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| ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 32 MB DDR The Return of the ATi-Knights | |
| (Review by MS) |
Incoming
Ok, Incoming is hopelessly outdated but, on the other hand, it can still be a valuable tool not fro evaluation of fill rate but for looking at the triangle setup capabilities of the Radeon. The 1100 MHz Thunderbird should have enough horsepower to push the Radeon over the limit, at least at stock settings. On the other hand, how much overclocking of the Radeon is necessary for keeping up with this power house before the point of diminishing returns (PDR) is reached?
This question can be answered by disabling sound and running the card at stock setting first, then a second run under highly overclocked conditions and multiply the clock/engine frequency with the ratio between the overclocked and stock setting frame rates:
| 166/166 MHz | 266 fps average |
| 200/200 MHz | 296 fps average |
| PDR: ?? MHz | 166 MHz* (296fps/166fps)= 184MHz |
Let's take a look at the real results:
Incoming frame rates show no further increase above 183/183 MHz overclocking of the Radeon, meaning that either the raw CPU power or else the bandwidth of the main memory become the limiting factor. The slight further increases in the average fps scores mainly reflect higher peak frame rates (up to 350 fps at 210/210 MHz).
One other reason to include Incoming into the selection of benchmarks here is to get an idea of the triangle setup capability of the Charisma engine. At low resolution, fill rates are certainly not to be held accountable for the limitations in frame rates, neither is the CPU/main memory subsystem the limiting factor at the default setting of 166/166 MHz.
Theoretically, a 640x480 pixel matrix can contain the same number of triangles as pixels, especially if this is the lowest resolution at which the game usually runs. This means that every frame could contain as much as 307,000 triangles. This mumber is certainly too high, at least by a factor of 3-4 since, otherwise, the total mumber of triangulations at peak frame rates (315 fps at default setting) would be in excess of 96 million trinagles / second. However, this calculation boils down to the fact that the 30 million triangulations claimed by ATi appear to be, at least, in the ball park.
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