ATi Radeon 64MB DDR
A review by Amir R. Pakdel

For a while now, Nvidia with their GeForce2 and the 3dfx with their Voodoo 5500 have been going at it to claim the prize for this generation's most powerful video card. As of some time ago, it was pretty safe to say that Nvidia pretty much owned the floor for their massively powerful and capable GeForce2, while the Voodoo 5500 pleased the minority with it's superior FSAA performance. In any case, the last thing I would want to do right now is start another GeForce2 vs. Voodoo 5500 rant, so let's get to our feature presentation, the ATI Radeon 64Mb DDR review.

ATI doesn't have a good history with gamers who wanted high-end performance, and for a good reason too. The ATI Rage 128 not only did not have better performance than the competition, but it was also plagued by poor drivers, and not to mentioned it was delayed. In addition, The Rage Fury MAXX was also hammered by the competition, obviously due to its high cost and inferior performance.

Sorry 3dfx, you are not the only one with cool  looking  boxes anymore!

Thus enters the Radeon, ATI's latest and greatest. At Radeon's heart is the Rage6C. Make no mistake, the core is beyond anything that ATI has ever constructed, it's not an updated version of the Rage128 cores. The chip's .18-micron architecture is somewhat more comparable to that of the GeForce2 than the Voodoo 5500 and its dual .25-micron VSA-100 chips. However, it has two rendering pipelines, each with three texture units per pipeline, which adds up to a total of 6 texels per clock, 2 less than that of the GeForce2, which has 4 pipelines each capable of passing two textures per clock; so in theory is Radeon starts to seem inferior, but we'll see if that's true or not.

So what we have here is ATI's response to the Voodoo 5500 and the Geforce II, and this time, ATI managed to get our attention by actually releasing the board earlier than previously promised. How does it stack up, you ask? Let's have a look.