FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
COMPU-CLUB carries ATI Rage 128 product line
New, fast 2d/3d graphics accelerators carried by COMPU-CLUB
March 23, 1999 -- (article from ZDnet)
ATI Technologies' new Rage Fury, with an
average mail-order price of $170, was the only card in this roundup to ship with a
whopping 32MB of graphics memory. Not only is it an excellent all-around solution, but
this board pumps out 2-D and 32-bit 3-D performance second to none.
The Rage Fury draws its power from the Rage
128 GL 2-D/3-D chip, which has been totally redesigned and bears little resemblance to the
Rage Pro in previous ATI accelerators. The Rage Fury also has TV-out capability.
The board we reviewed used 32MB of SDRAM and the latest driver release from ATI.
The Rage Fury had just begun shipping as we tested, so the drivers were still pretty
fresh. The card pumped out a 3D WinMark 99 score of 575, easily the highest in this
roundup. Although both 2-D and 3-D performance were excellent in the benchmarks, the
board's actual game performance lagged a little behind that of the Riva TNT cards in both
Direct3D and OpenGL.
We also noticed some minor image-quality problems in games. For example, there
was a noticeable graininess when running 3-D games in 16-bit color; this disappeared when
running the same games in 32-bit color, however. ATI said it would fix these problems by
the time this issue hits print. We ran Falcon 4.0, Half-Life, and Quake II with the card,
and performance was fluid and smooth throughout.
ATI has improved its installation procedure, finally shipping a full setup
program rather than relying on the standard Windows method of installing drivers. This can
be handy when you have to force the installation of an older driver revision.
Interestingly, the Rage Fury's game performance in 32-bit color lagged behind
its 16-bit performance by only a few percentage points. This is in contrast with other
chips, which fall off as much as 50 percent in 32-bit color mode.
We did not test ATI's DVD performance, but visual quality of MPEG file playback
was fine. ATI ships the card with a software DVD player with algorithms that boost MPEG-2
playback.
The Rage Fury is a late third-generation card and something of a harbinger of
boards to come. With 32MB of RAM, and excellent 2-D and 3-D performance-- especially in
32-bit mode--the Rage Fury is a great choice for both business and home.
(article taken from ZDNet)
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