Back in July of 2000, the RADEON offered the highest performing 3D on the market. Since then, NVIDIA has updated their driver set to Detonator 3, surpassing the RADEON. Additionally, they have started shipping GeForce2 Pro and GeForce2 Ultra cards sporting high-speed DDR memory, which also outperform the RADEON. Nevertheless, the RADEON GPU still offers some of the best 3D quality and performance available, and this All In Wonder card is no exception.
Complete with 32MB of 6ns DDR memory clocked at 166MHz and a RADEON core also clocked at 166MHz, you should expect the same performance from this card as you would the vanilla RADEON 32MB DDR card we reviewed here. Two pixel pipelines and three texture units give the All In Wonder a potential 333Mpixel/1Gtexel fillrate.
The beauty of ATI's RADEON line lies in their usage of the same GPU for each product, varying only core and memory clock speeds. Because of this, the All In Wonder offers the same 3D feature set we outlined in our RADEON 64MB DDR Preview. For those of you who may have missed previous articles on the RADEON, let us present an expedient summation of these features.
The Charisma Engine is a fancy term for the performance attributes of the RADEON. Originally spec'ed to process 30 million triangles a second, that number has dropped closer to 25 million after a core frequency decrease, and you can't forget those triangles all have to share vertices! Additionally, T&L support has been implemented, and up to eight hardware lights are fully accelerated through OpenGL and DirectX 8. In order to make the RADEON stand out from the current competition, other features, such as keyframe interpolation and four-matrix vertex skinning, have been accelerated in hardware.
ATI's Pixel Tapestry is a little more intricate, and incorporates the hardware responsible for "beautifying" a 3D scene. We're now able to turn off all of the details in today's most advanced games and obtain more than 200fps, so why not focus on realism? In an attempt to do just that, the RADEON supports all three types of bump mapping (EMBM, DOT3 and emboss), 3D textures, environment mapping (spherical, dual-paraboloid, and cubic), priority buffers, and range-based fog, all of which are thoroughly explained in our ATI Next Gen: Explored article.
Of course, we couldn't review such a versatile card without gaming on a television. Connected via the included S-Video cable, we put our All In Wonder through rounds of Sacrifice, Episode 1: Racer, Heavy Metal FAKK2, Rouge Spear, and of course, Quake III. A couple of conclusions about big-screen gaming were made. First, applications with text, such as Sacrifice, retain their splendor on a smaller monitor, while no-brainers, like Quake III, look sweet on the TV. Unfortunately, the television doesn't do justice to games with graphic detail, since the resolution is low and color sharpness is not as precise, making text hard to read in most cases.