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The ATI Rage is a series of graphics chipsets offering 2D GUI acceleration, video acceleration, and 3D acceleration. It is the successor to the Mach series of chips (See list of major graphics chipsets released by ATI).

3D Rage (I)

The original Rage chip was based upon a Mach64 2D core with new 3D functionality. MPEG-1 acceleration. The 3D Rage was used at least on ATI's Xpression video board (a board that previously used a Mach64).

3D Rage II (IIC, II+, II+DVD)

The 2nd generation Rage was capable of roughly 2 times greater 3D performance. Its graphics processor was based again on a re-engineered Mach64 GUI engine that provided optimal 2D performance with either single-cycle EDO memory or high-speed SGRAM. The 3D RAGE II chip was an enhanced, pin compatible version of the 3D RAGE accelerator. The second-generation PCI-bus compatible chip boosted 2D performance by 20 percent and added support for MPEG-2 (DVD) playback. The chip also had driver support for Microsoft Direct3D and Reality Lab, QuickDraw 3D Rave, Criterion RenderWare, and Argonaut BRender. OpenGL drivers are available for the professional 3D and CAD community and Heidi drivers are available for AutoCAD users. Drivers are also provided in operating systems including Windows 95, Windows NT, the Mac OS, and OS/2. ATI also shipped a companion chip for RAGE II, the ImpacTV chip. This chip was a TV encoder.

Rage II was integrated into Macintosh G3 and Power Mac 6500 computers, PC motherboards, and several video cards including: ATI 3D Xpression+, 3D Pro Turbo, and the original All-in-Wonder.

3D Rage Pro

ATI added a triangle setup engine; improved the perspective correction, fog, and transparency implementations; added support for specular lighting; and enhanced the video playback and DVD support. The 3D Rage Pro chip was designed for Intel's Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP), taking advantage of execute-mode texturing, command pipelining, sideband addressing, and full 2x-mode protocols. Initial versions relied on standard graphics memory configurations: up to 8MB of SGRAM or 16MB of WRAM, depending on the model.

Rage Pro offered performance in the range of NVIDIA's RIVA 128 and 3DFX's Voodoo accelerator, but normally failed to match or exceed its competitors. This, in addition to its (early) lack of OpenGL support, hurt sales for what was touted to be a solid gaming solution. In February 1998, ATI attempted to "reinvent" the Rage Pro by simultaneously renaming the chip to "Rage Pro Turbo," and releasing a new "Rage Pro Turbo" driver-set (4.10.2312) that supposedly increased performance %40. In reality, the drivers only delivered increased performance in benchmarks such as Ziff-Davis' 3D Winbench 98 and Final Reality. In games, the performance actually suffered. Despite the poor introduction, the name Rage Pro Turbo stuck, and eventually ATI was able to release updated drivers without the performance hit in games. Still, there was no tangible gaming performance improvement from the whole debacle.

Rage LT

Rage LT was often implemented on motherboards and in mobile applications like notebook computers. This chip was very similar to the Rage Pro and supported the same application coding. It integrated a Low Voltage Differential Signaling (LVDS) transmitter for notebook LCDs and advanced power management (block-by-block power control). The Rage LT PRO also offered "Filtered Ratiometric Expansion," which automatically adjusted images to full-screen size. ATI's ImpacTV2+ is integrated with the Rage LT PRO chip to support multi-screen viewing, i.e. simultaneous outputs to TV, CRT and LCD. In addition, the Rage LT PRO can drive two displays with different images and/or refresh rates with the use of integrated dual, independent CRT controllers.

A Rage LT Pro chip also existed which was a slightly faster variant.

Rage XL

Rage XL was a low-cost Rage Pro-based solution. The chip was used on many low-end graphics cards. It was also seen on Intel motherboards, as recently as 2004 and is still used in 2006 for server motherboards. It was known as being a low-power solution with capable 2D-acceleration.

The chip was basically a die-shrunk Rage Pro, optimized to be very inexpensive for solutions where only basic graphics output was necessary.

Rage 128

In the continuing struggle to create the fastest and most advanced 3D accelerator, ATI came up with its latest design, the Rage 128. The chip was announced in two flavors, the Rage 128 GL (a reference to a full OpenGL installable client driver) and the Rage 128 VR (Virtual Reality). Aside from the VR chip's lower price-point, the main difference was that the former was a full 128-bit engine, while the VR -- still a 128-bit processor internally -- used a 64-bit external memory interface.

  • Magnum - A workstation board for OEMs, optimized for OpenGL, with 32 MB SDRAM. OEM-only model.
  • Rage Fury - 32 MB SDRAM memory and same performance as the Magnum, this add-in card was targeted at PC gamers.
  • Xpert 128 - 16 MB SDRAM memory and, like the others, used the Rage 128 GL chip.

Rage 128 was ATI's Direct3D 6-compliant accelerator. It supported many features from the previous Rage chips, such as triangle setup, DVD acceleration, and a capable 2D accelerator core. Rage 128 added inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT) acceleration to the DVD repertoire. It was ATI's first multitexturing renderer, in that it could output 2 pixels per clock (2 pixel pipelines). The processor was known for its extremely capable 32-bit color mode, while also being known for an extremely low-quality 16-bit mode (poor dithering) that also strangely gained little speed over the more bandwidth-heavy 32-bit color. In 32-bit mode, Rage 128 was more than a match for the RIVA TNT, and the Voodoo 3 did not support 32-bit at all. The chip was meant to compete with the NVIDIA RIVA TNT, Matrox G200 and G400, and 3dfx Voodoo 3.

ATI implemented a then-new cacheing technique they called "Twin Cache Architecture" with Rage 128. The Rage 128 used an 8 KB buffer to store texels that were used by the 3D engine. In order to improve performance even more, ATI engineers also incorporated an 8 KB pixel cache used to write pixels back to the frame buffer.

Later, ATI developed a successor to the original Rage 128, called the Rage 128 Pro. This chip carried several enhancements, including an enhanced triangle setup engine that doubled geometry throughput to 8 million triangles/sec, better texture filtering, DirectX 6 texture compression, AGP 4X, DVI support, and a Rage Theater chip for better video encoding/decoding. This chip was used on the gamer-oriented Rage Fury Pro boards and the business-oriented Xpert 2000 PRO. Rage 128 Pro was generally an even match for Voodoo 3 3500, RIVA TNT2 Ultra, and Matrox G400 MAX.

The Rage 128 graphics accelerator is the final revision of the Rage architecture.

Alternate Frame Rendering

The Rage Fury MAXX board held dual Rage 128 Pro chips in an alternate frame rendering (AFR) configuration to allow a near-double increase in performance. As the name says, AFR renders each frame on an independent graphics processor. This board was meant to compete with the GeForce 256 and Voodoo 5. While it performed well, it was not really a match for those aforementioned cards due to feature disparity (especially with GeForce). The board died a quick death when it was discovered that Windows 2000 and later NT 5.x-based operating systems did not support dual AGP GPUs in the way ATI had implemented them, and so the board could only operate as a single Rage 128 Pro (i.e. with performance of a Rage Fury card.) So, in order to get full performance, Windows 9x must be used; ideally Windows 98, as Windows 95 had an early and sub-optimal AGP implementation, while there was never a specific driver for Windows Me which forced the use of the Windows 98 driver, with often unstable results.

Trivia

  • The ATI Radeon 256 was codenamed Rage 6. This was later changed to "R100".

References

See also

External links

Graphics cards

ATI Rage

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "ATI Rage".

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