ATI XPERT@Play (www.combatsim.com)

ATI XPERT@Play

Test System:

PII 300 MHz, 75 MHz bus
64 meg of SDRAM
Quantum UDMA 2.5
Toshiba 24x CD
JAZZ 3d Speaker System front
Hitachi Speaker System rear
Voxon DX17
Thrustmaster F22 and TQS
Quickshot Masterpilot

For quite some time I bugged ATI to send me their new board, simply because I was convinced that this time they had a winner. ATI hasn't always had the best compatability, but they have always tried to remain on the cutting edge with innovation. Sometimes they have succeeded spectacularly.

Enter the XPert@Play and XPert@Work video boards. Both are well designed, innovative, and fast. The XPert@Work is aimed at the business market: surprise! And obviously the XPert@Play is aimed at you and me! Fully loaded the board sports 8 meg of SGRam and has a TV output, its main difference from the Work version. 8 megabytes of onboard RAM means that this board is capable of supporting up to 1280x1024 even in 3d mode! You want to push the cutting edge in 2d mode? Try 1600x1200!

The chip itself is somewhat unique, and is currently the only AGP capable chip that supports the 2x mode. At the moment this advantage isn't apparent, but this is only because AGP isnt really ready to go yet. As AGP comes of age the Rage Pro will be ready to benefit by it.

In the past I've had some installation problems with ATI boards, but this board didn't slow me down. Early driver versions apparently were unpredictable, but the updated ones seem very solid. Furthermore, the Direct3D performance of these XPERT boards on early drivers were barely matching 3Dfx results, but the latest drivers actually leave Voodoo 1 boards in the dust, passing them by a mighty 20 MPH .. er, 20%!

Equally important, the image quality of the XPert@Play is excellent, surpassing the Nvidia Riva128 in quality and quite comparable to 3dfx. This is no mean feat and it got me thinking that this company has come a long way in the past couple of years. I've heard that the filtering on the XPert@Play isn't quite up to 3dfx, but I couldn't see much difference in the sims I was running.

Don't forget, however, that this board is a 2d/3d solution in one card, which 3dfx is not. In this sense its a better comparison to the nVidia chipset on a board like the STB Velocity 128 3d. Better yet, its almost as fast in 2d as the V128 in 2d, making it a great board for all round WIN95 use.

This diagram is supplied by ATI. No matter, the difference in comparison to these other boards places things in perspective. The Rage Pro is MUCH faster than the Mystique. That isn't saying much, but comparisons to the STB V128 are still favorable. Any chipset that can come close to the current leaders is worth considering.

However, I have only tested the PCI version. There have been reports on the net of problems with the AGP version when paired with a Socket 7 board that uses VIA's Apollo VP3 chipset. If you have this mainboard you will want to stick to the PCI version of the XPert@Play.

I tested the board in Tombraider and with F22 ADF. Both these games ran fine, and the speed of ADF in D3d was almost the same as running under Glide with 3dfx. Many 3d boards are sporting TV output these days, but I haven't seen any with the tweaking utilities supplied by ATI. Bring up the advanced tab and you can adjust color saturation, contrast, brightness and flicker. You can also adjust video sharpness for composite and SVHS output separately. The ImpactTV2 chip will output up to 800x600. If you like to play your games on the big screen, this board is for you!

Always straddling the cutting edge, the XPert@Play even supports some features that won't be commonly seen until DirectX6 debuts this summer, like texture compression and compositing. ATI has done their homework, and their new boards are ready for prime time both now and in the future. Running up against the new V2 boards makes this one a tougher sell, but if they lower the price of this board to bring it more in line with Diamonds Stealth2, it would be a good buy.

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