MACWORLD Expo - Get The Dirt On The The ATI Radeon Card

by , 1:00 PM EDT, July 20th, 2000

The ATI Radeon card is quite promising. ATI met us in its private room and gave us all the specs and information about the graphics acceleration card and they claim that it will smoke the competition. ATI plans on giving up the 128 cards once its AGP Radeon card ships. They say that they are past them and they are entering a new level. Here are the features, specs and details:

• 32-bit gaming support.
• 32 MB RAM.
• Optimized memory bandwidth
• VGA out, DVI flat display support, Apple monitors support, S-Video out, TV support.
• 14.9 frames per second at 1600x1200, 39.8 frames per second at 1280x1024, 56 frames per second at 1024x768.
• Vast current and upcoming game support.
• High quality rendering support.
• 3 texture units, giving 3 textures per pixel.
• Pixel tapestry architecture and 3D textures.
• Charisma engine.
• HyperZ.
• DDR memory.
• 20% performance increase when HyperZ is turned on.
• DV engine.
• High polygon definition (there was a demo with Unreal running and it made the pictures look better).
• Adaptative De-Interlacing.
• OpenGL features support.
• 350 MHz Digital Analog Converter.

Benchmarks

From what was exposed in the benchmarks (running the cards on PC's), the ATI Radeon would beat the 3dfx Voodoo 5 card easily while the 3dfx folks did NOT benchmark their new card with the ATI Radeon. We will see if the benchmarks will be the same on the Mac, but in normal circumstances, they should be similar. Only the GeForce2 card was very close to the Radeon in all tests.

Availability

ATI promises that it will ship the AGP card in September for US$279 (street price).

The Mac Observer Spin:

The fact that 3dfx did not compare its new Voodoo 5 card with the Radeon leads us to believe that the ATI folks could have a performance winner on their hands. Hopefully this card could make it to Apple's G4 units soon.

ATI