First post, by Putas
- Rank
- Oldbie
Nowhere do I see a mention of Rage XL improvements upon Rage Pro.
I don't know what happened back then, but I myself wrote in review that Rage XL made no 3d improvements.
By most regards these chips (XL, Mobility P and probably XC) are still the old Rage Pro.
However, going through the cards now I see that transparent textures are finally bilineary filtered.
And this is happening at usually better performance than the Rage Pro. Around the net are often stated 83 MHz clocks for the Rage XL, 10 % above the Rage Pro.
That could explain the shift, but I cannot confirm this as clock tools I tried go haywire with those cards.
But during my overclocking measurements of the Rage Pro it seemed largely limited by memory bandwidth and here is the surprise: even with 32 bit memory the Rage XL/Mobility P can outperform Rage Pro.
ATi specced memory up to 125/150 MHz for 64/32 bit interface.
These frequencies are above of what the Rage Pro tolerates.
More importantly, at best can compensate only half of the bandwidth lost on 32 bit cards. When I have 32 bit Rage XL/Rage Mobility P cards outdoing the Rage Pro (especially with dense geometry) even the 83 MHz core clock is too low- assuming all else remained the same.
We have a die shot proving R3L is a major die shrink, perhaps more changes could happen.
Thoughts?