May 2002 3Digest - ATI RADEON 32 MBytes DDR

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By Andrey Vorobiev

This chip is presented by ATI RADEON 32 MBytes DDR, AGP videocard.

Features:

ATI RADEON chip, 166 MHz clock rate;
32 MBytes DDR SGRAM memory in four Samsung 6ns microchips, 166 (333) MHz clock rate, 128-bit bus;
Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 333 megapixels/sec and 1000 megatexels/sec with three texture blocks on each pipeline and 666 megatexels/sec with two texture blocks on each pipeline.

Overclocks to 190/190 (380) MHz (see summary diagrams).

In the summer of the year 2000, when NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS was at peak with its prices dropping, ATI released a product, being absolutely noncompetitive due to its high price and half-made drivers. The software quality became acceptable only in a year after the release, and prices for some RADEON models became rather attractive. The fall of 2001 brought the successor - RADEON 7500, made according to a better technical process, and thus having more higher clock rate. Now RADEON 7500 cards cost less than the reviewed card, so RADEON 32/64 MBytes DDR is bound to vanish. It's almost not manufactured anymore (except for maybe by 1 or 2 firms), companies sell their stock. So, we place this section into the archive.

For the 10th of May 2002 the latest drivers from ATI are 9.030, 9.031 for Windows 9x/ME and 6.071 for Windows XP.

I shall note there's Radeon2.ru web-site that tracks all software novelties from ATI and offers improved drivers versions with preset registry settings for increasing RADEON cards perfomance.

As the drivers differences are equal for all RADEON cards with DDR memory, there's no sense in comparing drivers separately for each of these cards. See ATI RADEON 64 MBytes DDR section for more information about drivers.

And now I want to attract your attention to another important 3D feature - filtering. As many of you know, all chipsets support bilinear filtering that is an important instrument in MIP-mapping, some chipsets support trilinear filtering (true, not the approximation) and only few support anisotropic filtering.

Due to the fact that Radeon does support anisotropic filtering, I recommend you to pay attention to the article concerning this feature.

Below are some screenshots taken on RADEON and reference ones taken on NVIDIA GeForce3. Pay attention to Need For Speed: Porshe 2000. As we've already said all cards by ATI lack fog in this game. But it can be enabled either with the help of RadeonTweaker utility (download the latest version from ATINFO) or by means of manual registry editing. You'll need to enable WFogEnable and TableFogEnable. This method proved to be efficient with 7.041, 7.131, 7.153 versions.