ATI chipsets - seem to be unknown?

[Cymbeline]

In the midst of all the talk about 3dfx's Voodoo cards and nVidia's GeForce, I wonder what has happened to ATI's chipsets.

I never hear anyone blab about how Rage chipsets or Radeon chipsets fare in Quake 3 (which admittedly, I don't play). I've used ATI video cards for quite a while myself. My first 3D card was an ATI Xpert 98 (Rage Pro chipset).

I personally don't see the difference between the stuff I play with an ATI chipset and the stuff my friends play with Voodoo, TNT2, and GeForce cards.

What I liked most about the ATI chipsets came when I began to use Linux about a year ago. The standard XFree86 servers had support for ATI cards very early. If I had a card with a 3dfx Voodoo or nVidia TNT2 chipset, I wonder what I would be doing in X with a resolution of 320x200. :-)

The whole point of my ranting is to shine more attention to the abilities of these cards.

[Tiretool]

I think the only problem with ATI is that they haven't pushed as hard as 3DFX and NVidia to be on the bleeding edge of the technology curve. I've never used an ATI product, but from what I hear they make darn good cards. It would seem that they may have a trick up their sleeve though with the upcoming Radeon 256. If it lives up to it's media hype it will take the GeForce 2's spot as the most complex graphics processor. It will incorporate a dual pipeline pixel engine that boasts three texture units per pipeline. The fillrates might not match that of the GeForce 2 but with it's HyperZ technology which consists of data compression and on-chip caching techniques it will get a 20% boost in fill rate performance. It will reportedly also include support for features such as 3d texturing, projective texturing, and dot-product and environment bump mapping. Also it will include hardware T & L.

Look for boards based on this new chip in September.

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Life: Sexually transmitted, always fatal.

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tiretool@pcmech.com

[Xayd]

In fairness to 3dfx and NVIDA, they are coming along with Linux support. Agreed that ATI is still the most fully supported card manufacturer out there, but since Linux support for the Voodoo3's has come along, NVIDIA has jumped on the bandwagon as well. I'm currently running a Voodoo 3000, and things work great.

Linux has only recently become a viable gaming platform, which is probably why Linux support for high end cards is just now coming along.

ATI is the budget card of choice for office applications and workstations, which is probably why Linux support for them came along earlier. They do their job efficiently and cost-effectively. 3dfx and NVIDIA are shooting for nothing but the high-end gaming market, though. They didn't need to pay attention to Linux until the game manufacturers started to.

Xayd

[Charliey]

There are already Radeon reviews at many hardware sites.

I know 1 of the versions of it is already avalable now.