.
On top of providing shoddy driver support for Windows (the cards' native environment), they also keep their chipsets proprietary, not even allowing NDA access to the design. This means that ATI chipsets are entirely dependant on ATI to supply drivers, unless you don't mind using a reverse-engineered driver that may or may not provide 100% functionality.
ATI is outclassed on all fronts by the likes of S3, Nvidia, and even *spit* 3dfx. The only reason they have survived is because they are firmly entrenched in the OEM market. I will not use ATI products by choice, and I will not reccomend them to my friends. Spend your money on a TNT2.
Nathan
I'm personally still betting on GeForce... that being said, can anyone comment on ATI's position as far as either releasing hardware spec or working on drivers for linux? I'd like to be informed in case some of my linux-using friends get all worked up about this card...