Event Horizons and Trends

There are a number of incoming chips that we picked up in our over-the-horizon radar. They continue a couple of interesting trends that we've seen in our roundup.

The first trend is boards with lots of local video memory. Most of the boards tested now ship in 16MB versions, and some retail boards are available only in 16MB versions. (For the price conscious, beware that some OEM boards may only have 8MB RAM, and may not be expandable.) Even 8MB Voodoo2 boards have all but disappeared, with 12MB boards now the norm.

Number Nine is even shipping a 32MB version of its Revolution IV, and ATI has announced a pair of 32MB products using its Rage 128 chip.

Another trend is integration of dual rendering pipelines. The first hardware part with dual-rendering pipelines on a single chip is nVidia's TNT. The Rage 128, which is probably shipping as you read this, also sports dual-rendering engines, as does 3Dlabs' Permedia 3 and Rendition's recently announced Redline accelerator. Here's a quick rundown on each of these new parts.

ATI Rage 128

The Rage 128 has been redesigned from the ground up and bears little resemblance to the Rage Pro. In addition to two rendering pipelines, it has full hardware DVD decoder capability on the chip. So with the right software support for DVD region encryption, you won't even need a daughtercard. The chip is manufactured using a process (0.25 micron) that can cram more transistors into a given space - the Rage 128 has 7 million transistors. The first versions will likely run at 100MHz, but 125 and 150MHz is possible. The chip can also support a higher speed variant of SDRAM, called Double Data Rate RAM (DDR RAM.)

ATI is shipping two boards of interest to gamers. The Rage Fury uses the Rage 128GL chip, which also powers a workstation card: the Rage Magnum. The Fury comes with TV-out and 32MB of RAM; the announced price is $299 for 32MB. The Xpert 128 will have 16MB of RAM, and will cost less. Driver support is likely to be robust, with full DirectX6 and OpenGL ICD drivers.