Before I go on explaining what some of the features are, I want to first establish the fact that the Radeon has the most and the nicest set of features than any other card of this generation, period. This alone, is something that gamers should consider before deciding what video card they want to buy. However, you should also be aware that many of the features have to be implemented by the game developers in order to be taken advantage of (i.e. T&L).

Some features will take more time than others to become standard. For example, while we are seeing more and more games taking advantage of T&L, we still have not seen any games that have 3 textures per pixel, and this is a disadvantage to the Radeon. This is because today's games have a maximum of 2 textures per pixel and each of GeForce2's 4 rendering pipelines can pass 2 textures per clock. That is a total of 8 texels per clock. However, the Radeon has 2 rendering pipelines and each with 3 texture units, yet each pipelines will only pass 2 textures in 2 textured pixel games, meaning that the last texture unit is unused, and it will continue to go unused until we see games that actually ha

Eh, a Canadian masterpiece.

ve that 3 textures per pixel. Keep in mind, however, when we do start seeing games that do have it, tables will turn, since each of GeForce2's dual texture units will end up having to pass the lass texture to the next pipeline, and in this case that pipeline will only render that texture, and it's second texture unit will go unused. Again, it's all theory talk since we cannot yet test its performance in such occasions.

The Charismatic Radeon

The Radeon core is packed with 30 million transistors, yes not only more than our high-end CPUs such as the Athlon and PIII, but also 5 million more than the beast we call GeForce2. Most of it goes to work for what ATI calls the Charisma Engine, which provides some nice features.