ATI is a graphics company with a long history in the accelerator business. In fact, one of my first VGA boards ten or twelve years ago was made by ATI, and at the time it was faster and had more features than other comparable boards in it's price range. Only a few years ago, ATIs VGA Wonder followed in that same tradition.

At the same time, however, some ATI chips have been plagued with compatability issues. ATI is not alone in this department, of course, but it leaves questions in the minds of gamers about any of the companys new products.

ATI will release the Rage Fury and Rage Magnum boards in November, each with 32 meg of onboard memory. The new Xpert 128 will release with 16 meg of memory (all of these boards are AGP 2x). With a new chip that could pass Riva's TNT for processing power, we thought it a good idea to ask a few questions. Here are the results of our interview.

CSim: Can you summarize for us the features of the Rage 128?

A: Two 128 bit wide graphic pipelines. ... single pass multi texturing Pixel cache (8KB) and Texture cache (8KB) ... more frame buffer B.W.

• 32 bit Z buffer.
• 8 bit Stencil buffer
• DX6.0 and Open GL support.
• Line and Edge antialiasing.
• VQ texture compression
• DVD MPEG-2 decode includes iDCT.
• Concurrent Command Control Engine ... uses AGP memory space to process
• display list from CPU so the RAge 128 is pulling the commands rather
• than the CPU pushing the commands thus avoiding stalls.
• 32 MB frame buffer support.
• 100MHz clock.

A: Single pass multitexturing and everything else that gets the frame rates up.

CSim: Moving to 32 meg of onboard memory seems odd in the face of the maturity of AGP. Why 32 meg?

A: 16MB is the standard for cards shipping now. We don't necessarily ship with 32 MB but we could if necessary.

CSim: Direct3D finally seems like a mature API. Does it appear this way from the perspective of a hardware maker like ATI?

A: The API is now pretty stable, most of the initial problems have been ironed out and it is now possible to expose much more of the hardware capabilities than previously. (See answer to "twin texel" question for an example). We have worked closely with Microsoft in coming up with a suitable API that will benefit both IHVs and ISVs. We are continuing to improve on this work, and have even greater expectations from DX7.

Click to continue . . .

CSim: As a twin texel chip the Rage 128 follows the trend of the Voodoo2 and TNT boards. Is the implementation similar?

A: The Rage 128 does not follow the trends set up by them, rather they follow the trend set up by our previous chip the Rage Pro, which had rudimentary multitexturing capabilities (lightmaps, texture morphs, etc). The Rage 128 is a second generation multi-texturing part for us, and we have designed this new pipeline from scratch to carry out a full dual texture implementation.

CSim: ATI 3d technology has had some compatability issues in the past. What can users expect in terms of compatability running under DX6?

A: The Rage128 was designed with input from the work we had done with Microsoft on the DX6 specifications. As such, the part implements the DX6 pipeline fully according to the specs.

CSim: Would you speculate on the speed of the Rage 128 under DX6 in relation to the present generation of nVidia's TNT technology? Do you expect to see better performance, and if so by what percentage at a resolution of 1024x768 and 16 bit color?

A: TnT is a 95MHz clock, Rage 128 is a 100MHz clock therefore faster. (WinBench 99 numbers will be available at COMDEX). Furthermore, present TNT chips use a .35um die process, while we use .25, which means you can cook an egg on their chip at higher clock speeds.

CSim: Will the Rage 128 be released at its maximum potential or is there room for improvements in speed with higher clock rates in later steppings?

A: The Rage 128 clock rate can be improved.

CSim: Where is the future for multi texel 3d hardware? Are we likely to see triple or four texel units on 3d boards in the future, or will ATI release an SLI configuration similar to that designed by 3dfx?

A: Gamers would like to see 8 textures rendered at once. The next version of Quake apparently uses up to 9 passes on some of its polygons, which we may be able to do in 3 passes with the Rage 128. More and more games and game engines are using these multiple passes now available to them to create more realistic visual effects like bump mapping and gloss-mapping.

CSim: thanks!