ATI Radeon AGP Reviewed by: Brian Paloski Review Date: 10.16.00 Manufacturer: ATI MSRP: $279 (US) Back at MacWorld Expo in July, we were lucky enough to get a preview of the new ATI Radeon Mac Edition AGP video card, and we were astounded by the claims of the card’s estimated performance specs at the show. Although some people were disappointed that the card was not listed as a build-to-order option for the new G4 MP machines that Apple was shipping at the time, the consensus was that there was definite interest in the product come the shipping date. Just outside of the small room where we had our meeting with the ATI representatives, there was a constant buzz around the demo machine running Quake 3 Arena and we have been waiting for the past three months to get our hands on the new Radeon video card. Over the past week we have been putting it through our rigorous tests, and have come up with some interesting results. Upon taking the Radeon out of its box, we noticed that the physical size of the card was comparable to the size of the current ATI Rage Pro shipping in the current G4 machines. The reason I’m mentioning this is because the Radeon’s main competition, the Voodoo 5-5500 is over twice as long, not to mention, covered with two large fans to help dissipate the heat from the chips which may requires an available power connector to run. With the Radeon, all we had to do was open the side of the case, remove the existing Rage Pro card, and insert the new card in the slot, and we were ready to go. The fan that is built onto the card requires no extraneous connectors, and for the most part creates little to no noticeable noise inside the case. The external connectors on the Radeon include the standard VGA, DVI-I for digital flat panels, and TV-Out via an S-Video connector. We’ll go into more detail later about the connectors, but for now, on to the completion of the installation procedure. After the initial boot, we installed the ATI software that was not much different than the existing ATI universal drivers, except made for the Radeon, and OpenGL 1.1.5, which is required for most of the 3D operations of the card. After a quick reboot, we were up and running with no extra configuration needed. If there is a need to do so, the ATI Displays control panel is easy to navigate, and is pretty much self-explanatory. The included manual is clear and concise, and has step by step directions for a more in-depth understanding of the Radeon’s inner workings. On a side note, we tested the Radeon with the OS X Public Beta, and it worked without any noticeable problems, although under the current beta limitations, we did not have any OpenGL support for the card, which also means there is no hardware support for rendering engines. The first application that we tried out on the new Radeon was the Apple DVD Player. We threw in a copy of The Matrix, loaded up the chapter where they were going into the building to save Morphius, and let it go. With my PowerBook, at times I noticed some video stuttering in this part of the movie when I am running in full screen mode. I figured that if we got through the sequence with no major problems, I would be happy. The Radeon Video Immersion technology promotes on-chip motion compensation, run-level decode, de-zigzag and IDCT hardware acceleration of MPEG-2 decoding for a nearly perfect picture. Needless to say, the Radeon passed with flying colors and not once did it stutter. A side note is that the Voodoo 5-5500 does NOT offer DVD decoding, and therefore does not support DVD playback on your desktop. If you decide to go with the current PCI version of the Voodoo, you can use your existing Rage Pro for the video playback. If you choose to wait for the AGP version of the Voodoo 5-5500, I believe that there is again no planned DVD support on the card, which removes functionality of one of the coolest features of the G4. When ATI ships the PCI version of the Radeon, DVD support will be included, provided you have a DVD-ROM drive. The bottom line is, the ATI Radeon offers great 3D and 2D ability and the DVD support that current G4 owners expect, where the other cards fall short. Now if you aren’t watching a DVD, but are still interested in video editing and QuickTime playback, the Radeon has just the thing for you. The Radeon uses special hardware techniques such as alpha blending and chroma interpolation to enhance video quality instead of replacing pixels. For the Radeon’s hardware to kick in, the QuickTime file that you are viewing must be in either MPEG-1, Cinepak, or Indeo format. Although ATI states that the Radeon’s hardware works with the above formats, that does not mean that other movies compressed with codecs such as Sorenson Video look bad, they just can’t be hardware accelerated. With the DVI-I connector, you can plug in your digital flat panel display to the Radeon. Back when we ordered the MP G4, there was no build-to-order option with the Radeon, so we have to wait until we get our video adapter to hook up the Cinema Display. The last feature is that with the included Mac2TV Video Out (S-Video) feature, you can output the display of your desktop to a TV or VCR for uses such as recording presentations, and playing Quake 3 Arena on a 61 inch TV. On a final note, there is good news if you are one of those people who did purchase an ATI Rage Orion, or one of the other ATI cards, ATI says that it will support the Radeon in its Loyalty Upgrade Program. More than likely, if you are interested in the ATI Radeon card, you are interested in it because of its 3D and gaming abilities. I’m not saying that the 2D acceleration is immaterial, but the strengths of this card lie heavily with its 3D rendering and gaming abilities. If you ask me if it’s worth the $99 build-to-order option, I would definitely say yes for a few reasons. Firstly, the ATI Rage Pro was a great performance card for its time. The Rage Pro has been out for close to two years now, and although it’s a strong contender, the technology is dated. Consumers wondered if the ATI Radeon would be worth the wait, and honestly, I believe so. For the seasoned gamer, this card is the answer to your high-resolution prayers. I believe that the true test of the Radeon’s horsepower comes in the display of its 3D gaming and rendering abilities. We focused on two games, Quake 3 Arena, and Unreal Tournament, and one 3D rendering benchmark; CineBench 2000. Although CineBench did not give us any staggering results, there are few exceptions to the rule, and most of them lie on the PC/Windows NT side of the coin. Quake 3 Arena was used because of the almost industry standard "TimeDemo 001" test for frames per second (FPS), and Unreal Tournament because of the inclusion of RAVE hardware acceleration into the game itself. But enough of the talking; let’s get on with the games. Benchmarks were performed on an MP G4-500 with 512 MB of RA and a minimal install of Mac OS 9.0.4. I tested Quake 3 Arena v1.17 on one clean partition and Unreal Tournament v4.25a on another. Both games were allocated a minimum of 100 MB and a maximum of 150 MB of RAM. All of the tests were done with clean config files, where the resolution and bit depth were manually changed from within the program. All of the config setups were done under the "Normal" settings, and with Unreal Tournament, all settings were on "High," with RAVE acceleration as the default. I manually rebooted the machine after every five or so tests to clear out any bugs or memory glitches. There are a few personal points that I would like to address before I continue. First, we at IGM believe that any gameplay under 30 FPS, and any resolution below 640x480 is virtually unplayable, horrible, and useless. There’s not much sense in playing a game if you can’t enjoy it visually because it’s jerky or choppy. The results that we came up with for the "IGM Config" and "Loki Config" are our own special touch to the testing procedure. The Loki Config script is recognized in the Quake 3 community as the supposedly fastest config script that doesn’t sacrifice gameplay. The IGM Config is an improvement upon the Loki Config that adds additional FPS. Both the Loki and IGM Configs were only performed under 640x480, 16 Bit resolutions as to preserve the nature of the high FPS. We understand that not everyone has the fastest computer on the market, but once again, these results are meant to be relative to your current machine. See Image Comparison Page As you can see above, the Radeon posts some impressive numbers, with the biggest surprises being at higher resolutions. It seemed that the harder we pushed the Radeon, the faster and more responsive it became. The Radeon’s Charisma Engine adds to the mix with its ability to handle more clipping and lighting computations so that your CPU doesn’t have to. This widens the information pipeline to the Radeon and takes CPU load off of your computer. Unreal Tournament, we posted the results in addition to the Quake 3 results knowing that the FPS would register lower due to the fact that you’re comparing apples to oranges. In Quake, despite the lower increase of FPS on the lower resolutions, at 86.4-FPS being our average high, using the Radeon, we could achieve the same FPS with greatly increased viewing detail at higher resolutions. What this means is that under our current IGM Config, we saw no lighting effects, no textures, and an overall "blocky" feel to the world around us. With the Radeon, we were able to turn up the lighting, textures, geometric and texture details with only a minimum hit to our FPS. As we mentioned before, any FPS above 60 is a luxury, and if you enjoy playing the game, why not have it look good too. In addition, the character models looked the best we have ever seen given the new "skinning" offers better character modeling. The Pixel Tapestry Engine aids in the rendering of 3D textures and texture maps so that you won’t lose any framerate, even in high action sequences. Below are some examples of the way we were used to playing, to the way we’re playing now. Needless to say, we’re never going back to the old, "blocky" regime. In conclusion, we have to say that the ATI Radeon Mac Edition AGP video card is the fastest video card out for the current G4 line. Its unparalleled 3D acceleration along with its quick 2D performance make it an easy choice on a build-to-order G4. Any hard core gamer will tell you the advantage of having higher FPS. It’s safe to say that its the difference between blowing someone up, and being blown up. With the Radeon, you don’t have to worry about slowing yourself down if you want to run at higher resolutions. You purchased the newest G4, or you have a blazingly fast upgrade, and you have more RAM in your computer than you know what to do with, so why cheap out on the video card. The Radeon is the all-in-one card that offers DVD and QuickTime enhancements, along with superior 3D acceleration that blows away all of the competition.