ATi RADEON - The Empire strikes
back (1/15)
The Empire strikes back! ATi, supreme ruler of OEM sales, has returned to issue a challenge to NVIDIA on NVIDIA's sacred ground - the high-end segment. And judging from what I've seen, the RADEON is a real contender. It has everything its rival, NVIDIA's GeForce2, has - and more. One look at the list of features is sure to give you more thrills than Stephen King's latest bestseller! The so-called reviewer's guide - the documentation ATi includes with its review cards - covers everything from RADEON's Charisma Engine (Hardware T&L) to ATi's Hyper-Z Technology in great detail - and weighs in at a hefty 40 pages. And that's not counting the 27 additional pages for the Charisma Engine whitepaper. ATi will be offering the following versions of RADEON based cards in Germany: A version with an integrated TV-Tuner, dubbed "All In Wonder", will be introduced at a later time. For this test, ATi generously supplied me with the 64 MB DDR version of the RADEON, with integrated Video In / Video Out (ViVo) capabilities (ATi Rage Theater). It's core is clocked at 183 MHz, running synchronously with the memory (183 MHz DDR = 366MHz). In this round, the RADEON had to prove its worth (stand its ground?) against its main target, NVIDIA's GeForce2, represented here in the form of the Hercules 3D Prophet II 64, which also happens to be clocked at the same memory and core speeds. With an official retail price of DM 999.-, it also fits squarely into the price segment ATi is obviously targeting. Although the ASUS V7700 PURE (GeForce2 - 200/333) and the 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 (2 x VSA-100) aren't quite in the same league, at least speaking price-wise, they are included in this test to give a better impression of where the RADEON performs within the current range of graphicscards. As an aside: it should be noted that the cards by ASUS and 3dfx are really competitors of the 32MB version of the RADEON, as they fall roughly into the same price range.
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| Copyright: 07.08.2000 -
RIVA
Station 2000 - Lars Weinand Translation by Benjamin Kraft URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/radeon64_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
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