Graphics trends for Q1'00

Introduction

Graphics cards, as we noted in our last Graphic Card roundup, are one of the hottest product categories, both in terms of consumer interest and product innovation. New products from one major player or another seem to come out weekly, and driver updates are even more frequent. In this article, we'll take a look at the products that should be on your short list for Q1 of Y2K.

Major Graphics Chip Manufacturers

While there are more manufacturers than those listed here, these are the makers of the leading graphics chips on the market today.

• 3Dfx
• ATI
• Matrox
• Nvidia
• S3

The Chips Here, we note the major manufacturers' forthcoming and shipping chips themselves:

• 3dfx Voodoo 3 and VSA-100 (Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5)
• ATI Rage 128 and Rage128 Pro
• Matrox G400 and G400 MAX
• Nvidia TNT2 and GeForce 256 (and its successors, the NV10 and NV15)
• S3 Savage 4 and Savage 2000

The Products Shipping and announced retail and OEM products:

• 3Dfx Voodoo3
• 3Dfx Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5
• Abit Siluro
• Asus AGP V3800 Ultra Deluxe
• ATI Rage Fury, Rage Fury Pro and Rage Fury MAXX
• ATI Xclaim 2000 Pro
• ATI All in Wonder 128
• ATI All in Wonder 128 Pro
• ATI Xclaim VR 128 (Mac)
• Creative Labs TNT2
• Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator
• Elsa Erazor X and Erazor X²
• Elsa GloriaII
• Matrox G400
• Matrox G400 MAX
• Matrox Marvel G400-TV
• Guillemot Xentor 32
• etc.

ATI All In Wonder 128 ATI All-in-Wonder 128 (Rage 128) -

The heavy shielding around the TV tuner section of the All In Wonder produced excellent image quality, with no visible image distortion, even when the video output was routed through a Creative Labs Encore DVD decoder card and a Voodoo2 add-on accelerator card. Moreover, the card provided excellent AVI and MPEG playback.

We encountered a few minor problems installing the All in Wonder 128 on a system running Windows 98SE, however, the ATI website provides details and a workaround. We were impressed by the quality of the ATI codecs (compressors/decompressors) and the unit's MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video capture quality. Note, however, that encoding a video with the ATI codecs means that it will be unable to play on other computers unless they, too, have an ATI card with these drivers.

We also encountered occasional display anomalies, primarily manifesting as colour palette problems of a non-critical nature. The card's TV output was also very good, albeit not quite as excellent as that produced by the Matrox's offerings.

Our application software tests hit a snag when 3D Studio MAX R3 refused to run when the display option was set to "Open GL." We solved this by installing ATI's "special purpose" driver, which improves upon the OpenGL driver provided by default. Note that, although the Rage 128 chipset is supported at a basic level by all major operating systems, including Windows 95/98/NT/2000, Linux and the Mac OS, the All in Wonder currently ships with a full set of drivers and capabilities for Windows 95/98 only.

Buying options

The All in Wonder 128, like its predecessors, is available in a number of different retail configurations:

• All in Wonder 128 (16MB PCI)
• All in Wonder 128 (16MB AGP)
• All in Wonder 128 (32MB AGP, C$419)
• All in Wonder 128 Pro (32MB AGP, C$449)

AGP vs. PCI performance.

As shown in a previous article, AGP outperforms PCI in general purpose tasks by only a few percent. However, in games with a lot of textures, AGP really shines. If you plan to play 3D games, get an AGP card. See our Benchmarks page for more details.

Driver Features

As has been the case with recent ATI drivers, extensive colour correction and desktop configuration features are provided by the All in Wonder 128's driver software. A menu-tray icon and Display properties tabs provide access to various features. And, despite the fact that the OpenGL driver we tested exhibited some problems, it improved performance significantly in applications using that API, and allowed 3D MAX to run correctly.

The All-in-Wonder 128, when run under Windows 95 or 98, includes TV and S-video out, Dolby Digital out (option), video capture, closed caption keyword search/capture, "TV Magazine" mode (captures CC text and periodic images, formats them in an RTF document). audio pass-thru, and comes bundled with a decent software selection, including a demo/tutorial disc, MGI VideoWave II and a trio of 3D action games. Basic display driver support is available under Windows NT.

Although ATI's current Multimedia Center and DVD playback doesn't work under Windows 2000, PC Buyer's Guide managed to successfully capture video using the card and the standard WDM/DirectShow Video Input/Capture (Bt829) VidCap video capture software supplied with Windows 2000. WDM TV Tuner Drivers are also included on the Windows 2000 CD. ATI says Windows 2000 drivers for the AIW128 and various other ATI products will be available later this year, with a beta release sometime near the end of March 2000. A Windows 2000 FAQ provides details.

In summary, the All-in-Wonder 128 is a viable and well-supported 2D/3D card and a versatile multimedia solution, well suited to casual video capture and DVD playback.

nVIDIA TNT2,  GeForce 256 and Beyond

The GeForce 256 graphics processing unit includes more than 23 million transistors, and is capable of graphics processing speeds of 50 Gigaflops -- that's 50 billion floating point operations per second. A number of manufacturers showed and/or announced boards based on nVIDIA's GeForce GPU at Comdex Fall '99, including Elsa, Creative Labs, Guillemot, Asus and Abit. The Elsa PR mentions LCD shutter glasses, adding further appeal to its ERAZOR X and ERAZOR X²  graphics solutions, the latter of which provides a feature the company calls Double Data Rate (DDR) memory to provide top-of-the-line gaming performance. The hottest feature of the GeForce is its support for Transform & Lighting functions, or (T&L) -- a feature that, like Matrox's Environmental Bump Mapping, requires specially written software titles. This, the company says, allows complex 3D scenery to be displayed with a speed and quality not seen before. Quake 3 Arena is an example of a game with support for hardware-assisted Transformation computations.

At this writing, one of the fastest GeForce-based cards is the Creative Labs' GeForce 256 DDR-powered, Annihilator Pro. This US$299 card uses ultra-fast 6ns SGRAM running at 300MHz (the card's core runs at 120MHz by default) to provide optimal performance. As always, better cards are coming soon. Other models, such as the Hercules Prophet DDR-DVI or ASUS V6800 Deluxe, offer Video-out, TV-in and other capabilities. -- at a higher price, of course.

And what's motherboard maker Abit doing in the above list? A Dec. 20th interview at 3DWars.com with Abit's American marketing rep Eric Boeing reveals that the company didn't get the support it was looking for from AMD and, as such, won't be producing an Athlon-based motherboard anytime soon.

Says Eric: "When we approached AMD in Taiwan, they decided to work with other manufacturers first, and we were unable to get the assistance that we required to come out with a timely Athlon board."  The company will instead devote R&D efforts to the production of a new line of graphics cards based, at least initially, on nVIDIA GeForce and TNT2 chipsets.

Abit's latest lineup of graphics cards includes several models based on the nVIDIA TNT2 graphics processor, including the Siluro GT2 Ultra, Siluro GT2V, and Siluro GT2, but the performance star is sure to be the Siluro GF256, based on nVIDIA's GeForce256 graphics processor. The Siluro GF256 will reportedly not be ready until late in the first quarter of 2000, but will come with "proactive hardware monitoring" and special cooling to ensure card stability when there are high temperatures. The Siluro cards will be bundled with two games, Wargasm and Total Air, and MaxGraph, a configuration utility for the card. The Siluro GF256 also comes bundled with WinDVD 2000, said to be an excellent software DVD decoder and player.

The ABIT Siluro GT2, the company says, is a high-performance 3D/2D graphics and DVD accelerator card, integrating up to 32 MB of ultra high speed memory and a 300 MHz DAC. ABIT will also offer its Siluro GT2 Ultra, a "maxed-out" version of the Siluro GT2 based on the RIVA TNT2 Ultra chip, "the highest-end version of the RIVA TNT2", says nVIDIA. All the Abit cards include a utility called MaxGraph, allowing users to fine tune the performance and maximize values for variation of resolutions and color depths, depending on the application.

Beyond the GeForce is a chipset known internally at nVIDIA as the NV10. It is just now hitting the market as the Quadro. In Feb. 2000, the first Quadro-based board, the Elsa GloriaII was released. nVIDIA has,  however, released a reference design (described here) that uses faster Double Data Rate (DDR) RAM than the Single Data Rate SDRAM used by the Elsa board.

Diamond / S3 Savage 2000

The Savage 2000-based Viper II, due soon from the recently merged Diamond/S3, will apparently not include hardware support for Transform & Lighting, despite claims to the contrary by S3 marketing personnel. Technicians at the company now confirms that T&L support will be provided by software drivers only, as first reported in an article in GameSpot. However, sources close to the company say a future version of the Viper II card, with 64MB version of onboard memory and a higher clock rate, will provide hardware support for this feature. Thus, the drivers necessary to support hardware T&L will likely appear at some point, but until the new deluxe Viper II makes its appearance around the end of Q1 2000, the Viper II will provide T&L support through software only, for the few games that support one or both of these features. (Currently, Quake3 supports Transform only.) Adding to the confusion are statements from the company with doublespeak like this Viper II press release, dated Nov. 16th:

"... with S3’s fully integrated geometry engine, Viper II is capable of performing all 3D transformation and lighting computations in hardware to accelerate next-generation content with 4-10X the polygon and lighting complexity of today’s applications." 

As Anandtech notes in its review, the Savage 2000, when its drivers mature, should have fill rates that outperform those of the GeForce 256, currently the all-around favorite of most gamers. However, if fill-rate is what you're after....

On Dec. 20th, Santa Clara-based S3 Inc. announced that it had acquired Number Nine Visual Technology Corporation, a contract supplier of S3-based boards to IBM. This, the company maintains, will allow S3 to consolidate its graphics business with IBM into a single source distribution model, while also adding highly skilled hardware and software engineering resources to S3's existing teams.

3dfx Voodoo4 and Voodoo 5

Although the company missed the lucrative Christmas buying season with the announcement that its Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 boards, based on the VSA-1000 "Voodoo Scalable Architecture" chip announced at Comdex Fall '99, won't be shipping until March 2000, the products sound impressive, with up to four processors per card (and a theoretical maximum of 32 processors on-board!), yielding fillrates of more than 1 billion pixels per second. But the chip offers more than raw speed. The VSA-100 also provides what 3dfx is calling "T-buffer Digital Cinematic Effects," including full-scene anti-aliasing, programmable depth-of-field, soft shadows, soft reflections and motion blur effects, as well as long-awaited support for 32-bit colour -- an omission in its Voodoo3 generation of chips that 3dfx took a lot of heat over, despite their pixel-pushing power. 3dfx, in Feb. 2000, revealed details on the new chips, code-named Rampage and Sage and others still under NDA.

And speaking of heat and power....

The brute-force approach of the VSA-100's "massively parallel" graphics architecture has the side-effect of putting extra demands on your computer. As seen in these pictures, the Voodoo 5 5500 has an onboard power connector, while the big kahuna, the four-processor Voodoo 5 6000, includes a separate (laptop PC-style) power brick!

The most lamentable shortcoming of the Voodoo 4 and 5, other than the latter's rather high price, is 3dfx's decision not to support hardware transform and lighting. Granted, not many games currently support these features, but Y2K will be the year these features start to pay off, and Voodoo 5 owners won't be invited to the party. Indeed, although the newly announced cards don't support T&L, 3dfx says that when the time comes and games support it, they will release a 3D solution to enable it.  The 3D Zone has details, in its Nov. 15th report, and www.maccentral.com provides additional technical details.

Matrox G400 and G400 MAX

At Comdex Fall '99, Matrox was showing off some new products that will be hitting the market in 2000, including a G400-based version of its video-capture and TV-display solution appropriately named the Matrox Marvel. Like the Marvel G200-TV that preceded it, the new Marvel G400-TV will support Motion JPEG video capture, but it will also support MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 captures and playback for those who value these formats' abilities to produce high-quality captures while using less disk space than that required by M-JPEG. Oddly, though, Matrox declined our challenge to pit the G400-TV head-to-head in tests against an ATI All in Wonder 128 at Comdex West. This, we think, speaks loudly of the strength of the competition.

Matrox is aggressively supporting Windows NT and Windows 2000 with its G400 and Marvel G400 driver efforts, and already has one of the few capture solutions for NT with its G200-TV product.. The company has also produced and should soon be selling a DVD add-on for the G400 series products that allows the output of DVD to a TV -- while the G400 is displaying a different image on your monitor, if you wish.

This capability is known as "dual head" display, and the G400 is unique in its support of multiple displays with a single graphics card. Other cards, if they support multiple displays at all, typically require one AGP card and one PCI card, or two PCI cards. Matrox somehow does it all with a single G400.

The other key feature of the G400 is its support for "environmental bump mapping." This feature, which requires a game to be specially customized to support, makes otherwise flat textures, such as the surface of a pool of water or a brick wall, appear three-dimensional. EBM makes the G400 an excellent choice for gamers who want the best possible display... at least until the next generation of games, with support for T&L, come out. The G400 does not include hardware T&L support, nor does it support the motion blur and other T-buffer effects of the Voodoo 5.

Digital Web 3D reports that Montreal-based Matrox has confirmed that its G400 graphics cards are now certified to work on the newest AGP 4x-based systems, such as those based on the recently announced Camino (i820) chipset. According to Matrox, G400 boards that support AGP 4x transfer rates are identified with an additional '4A' in the part number: G4+MDH4A32GB/40.

.nVIDIA GeForce 256

The GeForce is the successor to the TNT and TNT2 chips that were perhaps the most popular gaming choices during much of 1999. The GeForce is, of course, faster, but it also includes many of the key features that gamers are clamouring over, including lighting and surface rendering effects, using a technique called Cubic Environment Mapping, which yields more accurate reflections and specular lighting, eight hardware accelerated dynamic lights (with, the company says, no performance hit!), and Vertex Skinning - taking image quality to a new level. The GeForce, unfortunately, is also suffering from some early driver bugs, especially with AMD Athlon-based systems.