ATi (Hall 9, C53)

ATi had some secrets to hide on this years CeBIT. Their own new T&L capable chip Rage6c will be announced soon (March 8.). ATi talks about NV15 performance regions for the chip but there are no further details known yet. Only that it will also support DDR-RAM. The graphics flagship on the ATi booth was the double-chip card Rage Fury MAXX.

Another news with ATi is that they will produce own mainboards. ATi bought the chipset maker ArtX which developed a chipset with an integrated T&L capable VGA unit. The ATI-S1-370TL is a 133MHz FSB Slot1 (may come as socket 370) mainboard with an own ArtX northbridge. These is compatible with the ALi M1535D and M1543 southbridge. The special feature of the ArtX chipset is the integrated 3D chip which does hardware accelerated transformtion & lightning + hw clipping. The chip renders 4 pixel per clock and calculates 12,5M polygons/sec. It achives a fillrate of 330M Texel/sec. Another neat feature is HW DVD playback.
The mainboard is made fot the entry-cost low-level OEM sector so the chip does not have its own memory onboard. It shares the standard system 133MHz SDRAM memory. To get a better performance of the 64Bit buswidth memory they do a trick: They use two memory banks at the same time - so they access the memory with a buswidth of 128Bit. In numbers: standard 64Bit memory interface delivers 1GB/s - For ArtX ATi speaks of 2,1GB/s.
We´ll have to see if this is enough to get acceptable framerates in current games. A bit confusing: ATi speaks of a "Virtual 8X AGP" AGP speed.... I really have no idea what this is :)

ASUS (Hall 13, B52)

ASUS shows their actual VGA line V6600 and V6800 with NVIDIA GeForce 256. The only news here are the new videoviewer/capture software ASUS Live 2000 and a 3D movie player. Behind the doors one could catch a look on a prototype of the V6600 Pro, a 64MB SDRAM card.

First time shown in Germany were the ASUS kabel, ISDN and ADSL modems. It´s unsure yet if they´ll sell them in germany. On the drive sector they showed a 8X DVD in action and a 12X drive in a show-case. The mainboard sector was dominated by the P3C (Slot1) and CU (socket 370) series with INTEL I820 Camino chipset. Also shown: ASUS Servers and Notebooks.

Copyright: RIVA Station 2000 - Lars Weinand
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