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Rage 128 Overview

These are based on initial impressions and will be later updated

The Rage128GL is a 128-bit 2D/3D/DVD graphics chip with support which offers top-notch 3D acceleration for both DirectX6 and OpenGL in addition to its unbeatable DVD support. The ATI Rage128 not only offers Motion Compensation and hardware subpicture decoding, but also is the first consumer 2D/3D card to offer IDCT Decoding which reduces the CPU burden a few more percent. The Rage128 is a .25 micron product which means that heat will not be an issue. The Rage128 also supports Multi-texturing for a fillrate of 250Mpixels/sec on a 125 MHz product and 200MPixels/sec on a 100Mhz shipping product. Driver quality is the main issue with the Rage128, but for a set of beta drivers, they are pretty good. ATI's Team is hard at work to produce a new set of drivers by January.

PROS:

Excellent 3D Performance

The Rage128 has a theoretical maximum fill rate of 250Mpixel/sec when clocked at 125Mhz, and offers top of the line performance especially at high resolutions of 1024x768 and above. AGP 2X is also fully implemented such that large performance hits are not incurred when using textures from system RAM. Furthermore, the Rage128 supports up to 32mb of local texture RAM which allows more textures to be stored in local RAM for faster performance. Furthermore, the 32mb of RAM allows you have a 3D resolution of 1900x1200x32 32-bit Z-Buffer (27mb framebuffer) or 1900x1200x32 16-bit Z-Buffer, triple buffered (31.5mb framebuffer). How fast is the card at that resolution? Who knows... someone needs to donate a monitor capable of displaying that first.

Excellent Visual Quality

32-bit True Color Rendering prevents dithering artifacts from occurring. The 16-bit rendering is also pretty good in my opinion. However, you should look at the screenshots to make your own decisions.

Good 2D

The 128-bit core provides extremely fast 2D performance and the high-quality RAMDAC allows for images that are visually clearer and sharper than other cards.

Excellent MPEG-2 Acceleration

Not only does the Rage128 offer optimized Motion Compensation to reduce CPU requirements, but it is currently is the only shipping 2D/3D card with IDCT (Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform) which reduces a few percent of the CPU usage. Furthermore, ATI also is a "true Software DVD solution" as defined by myself which means the card also supports subpicture alpha blending for DVD playback which translates into "stand-alone-player" quality for subtitles and on-screen interactive graphics.

Superb Price

The street price for an 16MB SDRAM Xpert128 is approximately $90 US and the 32MB SDRAM Rage Fury is approximately $130 US. Both prices account for the $20 manufacturer's mail-in rebate. Furthermore the Rage Fury has an excellent software bundle.

Brand-new Drivers

As the Rage128 is using a completely new 2D and 3D core, the drivers are also brand-new and thus leaves behind any legacy code that may have slowed down the drivers. The best example of this is the fairly robust OpenGL ICD with great CDRS support, Quake2 support, and E&S Glaze support.

CONS:

No Support for 3Dfx Glide

Although native-mode APIs are less important today with Direct3D and OpenGL, some games continue to support 3Dfx's native mode API exclusively such as Diablo 3.

Brand-new Drivers

While brand-new drivers allow ATI to leave behind legacy code, it also means that the Rage128 will be shipping with first generation drivers. ATI has not had time to finalize and develop the drivers yet. The drivers are pretty good and are better than the original set of Rage Pro drivers, but the system did crash a few times. If they had used legacy drivers, we'd have more robust and stable drivers, but we'd lose performance. There's no way for ATI win, but unfortunately, that's the truth. That said, it's better that ATI used brand-new drivers.

Mediocre TV-Output

The Rage128 uses the same ImpacTV2 chip as the older Rage Pro series. While the ImpacTV2 was one of the best TV outputs, it is beginning to pale. While the 800x600 support is still better than most competing solutions, the color saturation is bit bland and the image could be a bit sharper. That said, ATI has already developed its 3rd generation TV output chip, the Rage Theater which should not only provide better image quality

Performance hit with Trilinear Filtering

Unlike the Savage3D, the Rage128 has a 25% performance hit when trilinear filtering. Although this is not as bad as some may believe, as the Rage128 performs Trilinear filtering faster than the RivaTNT, it is still a 25% performance hit that the user must consider when given the choice to enable or disable trilinear filtering.

Chip comparisons

ATI Rage128 v. 3Dfx Banshee

The ATI Rage128 offers higher 3D image quality with its full support for AGP2X, 32-bit color rendering, hardware accelerated MPEG-2 support for Software DVD playback, 32mb of memory, and has support for multitexturing. The Banshee is unforunately limited to 256x256 sized textures (see article), only supports 16-bit rendering and does not have accelerated Software DVD. Furthermore, the Banshee runs hotter than the Rage128 which may be an issue in overclocked systems. On the other hand, the Banshee offers Glide support for excellent software support, and also benefits from 3Dfx's mature drivers. In fact, at the Banshee can be faster in single-textured games at times thanks to 3Dfx's mature drivers and SGRAM bandwidth. Last, a PCI version of the Banshee is already available.

ATI Rage128 v. NVIDIA RivaTNT

The Rage128 offers up to 32mb of memory, accelerated MPEG-2 support for Software DVD playback, is just as fast or even faster than the TNT, and furthermore, the Rage128 is cheaper than the RivaTNT. Visual quality is similar although the TNT does support anisotropic filtering. On the other hand, the RivaTNT does not support 8-bit palletized textures. Last, a PCI version of the RivaTNT is already available.

ATI Rage128 v. Matrox G200

The Rage128 has many improvements over the G200. The Rage128 has similar visual quality, hardware MPEG-2, is faster than the G200, and has an OpenGL ICD. In the case of the Mystique G200, the G200 is supposed to have a better TV Output with a maximum resolution of 1024x768. The two main advantages of the Matrox G200 is that it allows you to upgrade to the whole suite of Rainbow Runner upgrades such as a TV-Tuner, or MJPEG capture card. ATI currently only offers the ATI-TV although an upgrade although HDTV is planned. Last, a PCI version of the G200 is already scheduled to be shipping.

ATI Rage128 v. Savage3D

Full Face/Off soon...