LOSTCIRCUITS |
|
ATI FIRE GL 8800
... with gasoline |
| (Review by MS, June 22, 2002) |
The Control Configuration
The GUI is similar to the standard ATI configuration windows. A typical feature of OpenGL cards is the capability to optimize the configuration for specific applications. The main parameters that can be modified or else saved in a custom profile are "Enable 8-bit double buffered Overlay Planes" and "Force Copy Swap".
Different profiles can be selected according to the application running. Essentially, each profile allows four different combination settings that may not necessarily be supported by the application. The best example is probably the "Enable 8-bit Double buffered Overlay Planes" which means that applications that can make use of this setting will add these overlay planes for better precision, albeit with a certain performance hit when it comes to raw frame rates. The short version is that adding the overlay planes is similar to stepping up from 24 bit to 32 bit color by adding the Alpha channel. There are fewer errors but the performance will drop. On a side note, "Force Copy Swap" means that the back buffer is copied on every clock cycle to the front buffer.
Cut and paste overlay of two different runs of ProCDRS03 from the ViewPerf 6.1.2 suite. Selecting the "CDRS optimized" profile returned the lowest score, manually selecting the opposite settings gave the highest results with the other two possibilities in between. Unfortunately, there is no possibility to show the increase in image precision concomitant with the performance hit which is also one problem with this kind of review: The only thing we can really show is frame rates.
Resolutions and Refresh Rates
Being targeted towards graphics workstations, the FireGL 8800 needs to support extremely high resolutions at high refresh rates. Nowadays, this is almost trivial but it was not long ago that at 1600 x 1200 x 32 bpp, the vertical refresh rates supported by the AGP adapter would drop to 65 Hz.
Screen shots of the possible resolutions and refresh rates supported by the FireGL8800.
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