More ATI TRUFORM

Here's my mini-review of the radeon


The Radeon VE is ATI's newest "budget" card. ATI already has a budget Radeon based card, the Radeon SDR 32MB card. The Radeon VE brings dual monitor support to the budget market. But what does it leave behind?

ATI stripped down the Radeon VE a considerable amount. All previous Radeon's have the same core but ATI has made some changes to the VE core. All other Radeon cores have two rendering pipelines, ATI has only given the VE core one. The other cards can do 6 texels per second this one can only do 3. ATI has also cut down the memory bus on the VE core to 64 bits. The VE comes with DDR memory so that is equivalent to 128-bit SDR Ram, which is what most GeForce2 MX's come with, and a few GF2 MX's come with a similar 64 bit DDR bus.

ATI has also removed the transform and lighting engine on the VE. Still Few games take advantage of this and on a budget card it isn't very necessary, this card has a lot of other performance hindrances that will become a performance factor long before the missing T & L engine. And finally ATI has also reduced the RAMDAC from 360MHz to 300MHz, which slightly reduces the 2D image sharpness from that of the original.

The rest of features of the original Radeon core are intact, such as the Hyper Z technology, bump mapping and iDCT.

Check this pic:
http://www.eurogamer.net/screenshot.php3?name=/pics/articles/wgdc2000/shamblerb.jpg
18000 polygon shambler? daaamn

truform resamples the incoming geometry (i.e., the base mesh) at a higher resolution. tesselation at the hardware level is what truform achieves.

WHOA! This looks like some cool technology right here folks.

ATI doesn't have enough acronyms for their technogoly to warrant my interest.

Has ATI provided any mpegs to show this stuff off ?

sounds good if developers don't have to do anything and it converts on the fly ...

Umm, didn't NVidia already do something like this to the Shambler model from Quake at some expo?

Yeah