3D Acceleration

ATI's First 3D Chip

ATI's first real foray into 3D graphics was the 3D Rage II. Though it was ATI's second 3D product, it was ATI's first to feature a hardware Z-Buffer. The chip had a fairly impressive feature list at the time including compressed textures, bilinear and trilinear filtering, and a good number of Direct3D texture blend modes. The pixel fillrate was in the teens (at best) and the approximated texture perspective correction algorithm was only marginally better than the Sony Playstation's.

As a "mainstream" chip, the Rage II only needed to compete against the S3 Virge and Matrox Mystique. The S3 Virge was even slower, and the Matrox Mystique did not even offer bilinear filtering or alpha blending. The Rage II gave ATI engineers a chance to dabble with 3D acceleration, but gamers looked to the Rendition Verite V1000 and 3dfx Voodoo Graphics for their real 3D needs.

The 3D Rage Pro

ATI released the 3D Rage Pro in April of 1997. As one of the first AGP accelerators, the Rage Pro was a well-designed chip. The Rage Pro offered a fill rate of 45Mpixels/second (equal to the original 3dfx Voodoo Graphics), VQ texture compression, and a 1.2 M triangles/sec full triangle setup engine. The chip had single-pass trilinear filtering as well as a complete set of texture blending options. Unfortunately, the drivers severely limited the shipping product and the card was unable to overtake 3dfx's Voodoo Graphics. NVIDIA shipped the Riva128 later that year with a 100 Mpixels/sec fill rate and 5M polygon/sec setup engine, putting ATI even further behind.

Though the Rage Pro was an enormous success with OEMs (thanks to its DVD performance and low-cost), it never reached its full potential with gamers due to poor drivers. There was once a time when people considered ATI products to be the most stable products in the world. This was the time of the Mach64. Despite the Rage Pro's great paper specifications, the chip didn't reach its full potential until it was already too late.

Released in February 1998, ATI 's promised a 40% speed boost with its TURBO drivers. They even renamed the chip the Rage Pro Turbo. In practice, however, the first Turbo drivers only improved 3D Winbench 98 scores. 3dfx released the Voodoo2 at the end of February, and ATI was all but forgotten.

Ironically, when the Rage Pro's final driver set was released in May 1999, well after the next graphics generation was on the market, gaming performance had indeed improved 20-40% over the original shipping drivers. Had the Rage Pro shipped with these drivers, the 3D market might have been very different.