February 11- February 18 2001
 
 
 
 
 
 

ATi Radeon 32 DDR AGP 4x/2x
by Alessandro Cancian

 In the past few years the commercial scenario of video cards destined for retail users was characterized by an ever-increasing dualism between Nvidia and 3dfx. These companies, thanks to very good products such as GeForce and Voodoo, managed to conquer leading positions in the 3D market occupying the covers of almost all specialized magazines. This dualism led on the one hand to the introduction of new technologies, and on the other to a price war that ended with Nvidias takeover of 3dfx.
This scenario left few solutions in order to compete with the two leaders, but ATi was still unaccounted for.
In the past, the video cards made by the worlds largest manufacturer always represented an ideal compromise between 2/3D performance and price. "All in Wonder" video card, for instance, achieved fame thanks to its good performance and to the presence of multimedia options such as hardware support for MPEG-2 decoding. What the Canadian company lacked was graphic support of 3D environment, which competing products boasted and which gave them superior performance.
The situation changed last summer, when the Thornhill-based (Ontario) company launched its new generation of video cards equipped with a new chip: the Radeon.
Available in several versions with 32 or 64 Mb RAM, the Radeon cards are today the most convincing reply to Nvidias chips. Thanks to ATi, I was able to test a card equipped with 32 Mb of DDR (Double Data Rate) RAM.
What distinguishes the Radeon from other video chips on the market is the adoption of a .18 micron technological process (30 million transistors) with two rendering pipelines and three texture units processed by each pipeline for a total of six textures. So if for instance a game or program requires three textures per pixel the card can satisfy this request in one clock cycle, i.e. in less time. Unfortunately, programs supporting three textures are very few, so this competitive advantage can only be exploited marginally. What is for sure is that the adoption of this technology, called Pixel Tapestry, will have to be vigorously supported by ATi, especially on the gaming side.
But Radeons aces in the hole are many, beginning with a new 3D engine called Charisma Engine. The heart of the new GPU can in fact implement technologies such as Transform & Lighting (T&L), Skeletal Animation and Vertex Skinning, and KeyFrame Interpolation, thus relieving the CPU of the need to compute many operations linked to 3D image generation. The hardware implementation of these technologies represents a pleasing change in itself. KeyFrame Interpolation, for instance, can redraw intermediate frames by evaluating the variations during a process, as long as the initial and ending frames are available.
Skeletal Animation consists in an innovative transformation routine of 3D objects from frame to frame where transform calculation is not carried out on the whole surface of the 3D object (i. e. also on its textures), but merely on its internal boning, the "skeleton." This process, which aims to simplifying rendering, also entails less positive aspects since the polygonal vertices of a 3D object often lack a full connection angling. ATi addressed this problem by introducing the Vertex Skinning technology, which fills these empties by regenerating new textures and mixing surrounding colours.
Another technology sported by Radeon is Bump Mapping, a technique that, using several textures and effects such as chiaroscuro, generates the illusion of a 3D surface on a 2D area. The card can use three different types of Bump Mapping: Emboss, Dot product 3, and Environment Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM).
The ATi card is perfectly compatible with computers equipped with AGP 4x/2x slots running one of the following flavours of Windows: 98, 98SE, ME, or 2000. Radeon installation is very easy and the small handbook included in the box can be a good starting point even for those not much "in the know."
Installation drivers, in line with the best 3D accelerators, allow a wide degree of user customization, such as the preferences usable in Direct 3D and OpenGL game environments, or the implementation of Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA), that can satisfy the most disparate needs. The FSAA technique, allowing visualization of linear contours in a full screen image, introduced by 3dfx in its VooDoo 5 cards, is in fact fully implemented also in Radeon cards, with good results from a graphical standpoint, although performance suffers.
Even if I dont want to introduce technical jargon by mentioning Frame Rates and Benchmarks, I can say that my tests, carried out on a computer equipped with an 800 MHz Athlon processor, were completely satisfactory. Performance was very similar, and in some cases superior to that obtained by much more expensive products.
Performance aside, however, one feature that shouldnt be forgotten is hardware DVD decoding, a big plus for all those who dont have the fastest CPU around. The Radeon 32MB DDR even has a dockable menu bar that gives you easy control of multimedia playback, including CDs and DVDs and its easy to turn off if you dont want it. At $260 CND the Radeon 32 DDR is the video card of choice for any situation, and its more than suitable for any pocket.

For further information please visit: www.ati.com
 

 

 
Up-front / Mainstreet / Focus / Opinion / Italy / Movies / Music
/ Theatre / Culture / Fashion / Travel / Food / Computers / Sports