Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Image Quality

3D image quality of the Rage Mobility 128 is very good. The visual artifacts that handicapped ATI's first generation of 128-bit graphic accelerators has been resolved with the Rage 128 Pro and the Rage Mobility 128. The support for anisotropic filtering is nice, although there will still be a big performance hit. Feature wise, the Mobility 128 concedes nothing to its desktop counterparts. The support for high resolution textures, up to 1024x1024, allows for much more detailed 3D environments. DXTC, DirectX Texture Compression, allows these textures to be compressed for more efficient storage and display.

Anisotropic Filtering(right)

Texture Compression

During our testing, we did not notice any visual defects in Quake Arena or ATI's Radiation demo. ATI did inform us that the current driver set did not fully implement all of the Rage Mobility 128's features, most notably anisotropic filtering. 32-bit color as always was more impressive than 16bit color, and the other 3D features that ATI demonstrated were impressive, although not exclusive to the Mobility 128. Does the Rage Mobility 128 support quality features above and beyond the desktop competition? No, but it does provide the mobile user with the image quality that is competitive.

DVD Performance

ATI has established itself as the leader in hardware assisted DVD playback with the Rage 128. The combination of iDCT, inverse discrete cosine transform, and motion compensation continues to be exclusive to ATI products. Many will argue that hardware assist on the graphics chip for DVD is superfluous with the massive processing power of the CPU. They point to evidence that most desktop systems above 500MHz will have little difficulty with DVD playback, on all of the latest video cards. With laptops though, the decreased CPU usage during DVD playback will lead to greater battery life and the potential to playback lengthier movies.

DVD Playing

75% idle!

We used the Entrapment DVD to test the DVD playback of the Rage Mobility 128. Maximum CPU usage was around 25%, but averaged closer to around 20%. ATI stated that a savings of around 10% in CPU usage, would save about 15 minutes in battery life. Quality wise, the ATI did not disappoint, giving very vibrant and artifact free images on the LCD. We did not get a chance to test out the TV output, but using the performance on the ATI Rage Fury Pro as a guideline, a laptop powered DVD home theater is very appealing.