What's missing and what's not

Where's my T&L?

The hottest buzzword in the 3D industry this generation is not so much fill rate, but T&L, or transform and lighting. Both Nvidia's GeForce and S3's Savage 2000 incorporate T&L into their designs, promising excellent triangle performance. In short, T&L was supposed to bring in the age of 10 million polygon/sec triangles where our in-game graphics rivaled Squaresoft's rendered CGI - then reality struck.

There was much excitement and anticipation when onboard T&L was first announced, but then the Savage 2000 shipped without T&L driver support, and users discovered that the GeForce engine didn't really offer much performance gain in any games that are currently available. Speed remained in the CPU domain. Hardware T&L still needs specific programming to take advantage of the technology, but games that use the extra triangles still aren't here yet -ATI's lack of hardware T&L doesn't give it much of a handicap at this point in the race.

DVD

ATI's famous DVD feature set continues to impress, although S3 and nVidia have nearly caught up in terms of performance and features. Today, the DVD acceleration is less important than a year ago as most machines faster than half a gigahertz will have little problem with DVD's. Granted, if you are also using your computer as a system critical file server, than offloading some DVD decoding to the graphics chip is a good idea. If you really are watching DVD's at your company's system critical server, then you are either the best tech person in the world, or the dumbest. :)

The lack of Windows 2000 drivers is not too disheartening as we don't even know when Windows 2000 will arrive on the shelves, though the OEMs have already received their shipments. ATI should have drivers ready when Microsoft releases Windows 2000. The lack of Windows 2000 drivers shouldn't affect users much, because most of us are probably going to keep Windows 98 in a dual boot, or wait until 2000 has gained enough hardware support before upgrading.

The 64MB of memory actually performs more like 32MB as each chip gets its own 32MB frame buffer. One little feature that I would have liked to see would have been a TV-Output on the Rage Fury MAXX. It is a little bit disappointing to see some of ATI's DVD power left untapped.