ATi Radeon 256 64MB VIVO Review Part 1 Daniel Lim MaTriX07

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ATi Radeon 256 64MB VIVO Review Part 1
Daniel Lim MaTriX07 / 29 Oct 2000

If you have been wishing for a card that offers 3dfx's FSAA and motion blur, Nvidia's T&L, Dot product & Cube environmental bump mapping, Matrox's EMBM and S3's DXTC solutions, you can feast your eyes on the ATi Radeon 256. Mixed these features with ATi's very own recipe of HyperZ, the Radeon 256 is the most featured card with wonderful performance. You might want to check up my preview before to see why.

This time, ATi is fighting not just to dominate the OEM market but the Mainstream market as well with the launch of Radeon 256. To achieve that, the driver's team had been updating the driver for Radeon 256 frequently. (From 3044~3063 in just 2 months) Many have known that ATi had bad reputation in drivers that seldom update. But it seem that history has change ATi for the better. The Radeon is wonderfully packed with features and it even support DX8, no other card can do so. The Radeon 256 performs very well in High resolution and in 32bit colors. ATi have even planned out 14 months schedule to launch the Radeon series of VGA card. The next Radeon Maxx, 2 Radeon Chip in AFR on a single board, should be out during Christmas to challenge GTS2 Ultra and Voodoo5 6000.

So what’s so great about this Radeon 256 card compared to Geforce2 GTS and Voodoo5?

Lets look into the specs of this card that is powered by the ATi Radeon graphics processing unit (GPU)

1) 64MB of powerful double data rate (DDR) memory.

2) ATI's CHARISMA ENGINE and PIXEL TAPESTRY technologies

3) ATi's HyperZ Technology.

4) The most robust Integrated Transformation, Clipping and Lighting (TCL)

5) Industry best DVD playback.

6) Video capture and TV/VCR-output support.

7) Supports 3D resolutions (32-bit color) up to 2048x1536 AGP Universal bus (for AGP 2X/4X systems)

8) With these 3D accelerated features:

·         Twin Cache Architecture

·         Superscalar Rendering

·         Single-Pass Multi-texturing

·         True Color Rendering

·         Triangle Setup Engine

·         Texture Cache

·         Bilinear/Trilinear/Aniostropic Filtering

·         Line & Edge Anti-aliasing (FSAA)

·         Texture Compositing

·         Texture Decompression (DXTC)

·         Specular Highlights

·         Perspectively Correct Texture Mapping

·         Mip-Mapping

·         Z-buffering and Double-buffering

·         Emboss, Dot Product 3 and Environment bump mapping (EMBM)

·         Spherical, Dual-Paraboloid and Cubic environment mapping

·         Fog effects, texture lighting, video textures, reflections, shadows, spotlights, LOD biasing and texture morphing

Mouth watering huh.

Next page: HyperZ and Charisma Engine.

The Radeon 64MB VIVO model.

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