Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/205

ATI Rage 128

by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 9, 1998 10:02 PM EST


The Voodoo2 has all but come and gone, and with its receding presence it has paved the way for more than a handful of contenders for 3Dfx's second place throne, a number of which have the potential to be the right card for your next system.  But what will it take?  If nVidia isn't the choice for you with their explosive TNT, and if the 3Dfx Banshee just doesn't seem to cut it for you when looking towards the future, what else is there?   ATI's Rage 128

We all hoped that Number 9 would come through with their Revolution IV, however the "ideal gaming card" turned out to be nothing more than another professional product in disguise.  S3's Savage3D, a chipset with a future, quickly became a part of history we'd all like to forget, the only real 0.25 micron solution on the market, it is unfortunate that the Savage3D was released a little before its time, and with companies like Diamond dumping their products based on the design, you can't expect to find one of those in your next system.  Once again, we're back to the starting point, a need without a card to satisfy it...or is there?

Could there actually be a chipset in existence that offers high performing, high quality 3D support, hardware DVD acceleration, without 2D quality that'll make you want to switch back to your old 9" monochrome monitor?   No one would've thought that ATI could actually come through with a card that could satisfy both the gamer and the home user, but it seems like you can always come to expect solid products from the names that have been around for ages, at least most of the time.  

The chipset?  The ATI Rage 128.  The target market?  Your average gamer, who wants to do a little more with his/her computer than play Quake 2 all day, someone who is looking for a combination of 2D/3D and DVD acceleration at an affordable cost.  Basically, if you just don't feel right slamming down $140 for a TNT or $120 for a G200, and you're sitting there with a feeling of emptiness from all that you've seen in the video accelerator market currently, then you may want to pay attention to the ATI Rage 128.  As the absolute last chance for a 2D/3D combo card of 1998, let's hope that this puppy can come through, otherwise, it looks like there are going to be a lot of less satisfied gamers this holiday season...



Highlights

  • A 128-bit graphics engine with advanced triangle setup and 128-bit memory interface for incredibly fast true-color 3D and 2D graphics performance in high resolutions
  • Fully featured OpenGL ICD optimized to provide superlative performance for professional graphics, 3D animation, CAD/CAM and visualization applications
  • 32MB of memory to handle massive graphics textures at high resolutions for generating improved application performance and user interface
  • Advanced graphics architecture with superscalar rendering, line and edge anti-aliasing, gouraud shading, twin cache architecture, single-pass multi-texturing and bump mapping
  • Built-in hardware DVD for full-frame, full-screen DVD playback

Features

Advanced Graphics Acceleration
RAGE MAGNUM's 32MB and ATI RAGE 128 GL technology offers definitive 3D acceleration for PC workstations. With full 3D acceleration in all modes and color depths in resolutions up to 1600x1200 at 32bpp, RAGE MAGNUM will deliver critical benefits: fast and accurate wire frame modeling, smoother animation and allow for extensive cut-away views, shadowing algorithms and masking for portal engines.

Power productivity applications in CAD/CAM, 3D Design and Modeling, Visualization and economic/financial modeling.

Full OpenGL ICD
RAGE MAGNUM's full support and compliance for powerful and demanding Windows NT and OpenGL applications lets users experience maximum 3D performance. Leveraging OpenGL, RAGE MAGNUM's 8-bit stencil buffer, 16/24/32 z-buffer, fog and fog tables and perspectively correct mip-mapped texturing will let you create with precision and sharpness for incredible realism.

Built-in hardware DVD
RAGE MAGNUM sets the new standard in video playback. With built-in hardware DVD (which saves you the expense of buying a separate MPEG-2 decoder card), RAGE MAGNUM processes full-frame rate, full-screen DVD video for a true multimedia experience on your PC. RAGE MAGNUM's 4-tap filtered video plays back top quality AVI files. And best of all, RAGE MAGNUM is ready for high-definition television (HDTV).

2D Workstation Performance for Windows NT
Delivering superlative 2D performance to a workstation is key, and RAGE MAGNUM's 128-bit 2D technology and current command engine provides amazing performance for robust 2D applications.

Specifications

System Requirements

  • Pentium II with AGP bus
  • AGP 1.0 compliant
  • Software requires CD-ROM drive
  • DVD requires DVD drive

Graphics Controller

  • ATI RAGE 128 GL, a high performance 128-bit graphics accelerator with superior 2D, 3D, and video support

Operating Systems Support

  • Windows 98
  • Windows 95
  • Windows NT 4.0

Monitor Support

  • CRT Monitor: 15 pin VGA connector

VIP (Video Input Port)

  • VIP 1.1
  • Ready for VIP compatible side port products

DAC

  • 250 MHz for flicker free display

Display Support

  • Register compatible with VGA
  • BIOS compatible with VESA for super VGA
  • DDC1/2b/2b+ monitor support
  • VESA Display Power Management support
  • Separate horiz & vert sync at TTL levels

Memory Configuration

  • 32MB

3D Acceleration Features

  • OpenGL ICD for NT 4.0 & Windows 98/95
  • DirectX 5.0, DirectX 6.0, Direct3D, DirectDraw
  • Triangle Setup Engine
  • 8-bit stencil buffer
  • Texture Cache
  • Bilinear/Trilinear Filtering
  • Line & Edge Anti-aliasing
  • Texture Compositing
  • Texture Decompression
  • Super Scaler Rendering
  • Specular Highlights
  • Perspectively Correct Texture Mapping
  • Mip-Mapping
  • Z-buffering and Double-buffering
  • Bump Mapping
  • Fog effects, texture lighting, video textures, reflections, shadows, spotlights, LOD biasing and texture morphing

2D Mode Support:
Resolutions, Colors and Maximum Refresh Rates (HZ)

Monitor Resolution 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1152x864 1280x1024 1600x1200 1920x1200
256 colors 200 200 200 170 130 90 80
65K colors 200 200 200 170 130 90 80
16.7M colors 200 200 200 170 130 90 80

Maximum 3D Resolutions

  16MB
65K colors 1920x1440
16.7M colors 1920x1200

Footnote: Maximum 3D resolutions and colors supported using double buffered settings.



Months before the introduction of the TNT, nVidia hyped the product launch beyond belief, a mistake they're still paying for every time a TNT owner tries to run their chip at 125MHz and fails.  In contrast, Number 9 didn't hype their product enough among those in their target market, resulting in a large amount of buyers left uninformed about their product, as well as a selection of gamers who were nothing less than extremely disappointed to find out that their Quake 2 benchmarks rivaled those of their older Riva 128's.  Where does ATI fall into the great scheme of things?  They didn't make any promises of the key to the elusive Voodoo2 killer, while at the same time, they never let the market forget that they existed.  Stemming from the popularity of their original 3D Rage II and 3D Rage Pro Turbo chipsets which quickly found themselves into the hands of most OEM's, ATI took their chances at the mainstream gaming consumer market with the Rage 128, and in doing so, set themselves up for a challenge they had never faced before.

A Heart of Gold

Ok, maybe not literally, but the Rage 128 is the "golden heart" of ATI's upcoming product line consisting primarily of the ATI Rage Fury and Rage Magnum cards.  The 0.25 micron core the Rage 128 is built upon, starts off by removing a great problem most of 1998's "next-generation" 2D/3D accelerator chips caused, heat.  By mimicking S3 in the use of one of the first 0.25 micron cores to hit the Rage 128, at the end of 1998, is really the beginning of a new era in 3D accelerators (this you will see proven in a more detail later). 

The core itself includes both a texture and a pixel cache in order to achieve a more efficient usage of memory bandwidth which is oh-so-precious in any situation.  A result of this is an extremely effective control and performance boost for the memory bus, and an interesting dependency on L2 cache performance.  As you'll soon see from the benchmark tests, older Celeron (0Kb Cache) users will be given performance that is noticeably slower than their Celeron A counterparts (128Kb Cache), especially at lower clock speeds. 

The 0.25 micron chip does remove a considerable amount of the heat production associated with most next-generation accelerators, while at the same time, conserving space on the board as well.  A unique feature on the evaluation board AnandTech received was the presence of 4 - 8MB SDRAM chips to total the 32MB of memory on the board, instead of the 8 or more chips present on most competing products.

Multi-Texturing

The Rage 128, like the TNT, allows for single pass multi-texturing.  For those of you that are clueless as to what multi-texturing is, we can use this example AnandTech used in the Maxi Gamer Phoenix Banshee Review:

If you look at 3D rendering as painting a wall, a single coat of paint can easily be accomplished by virtually any brush, while that same brush will require two strokes to place two separate coats of paint on the wall (multi-pass, multi-texturing).  Now imagine a brush capable of placing two coats of paint on a wall in a single pass (single pass, multi-texturing).  By using the latter type of brush you are essentially doubling your productivity. 

In 3D gaming and rendering situations the application of such a technique is a bit more complex, yet it follows the same basic principle.  If a wall in a game, such as Unreal, happens to have a texture placed on it, such as a brick texture, followed by another layer, say a reflection from a nearby fire, you basically have two textures on that one surface. 

A chipset that can "paint" those two coats of paint on the hypothetical wall in a single rendering cycle, or pass, is effectively twice as fast as a card that requires two cycles or passes to "paint" the same wall.  Multi-texturing is already used in some of the newer games you've probably already become addicted to, Half-Life, Quake 2, and Unreal (Unreal being one of the most multi-texturing "happy" games I've ever run into) just to name a few.  Upcoming games such as the highly anticipated Duke Nukem Forever will also make use of heavy multi-texturing, as well as a number of other features supported entirely in hardware by the Rage 128.

Bump Mapping

A feature that'll quickly gain popularity as more games make use of it is bump-mapping, a feature which is hardware supported by the Rage 128 without a performance penalty to your system.  Let's use the same painted wall example from above in describing bump-mapping.  Take a minute to get up close to one of the walls in the room you happen to be reading this article in right now (be sure to shut the door as you might look a bit funny staring at the walls in awe).  Assuming that you are staring closely at a painted wall, you will notice that the wall isn't perfectly smooth.  In fact, the wall happens to have a bit of a texture to it, something that could be described as somewhat "bumpy."  Bump-mapping allows for this "bumpy" textured effect to be introduced into a 3D world to provide a greater level of realism, and when supported in hardware, enabling such a feature provides very little or no performance decrease to the gamer which is always a plus.  Before you assume that you'll never live to see a game to make effective use of bump-mapping, at the E3 Expo last May in Atlanta, after speaking to a representative working on the game Duke Nukem Forever, it seems as if Duke will be roughing up the baddies in bump-mapped worlds as the upcoming game will make use of the technique.

32-bit Color Rendering

Out of all of the features the Rage 128 will become famous for, probably the most well-known will be its support for 32-bit rendering.   If the TNT and G200 can also render at a 32-bit color depth, why on earth would the most popular feature of the Rage 128 be its 32-bit rendering support?  Unlike the TNT and G200, the Rage 128 can render at 32-bit (aka True Color) color depths without the 20 - 50% performance decrease all other chipsets come with.  In fact, the Rage 128 can render at 32bpp (versus 16bpp) in many cases, without any performance penalty at all.   In the tests AnandTech ran, the largest performance gap between 16bpp and 32bpp rendering was no greater than 3 fps. 

Rendering at anything greater than 16bpp (bits per pixel) isn't really a necessity with today's crop of gaming titles, however in the future, speaking from the point of view a game developer would most likely share, you can expect many more titles to receive a visual benefit in 32-bit modes as compared to the "older" 16-bit standard.  For now, the difference is nothing more than future security, but in the world of computers, we all know how quickly the future can hop upon us.

Hardware DVD & TV-Output

Just as you thought that Hardware DVD was becoming a thing of the past, ATI brings back to our attention that CPU utilization is still an important factor to consider, especially when a part of the tweaking population considers multitasking an absolute must.  The quality of the DVD playback on the Rage 128 is virtually identical to just about any other hardware DVD decoder out there, with a major difference, the Rage 128 doubles as a 2D/3D video card, whose CPU utilization isn't high enough to cause a significant drop in performance while multi-tasking with a DVD window open. 

While AnandTech didn't have a suite of DVD decoders to compare the Rage 128 to, the test systems, ranging from an old K6/200 to a high end Pentium II 450 machine, AnandTech played around with all exhibited virtually identical behavior in terms of DVD playback with the Rage 128.  So long as you have a decent processor (Super7 users included!), the DVD playback on the Rage 128 isn't bad at all, and an excellent alternative to buying an external unit.  Although, personally, I still do prefer a regular DVD player outside of my computer to do some serious movie watching, simply because there is still no experience like going out, renting a few movies, then popping a few kernels of microwave popcorn without the "soothing" buzz from your computer in the background. 

The Rage 128 cards that'll be hitting the store shelves shortly will have TV-Output as an option, in comparison to the output on the Marvel/Mystique G200 boards, the Rage 128 is maybe a step or two behind in terms of quality.  However the picture is still good enough to play a quick game of Quake 2 or Half-Life from a distance on a 35" TV without becoming disgusted at the quality too quickly, just don't plan on typing any word processing documents on your TV though. 



If the past 3 pages was all there is to say about the Rage 128 then ATI would have the perfect chipset on their hands, unfortunately that isn't the case.  As AnandTech explained in the Number 9 Revolution IV Review:

Since its release, nVidia's TNT chipset has become a little more than a 2D/3D card for gamers.  It seems as if the TNT is being crammed down everyone's throat, even if they have no intention of touching a frame of Quake 2 or even picking up the crowbar in Half-Life.  Now, the TNT is a fairly affordable graphics solution considering it is a 2D/3D combo card, and its success is good news for nVidia.  Being a successful chipset isn't a bad thing, where the TNT does get a bad reputation is when someone with a 21" monitor unravels the TNT's dark secret and tries to run their card at 1600 x 1200 x 32bpp under Windows.  Look around the newsgroups, ask TNT owners, or try it for yourself, the TNT as well as many other 2D/3D combo cards don't provide the best 2D image quality when it comes to driving large monitors (i.e. 21") at high resolutions.  The most common occurrence being that when viewing black text on a white background (or vise versa), the characters will begin to seem a bit fuzzy, and, especially after hours of staring at the screen, your eyes will begin to feel the wrath of a poorly constructed card. 

Keep in mind that this scenario only really affects those with larger monitors running at resolutions above 1024 x 768 (most likely above 1280 x 1024).  The assumption being made here by most manufacturers is that their customers won't use their products for professional purposes (i.e. intensive image editing, publishing, etc...) and as long as their 2D quality and performance is top notch at resolutions under 1280 x 1024 (which most users do tend to stay under, simply due to monitor sizes), they'll be perfectly fine.  This holds true in a great percentage of the cases, which is why you'll hear people saying that the 2D image quality on the TNT or on the Savage3D is "top-notch" or "beautiful."  However, when you happen to push your TNT card to the limits at 1600 x 1200, or when you give the Savage3D a run for its money at the same resolution, and you see some "fuzzy" text, it's quite difficult to believe that just about every single TNT/Savage3D owner out there could be wrong in saying that the 2D image quality is astounding...but in your case, they are. 

The reason behind this is simple, in order to cut costs, the amount of filters placed between the analog VGA output on your video card and the RAMDAC are cut down to the bare minimum.  This sacrifice is made simply because of the assumption made above. 
Since most of these cards will be used for 3D games, and since there isn't a next-generation 2D/3D combo card out there capable of running any 3D game at 1600 x 1200 in a high performing fashion, most manufacturers figure that it's better to keep costs low and satisfy a greater percentage of the population than increase the costs to satisfy a smaller percentage.  That is the unfortunate truth, however if you're a gamer, using a 15" or maybe even a 17" monitor, chances are that you'd rather pay $130 for a card that suits your needs instead of paying $160 for a card that suits your needs as well as your neighbor with a 21" monitor.  At the same time, if you put yourself in the shoes of your neighbor with the 21" monitor, chances are that your neighbor would rather pay $160 for a card that does everything they need it to do rather than pay $130 for a card of noticeably lesser quality. 

Unfortunately, at 1600 x 1200 at 32-bit color, the Rage 128 didn't seem to produce as sharp of an image as the simply amazing Matrox G200 or the reigning champ, the Revolution IV.  In fact, the 2D image quality of the Rage 128 at higher resolutions isn't much better than that of the Riva TNT, so those of you interested in professional 2D applications where every pixel counts may want to take a pass on the Rage 128.

The 3D image quality of the Rage 128 is comparable to that of the TNT and Savage3D products, but still behind that of the G200.  The Rage 128 will ship with a full OpenGL ICD, and AnandTech was provided with a beta version of the OpenGL ICD for testing.  The performance of the ICD is most likely at its full potential, and the only real difference between what the Rage 128 can do now and what it'll be able to do in the future is with 3D image quality.   Currently, Half-Life works sluggish at best using the OpenGL renderer, although Direct3D seems to work fine.  There are hints of artifacts and other visual imperfections with the current drivers, however there is nothing that would lead AnandTech to believe that the drivers can't be perfected by the release of the retail product.

Performance

A note about V-Sync:  At the last minute ATI provided AnandTech with a way to disable an option that has almost become a household term, wait for v-sync.   Basically this feature, when enabled, synchronizes memory buffer swaps to the refresh rate of your monitor.  Performance wise, enabling wait for v-sync (or enabling v-sync for short) will limit your video performance to the value of your monitor's refresh rate, however the visual quality will be at its peak and you won't notice any "tearing" of the textures appearing on your screen.  Disabling v-sync removes all performance barriers and lets your video card run at its top speed, the only downside to this being that image quality may be sacrificed, and the screen itself may appear to "tear" or fracture in certain areas during gameplay.  From the testing with the Rage 128, there isn't a problem of excessive tearing with v-sync disabled, so the tests were conducted with it disabled as have all other video card tests on AnandTech been conducted. 

Test Configuration

The Slot-1 Pentium II Test System AnandTech used was configured as follows:

Slot-1 Test System

CPU's
Intel Celeron 300A
Intel Pentium II 266
Intel Pentium II 400

Motherboard
ABIT BH6

Memory
64MB Mushkin SEC PC100 SDRAM

CD-ROM Drive
AOpen 32X IDE CD-ROM Drive

Operating System
Microsoft Windows 98

Benchmarking Software (full versions)
Direct3D
Half-Life Blowout Demo
OpenGL
Quake 2 Demo1 & Crusher Demo

Socket-7 Test System

CPU's
AMD K6/200
AMD K6/2 350

Motherboard
FIC PA-2013 1MB L2

Memory
64MB Mushkin SEC PC100 SDRAM

CD-ROM Drive
AOpen 32X IDE CD-ROM Drive

Operating System
Microsoft Windows 98

Benchmarking Software (full versions)
Direct3D
Half-Life Blowout Demo
OpenGL
Quake 2 Demo1 & Crusher Demo

All video cards/chipsets were run using their respective manufacturer's reference drivers.

For the in-depth gaming performance tests Brett "3 Fingers" Jacobs Crusher.dm2 demo was used to simulate the worst case scenario in terms of Quake 2 performance, the point at which your frame rate will rarely drop any further.  In contrast, the demo1.dm2 demo was used to simulate the ideal situation in terms of Quake 2 performance, the average high point for your frame rate in normal play.  The range covered by the two benchmarks can be interpreted as the range in which you can expect average frame rates during gameplay.



In-depth Gaming Performance Comparison Charts
(click to enlarge respective graphs)
Quake 2 - demo1.dm2 Quake 2 - crusher.dm2 Half-Life blowout.dem
AMD K6/200

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AMD K6-2 350 graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes)
Intel Celeron 300 graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes)
Intel Celeron 300A graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes)
Intel Celeron 450 graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes)
Intel Celeron 450A graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes)
Intel Pentium II 266 graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes)
Intel Pentium II 400 graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes) graphicon.gif (102 bytes)

From a performance perspective, the Rage 128 is almost on par with the performance of the nVidia Riva TNT.  The real differences emerge when you make the shift into 32-bit color, where the Rage 128 describes an almost non-existent performance drop when making the jump from 16 to 32-bit color as shown by the Half-Life scores. 

The performance of the Rage 128 on lower end systems isn't bad at all, especially considering that even on the Pentium II 266 or Celeron 300 the benchmarks came out at around the 30 fps mark in Quake 2, even at higher resolutions.  ATI has virtually removed all penalties associated with running at higher resolutions on slower processors, where there is very little, if any, performance degradation, including in the switch from 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768. 

If you bump up the processor to something equipped with a faster L2 cache, such as the Pentium II 400, or even the Celeron A overclocked to 450, you'll begin to notice the Rage 128 skyrocket in terms of its performance at 800 x 600 and below while the improvement at 1024 x 768 remains present, yet not as great.  The performance drop-off from 800 x 600 to 1024 x 768 is more boldly illustrated in the benchmarks on the two high end systems, the Pentium II 400 and the Celeron 450A, where the frame rate difference between the two resolutions approaches the 20 fps mark.



From the perspective of the Slot-1 owner who craves speed, and wishes to get the best of all worlds (2D/3D/DVD), the Rage 128 should be considered as the ideal chipset for you.  Now once your needs become a little more specific, such as greater 3D performance (Voodoo2 SLI), or greater 2D image quality (G200), then you may be forced to veer away from the Rage 128, but as a starting point, you can't go wrong with this bad boy.  Regardless of the speed of your processor, if you're a slot 1 user looking for a well-rounded 2D/3D card, the Rage 128 gets AnandTech's recommendation for the best overall all-in-one, kicking Matrox out of that seat (although they still hold the high ground for best all-in-one with the highest 2D image quality).  

Super7 users should be able to find much comfort in the Rage 128, it isn't a horrible performer, and it offers very few compatibility issues with Super7 chipsets, not to mention the incredible feature set the chipset itself boasts.  If you're planning on upgrading your system in the next 3 - 6 months, the Rage 128 will definitely be a chipset that can at least keep up with the games of the future and it will definitely scale with your hardware as your needs grow. 

The Rage 128 is a chipset that already supports hardware bump-mapping, 32-bit rendering without any (or with very little) performance penalty, and a full 32MB of on-board RAM in addition to its full AGP 2X specification compliance, and down the road, it will be one of the few remaining chipsets from this video accelerator boom we've experienced to actually be able to stand (albeit a bit wobbly) next to the competition.  It seems as if ATI took the first alternative route to this search for the "Voodoo2-killer" by developing a product a large percentage of the hardware enthusiast population out there wanted, a downright decent all-in-one card designed with the future in mind...who would've thought? 

The only problem that remains is when you all can get your hands on the cards.  The answer to that question is a bit shady, the card AnandTech tested is probably most similar to that of the ATI Rage Magnum outfitted with 32MB of SDRAM, however the actual release will probably be, at earliest, in January of 1999 debuting at around $139 - $159 depending on the configuration.  That is a bit disappointing, but as usual, AnandTech will keep you up to date as more information does become available, so it looks like the best overall 2D/3D accelerator of 1998 won't be available until sometime in 1999.