ATI Rage Fury Pro Review — THG.RU

Introduction

The majority of the performance-hungry 3D-gamers may not even be aware of it, but ATi has been the most successful 3D-chip and 3D-card maker for quite a while now in terms of sold units as well as revenues. Many of you may ask why. The secret behind ATI’s success is very different to the ‘make the fastest 3D-chip so you’ll be most successful’-approach of 3Dfx or NVIDIA. ATI has been able to supply the market with decently performing 3D-hardware at very reasonable prices, with an excellent list of additional features, a good support and the ability to deliver product very reliably. This is why OEMs love ATI and you won’t find any OEM or large system integrator that does not use ATI-cards in at least some of its product lines. Whilst 3Dfx and NVIDIA were fighting for the 3D-crown, ATI sat back and simply sold their products in a very professional manner. Those products weren’t necessarily the fastest, but the performance was good enough, the list of multimedia-features was just what OEMs required, the pricing was decent and the products were delivered reliably.

Now this does of course not mean that ATI wouldn’t have to be able and supply well performing products too. ATi’s Rage 128 was not quite able to compete with the fastest 3D-chips anymore by the time when 3Dfx released their Voodoo3 and later on when NVIDIA brought RIVA TNT2 to the market. Still Rage128-products sold fine, but eventually the people expected more performance from ATI as well. Now ATi’s next chip Rage 128 Pro is ready to close the gap, and starting to compete against the top 3D-performers of the last 8 months. ATI-cards with this new chip are again not targeted to reach for the 3D-crown, but you’ll see that those cards will again sell very successfully, again for the same reasons mentioned above.

We had a close look at the Rage Fury Pro and a prototype of the Rage Fury MAXX, to see what kind of performance we can expect from the new ATI-chip and how it stands up against its competitors.

The Specifications of Rage 128 Pro

The name already shows it, Rage 128 Pro is not a completely new chip, but an enhanced Rage 128. The most obvious enhancement is of course the core and memory clock. Rage 128 Pro is clocked at 125 MHz and the memory runs at 143 MHz. This increases the fill rate to 250 Mpixels/s and improves memory bandwidth for high resolutions or 32-bit color depth. You will certainly realize that 250 Mpixels/s are just as much as a normal NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 chip is able to supply and even less than the fill rate of a 3Dfx Voodoo3 2000. Thus there’s no reason to expect miracles from the new Rage 128 Pro products and if you compare it to the predecessor Rage 128 you have hardly any reason to expect more than a 25% increase in frame rates. If you run Powerstrip to test the clock speeds, you’ll get the incorrect value of 143/155 MHz, just in case you’ve read different clock speeds somewhere else.

Here is a list of other important changes:

DVD playback

ATI has had an excellent track record when it comes to DVD playback but they’ve taken another step forward worth mentioning. While running some preliminary tests with a beta DVD benchmark THG is working on, I’ve seen no competition for ATI in regards to DVD playback quality / performance. Let’s look at how ATI decodes an MPEG-2 stream. I’ll list the process below and then show you the historical advances in hardware that ATI has made since Rage II+.

• Parsing
• Variable Length Decoding (VLD)
• Inverse Quantization (IQ)
• Inverse Scanning (IS)
• Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT)
• Motion Compensation

The strong hardware assist in the Rage Fury Pro along with its higher clock speeds gives it outstanding DVD playback that is unparalleled by any other card aside from a dedicated hardware MPEG-2 decoder. Even then the differences are arguable. The main reason for the high MPEG2-decoding performance of the Rage 128 family is the integrated iDCT, which cannot be found in any other 3D-chip. It is also very useful as DCT used for MPEG2-encoding of your own videos, something that can be performed beautifully by the Rage 128 Pro.

Rage Fury MAXX or Aurora, «The Golden Girl»

ATI was nice enough to drop by the US lab to give us a first hand look at the Rage Fury MAXX. The project is also called ‘Aurora’, which is Latin and means ‘the golden woman’. After a brief demonstration of the Rage Fury Pro and the Rage MAXX, we were allowed to test our benchmark suite with beta drivers on a beta graphics board. Unfortunately we can’t share the benchmark scores just yet (due to the status of the card/driver). Keep an eye out for our full review of this board sometime in December.

The Fury MAXX is basically two Rage Pros on a single card. Each chip has dedicated 32MBs of memory to use. While in 2D modes, only one chip is actually active leaving the additional chip (and it’s dedicated 32MBs) idle. When switched into 3D mode, both chips are active and all 64MBs of memory are in use. ATI has taken a new route to using a graphics chips in tandem. Lets take a look at what the competition was doing and what ATI has done.

SLI (Scan Line Interleaving by 3Dfx) was awesome when it first came out but proved to a very brute-force way of using two chips. Each would draw the same screen but the odd and even lines were divided between the chips. The big problem with this is that each card has to store the same data as the other which is a waste of memory. Image quality was also degraded, as the scan lines of the image were somewhat ‘jaggy’ when compared to a single card solution. The biggest draw back of this SLI-technology was the fact that the polygons of the whole scene had to be rendered by each of the two rendering devices, thus only the fill rate was doubled, but the triangle rate stayed the same.

Look at the slide of ATi’s Rage 128 Pro presentation that demonstrates the SLI-problem.

The next attempt at improving this idea was done by Metabyte using a process called PGC (Parallel Graphics Configuration). In this process the screen was split in half so that each chip could have it’s half of the screen to work on. In most cases this returned a decent performance increase and it would also double the triangle rate, but still wasn’t the best solution. At times one chip would be idle waiting for the other chip while it was trying to complete it’s scene and this lead to degraded performance. On top of this, there was a partition between the two halves that had to be covered by blurring of the partitioned area to hide it. PGC was no bad idea, but unfortunately it wasn’t good enough for any card maker. Thus Metabyte had to abandon this project finally.

Look at the slide of ATi’s Rage 128 Pro presentation that demonstrates the PGC-problem.

ATI’s AFR Technology

ATI stepped in next and created AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering). With this technique, each chip would render every other frame. Even if one chip fell behind, the «idle» chip would queue the next frame so it wasn’t wasting any time. This proves to be a very efficient solution.

Look at the slide of ATi’s Rage 128 Pro presentation that demonstrates AFR.

Still there may be one problem of the ‘golden Rage Fury’, which may come into account when benchmarking. Due to the alternating nature of the rendering process, once done by the one chip and the next frame done by the other, there will be at least some issue with synchronizing the chips and rendered frames. This will hardly be a problem for actual game play, but in case of a benchmark where the famous ‘VSYNC’ should be turned off, ‘Aurora’ may have a problem and report lower frame rates than what the ‘golden girl’ is really capable of. We’ll look into this issue once we’re testing the final card.

So where does that put the Fury MAXX as far as performance? Theoretically this gives a 500MPixel/sec fill rate and 4GB/sec memory bandwidth. Although we’re not allowed to publish numbers, we’ll give you an idea of where the Fury MAXX sits as far as performance. From tests that we’ve run here in the lab, the benchmark scores in Expendable were some of the highest we’ve ever seen while in OpenGL (Quake Arena/Descent3) we saw performance numbers only topped by NVIDIA’s upcoming GeForce256, which comes with 480 Mpixels/s. Keep in mind this was with beta drivers, so performance may vary with the released product (should be on shelves around Christmas time). I want to also let it be known that it looked possible in future models to have a dual output from this card although it’s not planned yet (think Dual Head).

ATI Rage Fury Pro Drivers

The drivers for the Rage Fury Pro are basically the same as the Rage 128 so please refer back to our comments here.

Platform Configuration

Benchmark Results — Shogo Results

As we begin the testing, we can see that the Rage Fury Pro is doing well by keeping up with the big boys. The Rage Fury Pro plays at a very acceptable level but we’re still playing nice at the moment.

As we crank up the resolution to give our test cards a challenge, the Rage Fury Pro falls behind the TNT2. The TNT2 Ultra and Voodoo3 3500 are keeping the dominating positions.

Rage Fury Pro fails to meet our 30 FPS minimum and lies on par with TNT2. No other cards pass the test so we have no real winner in this test. We’ll have to wait for the next-generation cards to come fix this problem (GeForce and Fury MAXX maybe?).

Benchmark Results — Expendable 16-bit Results

Well look at this. We have the Rage Fury Pro close to the leaders TNT2 and TNT2.

Rage Fury Pro keeps the momentum going but not quite as well as the Voodoo3 cards as they pull into the lead. Still Rage Fury Pro is way ahead of its direct competitor TNT2, getting rather close to TNT2 Ultra.

Ah, a real tough challenge as we put the cards into the upper resolution. Rage Fury Pro just comes short of getting the job done while the G400 based cards jump into the top spots. It is very impressive to see Rage Fury Pro in front of TNT2 Ultra. This can certainly not be explained with the fill rate, it rather seems to be a memory bandwidth issue.

Benchmark Results — Expendable 32-bit Results

Rage Fury Pro is on par with TNT2, just where everybody would expect it to be.

32-bit color benchmarks are dominated by the Canadians. It’s very likely that this is due to ATi’s and Matrox’ technique of using a 16-bit Z-buffer when the application doesn’t require 32-bit. TNT2 is always using 32-bit Z-buffer at 32-bit color depth, which puts it at disadvantage in this test. Anyway, Rage Fury Pro shows surprisingly good performance, overtaking even TNT2 Ultra.

Again the Canadians take the lead, obviously for the same reason as above. TNT2 and TNT2 Ultra look rather bad.

Benchmark Results — Quake Arena — Normal

Rage Fury Pro takes a very close 3rd place while the Voodoo3 boards dominate at the lower resolution.

OpenGL is the favorite playing field of NVIDIA-products and Rage Fury Pro falls behind TNT2 quite badly. It’s pretty obvious, Q3-players want TNT2, basta!

At this high resolution you really want to have a Matrox G400 MAX or a TNT2 Ultra. All the others don’t really suffice.

Benchmark Results — Quake Arena — High Quality

Once again the Rage Fury Pro takes a respectable 3rd place while we have two players drop out of the competition.

Rage Fury Pro falls behind the TNT2’s and is damn close to 30 fps. Again, it’s obvious that Quake3 requires a card with an NVIDIA-chip.

Here we’re reached the toughest test for sure in our test suite with not one card even getting close to reaching the 30 FPS barrier.

Benchmark Results — Descent3 — DirectX

Rage Fury Pro takes the lead for a change by a hair while the rest of the cards pull excellent scores right behind it.

Finding itself in last place all of a sudden, the Rage Fury Pro still manages the expected score close to TNT2.

All the cards but the Rage Fury Pro and normal TNT2 kept slightly above the magical 30 FPS barrier.

Benchmark Results — Descent — Open GL

Even if the Rage Fury Pro doesn’t pull a win, you still have to give it credit for having an OpenGL ICD good enough to actually run Descent3 unlike some of the other competitors. Still you see why OpenGL means NVIDIA nowadays, Rage Fury Pro is not on par with TNT2 as it should be.

In this test TNT2 kicks ass. Rage Fury Pro does not live up to its fill rate equal to TNT2. Is it its driver or is it its architecture?

Pushing our cards to the limit at Descent3’s highest OpenGL setting took a toll on the Rage Fury Pro as it falls miserably short of the 30 FPS barrier.

Conclusion

ATI traditionally has brought us a well-rounded graphics card that consists of acceptable 3D performance, leading edge DVD playback, video encoding hardware/software, digital flat panel support and the ability to ship in quantity. With this latest release, we are proven once again that ATI has all these abilities and there’s hardly any doubt that the OEMs of this world will continue to rely on their proven graphics partner. However, supplying the performance that the competitors reached already 8 months ago won’t make it easy for the single Rage 128 Pro cards in the retail market. People who want a perfect multimedia-bundle can’t go wrong with the new ATi-product, performance hungry 3D-gamers however will rather wait for NVIDIA’s GeForce256 or for ‘Aurora’. With the release of GeForce256 we’ll see the prices of TNT2 and TNT2 Ultra drop and the expected performance levels rise. When I asked ATi about this, they assured me that they would keep the pricing (of the Fury Pro) in competition with the TNT2.

The Rage Pro Fury can be obtained for a reasonable $149, which places it in the price range of the G400, TNT2 and Voodoo3 3000. This is a no-brainer if you’re into DVD playback or video encoding at all. The competition doesn’t stand a chance in this price range. However, if 3D-gaming is your thing and you need the top dog, you’ll probably want to consider the TNT2-ultra or even wait for GeForce256 or Rage Fury MAXX. Regardless which choice you’ll make, ATi’s new chip will be a strong contender for the AGP-slot of your system in any case. I can’t see any reason why ATi shouldn’t continue to stay the most successful 3D-chip maker for the next foreseeable future, whilst NVIDIA will most likely domain the high-end OEM and retail market with TNT2-ultra and GeForce256.

We include the Rage 128 Pro Reviewers Guide (PDF-file) and ATi’s Aurora PowerPoint-Presentation for the ones of you who’d like to read ATI’s own comments on their product and also the ones who would like to compare other Rage 128 Pro articles with those two documents.