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Yes, memory bandwidth is important.EDO cards are known to be minimally overclockable and mine confirms this after few extra MHz. A50 can do 15% percent more. However the SGRAM AGP card, with chip clock lower than others, maxed out PLL no sweat. I thought maybe with some crystal mod I could become lucky owner of the fastest 6326 "evah", but the DAC is tied to the same source. I will update this article later if it will be worth it. Interestingly enough SGRAM cards act like their chip clock is significantly below others. Now (Jan 2013) I can finally add results from early versions, starting with C1 featuring 4 MB memory and PCI bus.Since the beta driver release code named Java with OpenGL ICD was buried in the depths of the internet allow me to save the suffering of other geeks by providing the library here. But guess what, you can play some GlQuake on 6326 without it, because it is compatible with the S3 Quake wrapper for Virge. There is some hud corruption, but I am still surprised it works. What more at 640x480 the Virge wrapper is a bit faster than 6326 ICD. Real gift is Mpact 2 wrapper, properly working and fastest, it became the choice for first and second Quake engines instead of the ICD. Quake 3 is where ICD belongs and to my surprise, the game is rendered correctly with advanced effects. Outside of Id world I tried Star Siege, again succesfully. Why SiS aborted the OpenGL support is beyond me.
Little known brands are stigmatized with bad drivers expectations, but SiS certainly did not left 6326 without proper Direct3d support. Last drivers 1.32 are from the end of 2002, such long lasted support was probably caused by motherboard chipsets integrating 6326. First 3d architecture of SiS exhibits Direct3d compatibility on par with legends of its generation. If only the OpenGL library did not end up with beta release...The start however was rather rough. First revision C1 seems to be another chip with broken perspective correction engine. Many textures on large polygons are warped, shaking, sometimes even rotated. Even some 2D elements like HUDs can float by few pixels here and there. Four megabytes of video memory are sometimes not enough, C1 did not use texturing from system memory and dropped some textures in Incoming. Most of the cards have a jumper to enable own interrupt handling. I tried both to be sure whether it influences transfers with system memory, but it made no difference. Local memory management is problematic as well, games like Formula 1 or Motoracer 2 requiring minimum of four megabytes can reject the card- perhaps precious kilobytes allocated for Turbo Queue are to blame. Viper Racing scaled down textures even at 512x384, Populous could not run at resolution above 400x300. In Expendable and Resident Evil 6326 C1 rendered utter garbage. Common bug is found in Grim Fandango, where wrong z occlusion makes characters hide behind some backgrounds. While driver reports support for all blending modes, actual rendering has issues in modern engines like Half Life and Quake 3. Here is the gallery to see more.My C3 card has AGP interface, confirming it already supports AGP 2x with system memory texturing. Image quality issues are the same as with C1, but was memory management improved by AGP? Well, there are few hopes: Incoming did not drop textures and Formula 1 could start, but look at the mess:Since C5 blending is correct and most of perspective problems are fixed. However cases of unstable textures remained, so it still cannot be considered as correct and accurate per pixel division. The image quality of 6326AGP is fine but few things are still lowering overall impression. Major flaw is how some 2d images seem distorted, for example characters in Myth or fonts in Incoming and Unreal. It is very annoying and absolutely inexcusable bug seen in whole 6326 family. Second, smoke effects are still skimpy, sometimes hardly visible. It is just a bit of white shade thrown onto your screen. Third the texturing likes to drop samples at further mip maps, but the amount of shimmering is within expectations of the time. Having started testing with Windows 95 I used last driver for the system- 1.28. Thanks to that I saw properly lighted Unreal which does not happen with last Windows 98 driver. On the other hand Expendable was broken with older drivers. Also Incoming showed some excessive color banding. 1.32 driver on the other hand selects ugly format for space backgrounds in Wing Commander Prophecy. To see screenshots of 6326AGP visit this gallery.Performance3d performance of 6326 is rather low, unlike what theoretical fillrate suggests it does not have enough power for gaming at 640x480. The sweet spot is usually at 512x384. Lowering resolutions further does not help so much like with Virge for example, so the bottleneck is likely somewhere in the early stages. I have to comment on 2d speed as well. DOS performance is lower than others and that does not come from any benchmark, one can tell the difference just by text scrolling. 6326 did not feel very fast in Windows as well, but it does its job. I picked Virge /GX2 for comparison, but now it was obviously an undershoot.
How could one not mention the Turbo disaster in a Rage Pro article. At the beginning of 1998 happened interesting PR attempt to fake technological update. With the new driver strongly optimized for popular synthetic benchmark and "Turbo" printed next to Rage Pro on chips ATI tried to create a new product. Of course, this was quickly exposed and the company covered in shame. Nevertheless, sales were going strong and R3 architecture was to be found in newer and actually updated chips.Second lifeRage Pro replaced Rage II also in laptops, the LT version of the chip came one year later. It added LVDS, advanced power management and TV-out into the R3, enabling rich multimedia experience for notebooks. It is codenamed mach64LB and as you see the chip was used for discrete cards as well.
When 0.25 um manufacturing became available ATI adopted the R3 and created mach64GM core, used in Rage XL and XC cards. Serving as the cheapest discrete offerings during 1999. And as an integrated graphics for servers it went on almost forever. Besides 10 % higher clock speed, there was one notable improvement to the 3d engine- finally, all kinds of textures can be bilineary filtered. Coupled with faster SDRAM the Rage XL is the best form of the architecture, as long as 64-bit memory bus remained. The whole mach64 line was concluded with mach64LM core of Rage Mobility, power efficient chip with added iDCT. Such respins helped to prolong support for Rage Pro. Final driver used for my tests is the newest among everything I tried and is probably the only one with optimization for my system. It should be remembered that ATI also needed many years to fix major issues, deliver an adequate OpenGL driver, like one which would not crash your PC within several minutes of GLQuake. Actually, after two freezes doing only timedemos I am not sure if they ever really got it stable. Which brings me to the gaming experience.Playing like a ProPer-polygon mip mapping going wrongI already mentioned bilinear filter optimization. Rage Pro has double the number of gradients over Rage II and it is enough to not be perceived at first look, but still is far from proper filtering. ATI dragged this filter into next gen Rage 128 as well and fortunately for them almost nobody noticed. Another complaint is about reduced amount of texture samples at smaller mip levels, this creates obvious shimmering. The amount is about the same as for Rage II, but this time is less expected since Rage Pro was supposed to have high quality texturing engine and "free" trilinear filter will not compensate for such deficiencies. Also, mip mapping in advanced games like Unreal is still doing wrong mip selections, so I disabled it again. At least sub-pixel accuracy was significantly improved but there are still some polygon gaps to be seen in few games. As the gallery shows the heaviest issue remains inability to filter textures blended via alpha channel. Quake 3 even has special rendering path doing this filtering in software, but in some scenarios like with teleports the Rage Pro has to do the job on its own and leave some non-interpolated texel blocks on screen. ATi also never really excelled in 16-bit quality. Instead, they went for big true color leap ahead with next architecture.Not quite there yet, but ATi found it sufficient for years to come.
Merely tying the fastest chipsets on the market (with mature drivers), Xpert cards were not exactly gamers dream. However, Ati successfully used the "complete multimedia solution" buzz and could set attractive pricing. Finishing wordsThe Rage Pro line may have not been warmly welcomed by gamers in retail, but strong OEM deals were feeding the company better then ever. ATI entered 1998 like a graphics giant with more than 1,000 employees and during the year topped number of 3d chips sold, many of them integrated on motherboards. Between companies designing high performance 3d accelerators ATI was among last to deliver dual pipeline architecture. But when it arrived at the end of the year in the form of Rage 128, it also demonstrated very advanced design with "full speed" 32-bit depth rendering. The architecture performed adequately after 1999 "Pro" update, but ATI still wasn't getting under the skin of gamers. To win also in retail earlier availability and good initial drivers were needed. The former being easier to fix, Radeon entered the market in the middle of 2000 as a first direct competition to Nvidia's TnL chips. ATI showed cleverly balanced resources and in rapidly consolidated market suddenly became the only "real" threat to what was shaping like Nvidia's complete domination. At the end of 2001 Radeon 8500 arrived, and while it had some performance problems in the beginning, it also showed a more advanced shading architecture than Nvidia's. In 2002 finally all the efforts converged in the big success of Radeon 9700, a card with undisputed performance achievements and solid drivers from the start. And since Nvidia tripped over their shoelaces the talent of ATI was no longer to be in doubt. What followed after was a series of ATI vs Nvidia battles without a clear conclusion. These cyclical encounters are continuing till today, now of course the ATI brand is hidden under AMD. The takeover of ATI had some critics, but the trend of the future seems to be a convergence of CPU and graphics back into a single device and in this regard AMD is doing very well. Who knows when, but the day will come when 3d accelerator as we use it will be unknown to gamers. ATI itself had a strong record of growing through acquisitions, in this order they absorbed Tseng Labs, Chromatic, Artist, ArtX, XGI and BitBoys. 2ff7e9595c
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