The Specs

Specifications

8M Triangles/sec Setup Engine
210Mp/s Fill Rate
Concurrent Command Engine -Ensures maximum concurrency - Fully exploits write combining of Pentium-II/III processors
Single-Pass Multi-Texturing-Dual Pipeline allows a single clock to process two texture sources
Twin-Cache Architecture-Caching of Texels and Pixels; Improves memory performance
32-bit True Color & 32-bit Z-Buffer
Larger Texture Support
Single-Pass Multi-texturing
Improved 16-bit rendering performance
MPEG2/DVD Hardware
Enables full-frame-rate DVD playback
iDCT and Motion Compensation - off loads CPU --> improves battery life
Filtered on-chip expansion for digital panels (up to UXGA)
Hardware Video Overlay (2-tap vertical, 4-tap horizontal)
TV Encoder (display quality equal to that of DVD players in the consumer market)
10-bit DAC with 6-tap Vertical/ 10-tap Horizontal Filters
Adaptive text filter for improving text on TV capable of scaling down 1024x768 resolution
Integrated Dual Channel LVDS (at 112 MHz) interface for driving notebook flat panel displays
Integrated TMDS (165 MHz) interface for driving desktop Digital Flat Panel displays
Supports two completely independent UXGA displays
On-chip "Filtered" Ratiometric Expansion (i.e. scaling for Digital Panels) capable of expanding native images to fill UXGA panels

Notes

According to mobile marketing manager Ravi Gananathan, ATI tries to leverage its desktop technology into its mobile designs. Usually, the changes between the desktop and mobile designs revolve around optimizing performance and features while minimizing the laptop power consumption/heat dissipation requirements. The new ATI Rage Mobility 128 is just another example of this ATI tradition; the Rage Mobility 128 is basically the mobile version of the Rage 128 Pro, a chip just released 6 months ago. The Rage Mobility 128 will run with 105MHz core and 105MHz memory speeds.

Integration

Not just a repackaged Rage 128 Pro chip, the Rage Mobility 128 chip integrates many other mobile specific features required for notebook design (integrated TV encoder, dual CRT controllers with support for two independent digital displays, on-chip digital panel scaling, etc). RAGE Mobility 128's integrated TV-encoder is taken from ATI's RAGE Theatre chip - the one driving the TV on the Rage Fury Pro board. The Mobility 128 also has LVDS and TMDS interfaces for digital panel output support. Finally, the Mobility 128 also sports 8MB of SDRAM. The video memory is not on the die itself, but it is part of the packaging. The Rage Mobility 128 is priced at $55 in lots of 10,000.

All this looks impressive, but will the chip really be able to give gamers the performance needed for Quake 3 in a laptop? What about all the other factors besides speed that affect game play? Yes, there is more to game play than frames per second. ATI let our resident Quake 3 experts at FiringSquad give it a go on the Rage Mobility 128.