Review of the ATI Expert@Play AGP 2X graphic card

October 8, 1998

Introduction

Reviewing a graphic card that has been so widely commented all over the Usenet newsgroups as well as on many web site Forums is something very special. First of all you have to put aside all these comments you've read before and make you own opinion by the use of Benchmarks to see if all these saying were found or not. Beside, testing a 2D/3D graphic card is much more complicated than to test 2D or 3D only graphic cards because more Benchmarks must be used. On the other hand, this card being my first AGP card, I was very curious about how would be performing such a card compared to all other PCI graphic cards i tested to date. So, I took my courage with my two hands and I installed this card to test it as thoroughly as I could. So, here are the results of my observations.


Installation

The installation of the ATI Expert@Play AGP 2X was not complicated and went as a breeze. All I had to do was to insert the Installation CD when required and give the correct path for the drivers. The installation booklet included with this card is very limited but all the necessary information needed for the installation are well covered. There are no software bundled on the Installation CD at least with the evaluation unit I received. The included hardware is one video cable to connect to your TV set from the RCA TV out phone jack as well as one S-VHS cable to be used between the S-VHS video out of this card to an S-VHS video in of a TV set or a S-VHS video tape recorder.


The performances

How I tested.

All tests were performed with the following system setup:

Motherboard: DFI P2XBL
CPU: Intel Pentium II 350mhz
Memory: 128mb PC100 SDram (LGS)
IDE first channel Primary port: Quantum Fireball EIDE ST 3.2A
IDE second channel Primary port: Asus CD-ROM drive CD-S400
AGP slot: ATI Expert@Play AGP 2X
ISA slot number 2: Ensoniq Soundscape soundcard
ISA slot number 1: US Robotic 56k X2 modem
OS: Win95B OSR2 4.00.950B


The graphic cards drivers used were those included on the installation CD. The only foreign drivers used has been the OpenGL driver built 1036 from ATI and all the options enabled were the default options. No tweaking has been applied neither in the cards control panels nor in the games control panels.


The 2D results

Wintune97 Results


The above Wintune97 results are showing about the same performances as a Matrox Millenium graphic card as measured with the Mill. 4Wram I had on my personal system since a long time.



The 3D results

Forsaken + Intel PII-350mhz
Graphic card 640 X 480 - 75hz 800 X 600 - 75hz
ATI Expert@Play AGP 2X 56.27 fps 38.56 fps

The Forsaken FPS tests were performed 3 times each and the mean value obtained is the one indicated in the above results.


Quake 2 + Intel PII-350mhz using 640 X 480 X 75hz
Graphic card Demo 1 Demo 2 Timerefresh
ATI EXpert@Play AGP 2X 20.45 fps 21.1 fps 28.57 fps

All the tests have been performed 3 times each and the mean value obtained is the value indicated in the above table. The OpenGl drivers used was the built 1036 from ATI.

Quake 2 + Intel PII-350mhz using 800 X 600 X 75hz
Graphic card Demo 1 Demo 2 Timerefresh
ATI EXpert@Play AGP 2X 13.4 fps 13.8 fps 18.34 fps


All the tests have been performed 3 times each and the mean value obtained is the value indicated in the above table.

Timedemo testing procedure used:

  • The computer has been freshly booted
  • Quake 2 has been launched
  • The video console has been opened
  • The appropriate screen resolution has been selected
  • The game console as been opened by typing " ~ "
  • Once in the console I typed "Timedemo 1" and "Enter"
  • The command "demomap demoX.dm2" has been typed
  • Once that the demo was finished, I used to quit the game
  • The computer has been rebooted for the next test.

    Note: X stands for 1 or 2 depending if I wanted to use demo 1 or demo 2.


    Timerefresh testing procedure used:

  • The computer has been freshly booted
  • Quake 2 has been launched
  • The video console has been opened
  • The appropriate screen resolution has been selected
  • A new game has been started at the easy level
  • After the explosions, the game console has been opened by typing " ~ "
  • Once in the console I typed "Timerefresh"
  • Once the demo was finished, I used to quit the game
  • The computer has been rebooted for the next test.


    Unreal + Intel PII-350mhz
    Graphic card 640 X 480 - 75hz 800 X 600 - 75hz
    ATI EXpert@Play AGP 2X 14.66 fps 11.34 fps

    The Unreal timedemo test is an average frame rate Benchmark. To have a valid reading with this Benchmark you have to let the flyby intro screen play for a while. So, I used to play the flyby intro screen for half an hour in each resolution to have a well stabilized frame rate value and this is the value indicated in the above tests results.



    Final Reality

    Final Reality Results

    The above values are the mean values obtained from 5 tests ran in a row by selecting the Official Benchmark of Final Reality.


    3D Winbench98

    ATI Expert@Play 3D Winbench98 results

    The Ziff Davis 3D Winbench98 is clearly indicating that the 3D performance of this card are well under those of a Voodoo 2 based graphic card by more that 50% compared to the proceeding Voodoo2 cards tested in the past on this site.


    Conclusions

    My conclusions about this 2D/3D graphic card are going as following. Considering the very affordable price tag of this integrated 2D/3D solution graphic card, I must confess that I have been pleasantly surprised by its more than reasonable performances. Even if we can't really compare this graphic card against a Voodoo 2 based graphic card it is really surprising how good it is performing when used to play even the more demanding 3D games like Unreal for instance. In my opinion, this card is an excellent alternative to those with a restricted budget by allowing them to buy a more powerful processor with the money they save by buying this card instead of a 2D only graphic card and an add-on 3D graphic card. However, bear in mind that this card is requiring a very powerful processor to give good performances in 3D. According to this last statement, I wouldn't recommend to use this card with a system not equipped of at least a PII-300mhz and 64Mb of memory.


    Click here for more information about the ATI Expert@Play AGP 2X.


    Specifications

    System Requirements
    Intel or compatible Pentium II systems with AGP Interface.
    DVD movie playback requires DVD ROM drive and DVD MPEG-2 decoder

    Graphics Controller
    ATI 3D RAGE PRO TURBO, a high performance 64bit graphics accelerator with support for 3D, 2D and motion video; includes integrated triangle setup engine, on-chip texture cache, hardware assisted MPEG-2 acceleration and scaling, and integrated 230MHz DAC.

    Operating Systems Supported

    • Windows 95
    • Direct 3D
    • Windows NT 4.0 (AGP requires Microsoft's Service Pack 3)
    • OpenGL (Windows NT 4.0 only)
    • Windows 3.1
    • DOS 5.0 or higher

    Bus
    AGP 2X compliant

    Display Support

    • Register compatible with VGA
    • BIOS compatible with VESA super VGA
    • DDC1/2b/2b+ monitor support
    • VESA DPMS support
    • Separate horizontal and vertical sync at TTL levels

    Memory Configurations

    • 4MB SGRAM, upgradeable to 6MB and 8MB
    • 8MB SGRAM

    TV Out

    • Windows 95, DOS 5.0 or higher
    • NTSC output (PAL versions available)
    • Composite, S-Video connectors

    3D Acceleration Features

    • DirectX, Direct3D, DirectDraw
    • Triangle Setup Engine
    • 4KB Texture Cache
    • Bilinear / Trilinear Filtering
    • Edge Anti-aliasing
    • Texture Compositing
    • Texture Decompression
    • Specular Highlights
    • Perspectively Correct Texture Mapping
    • Mip-mapping
    • Z-buffering and Double-buffering
    • Special effects including:
      - Alpha blending (transparency), fog, video textures, texture lighting, reflections, shadows, spotlights, LOD biasing and texture morphing

    2D Display Modes:
    Resolutions, Colors and Maximum Refresh Rates (HZ)

    Resolution 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1152x864 1280x1024 1600x1200
    256 colors 200 HZ 200 HZ 150 HZ 120 HZ 100 HZ 85 HZ
    65K colors 200 HZ 200 HZ 150 HZ 120 HZ 100 HZ 85 HZ
    16.7M colors 200 HZ 200 HZ 150 HZ 120 HZ 100 HZ 75* HZ

    * requires 8MB memory

    Maximum 3D Resolutions

    Resolution 4MB 8MB
    65K colors 1024x768 1600x1200
    16.7M colors 800x600 1280x1024

    *Maximum 3D resolution and colors supported with specified memory amounts using doubled buffered setting