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ATI: Unexpected Discovery
by Anna Filatova
02/17/2001 | 11:16 AM
We managed to get hold of a very funny Chinese noname graphics card selling for $35. The funny thing about it is not the way it looks, because it is an ordinary 8MB graphics card with a heatsink, but the chip under the heatsink!
When we removed the heatsink we saw that... it was none other but ATI Rage Mobility-P (one of ATI Rage Mobility 128 versions).
We decided to test this piece and to compare its performance in Quake3 with that of ASUS V3800 32MB (TNT2). The test system included:- ASUS CUSL2 mainboard;
- Intel Pentium III 866 CPU;
- 128MB PC133 SDRAM;
- Windows98.
For ASUS V3800 we used Detonator 6.35 driver and for ATI Rage Mobility – the drivers from the accompanying package.<%BANNER[article]%>| 16bit | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
|---|
| NVIDIA TNT2 32MB | 53.7 | 47.6 | 37.7 | 24.6 | 15.6 |
| ATI Rage Mobility-P 8MB | 17.8 | 12.2 | 7.8 | 4.8 | - |
| 32bit | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
|---|
| NVIDIA TNT2 32MB | 49.4 | 36.7 | 26.7 | 15.5 | 11 |
| ATI Rage Mobility-P 8MB | 17.8 | 12.2 | 7.8 | 4.8 | - |
Well, as you can see, there is hardly any competition at all. The amount of onboard graphics memory, 8MB, doesn’t allow getting high performance rates in "heavy" 3D games. Moreover, the lack of texturing memory eliminates the difference between the 16bit and 32bit color.
All in all this graphics card is destined to work only in 2D and simple 3D games, i.e. to occupy the niche, which used to be held by S3 chips. So, the mobile chipsets from ATI ousted from their market turn out capable of getting a new life in desktop graphics cards.
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