First glimpses at ATi Radeon
Axico Ltd. , the Hungarian
There we had the chance to see the presentation, which included some breathtaking demonstrations of a fully functional pre-production card based on ATi's Radeon. At the very end of the press event, we asked Mr. Knight to run a Quake3:Arena timedemo. Frame rates were quite amazing for a pre-production alpha board with beta drivers, but sadly we cannot publish any numbers.
However, the demo rig (Pentium III/750, 256M SDRAM, ATi Radeon pre-production alpha) could cope quite well with the NV15DEMO, without any slowdowns or lockups!
[oldal:Pictures]
During the event Mr. Knight allowed the HWSW team to take pictures of the video card. Of course we took the opportunity, so you have a chance to marvel at the pics:
Check out the ATi Rage Theater chip on the card: that is responsible for video capturing. According to Mr. Knight, the video features of the card are fully functional. Please note, that this board is sample only, so the design of final boards may differ!
[oldal:Q&A Part One]
After the press event, Mr. Knight was so kind as to devote some time to answer all of HWSW's questions:HWSW: With the introduction of the 3dfx Voodoo5 boards, full scene anti-aliasing became a cardinal feature of a video card. How can the Radeon cope with this challenge?
Ed Knight: Actually, ATi designed Radeon to enable players to reach extremely high resolutions, even 1600x1200, with fairly playable frame rates. Obviously, you won't need FSAA in such high resolutions, but if someone insists, there's a software-implemented supersampling-based type of anti-aliasing feature in the Radeon chip.
HWSW: Keyframe Interpolation technology is a unique feature of the Radeon. Can you mention some game titles supporting this technique?
Ed Knight: Well, it mainly depends on Microsoft's willingness to implement it into DirectX8. If they will, games anticipated to be released for Christmas will surely benefit from this feature.
HWSW: Linux operating system is gaining more and more market share. What about Radeon's Linux-compatible drivers?
Ed Knight: We think that the best Linux-expert is the Linux-community itself, so the company will provide all necessary information and technical details that the Linux-community needs to get the drivers up and running.
HWSW: ATi has recently announced that, due to chip identification problems, no Windows 2000-compatible drivers will be released for Rage Fury MAXX cards. What's the deal with the planned Radeon MAXX?
Ed Knight: ATi's engineers are working very close with Microsoft and I can assure you that all Radeon-based products will have proper Windows 2000 drivers.
[oldal:Q&A Part Two]
HWSW: Could you tell me something about the pricing of the Radeon?Ed Knight: Detailed pricing list is not available yet, but Radeon will be agressively priced against competitive products.
HWSW: According to the plans, Radeon-based cards will support 200 MHz DDR memory. What if the semiconductor industry will not be able to provide enough memory chips?
Ed Knight: When we will not have enough memory chips as mass production starts, we will find another solutions.
HWSW: When can we expect to see the cards on retailers' shelves?
Ed Knight: Press samples will be available sometime in late July or early August and we plan to ship the first cards to retailers in August.
HWSW: How do you think Radeon will compete with GeForce 2 GTS or the up-coming NV20?
Ed Knight: ATi Radeon has many features which will be enabled only by Microsoft's DirectX8 API. The more games are based on DX8, the more powerful Radeon will become. When designing the Radeon, we were considering the future as well.
HWSW: How is Radeon's speed compared to GeForce 2 GTS?
Ed Knight: Well I can't tell you exact numbers, but our internal benchmarks show that in 32-bit rendering the higher the resolution, the more and more powerful the Radeon is. In 16 bit rendering GeForce 2 GTS is faster, but who needs 16 bit? (Voodoo-fans -Ytse :) NVIDIA also thinks it's totally dead.
HWSW: We know that the final cards are expected to have a 200 MHz core fed by 200 MHz DDR memory chips. Can you tell me the exact speed details of the demo card?
Ed Knight: Sorry, but I can't disclose these pieces of info.
HWSW: Thank you very much for answering our questions and we wish you good luck with the Radeon!
[oldal:Some more informations]
As you could see, Mr. Knight refused to answer our question about clock speeds of the demo card. But on the photos we took, memory chips are fully visible with all inscriptions
According to Hyundai technical documents these are 4 MByte 183 MHz DDR SDRAM memory chips. Eight can be found on the board to make up a total of 32 MBytes of video memory.
Mr. Knight intimated to us some scoop about ATi's roadmap and board configurations, but this must be treated as confidential 'till 20 June, 2000.
HWSW would like to say 'thank you' to Erasmus of GA-Hardware and Gabor Kadas for their help.