Radeon Driver 1.0 with Nexus 128 Graphic Card:

Perceptual Results on a 1600 x 1024 Display in:
LightWave 3D [6] - Form Z 3.0 - Flash 5 & Fireworks 3

MiniReview By: Phubear 11/12/00

A Triple Subdivided Cube "Beveled" a few times in LightWave 3D to form a total of 1038 Polygons.

Note: "Cages" (blue dotted lines) are active which can constrain redraw & movement greatly. For most people, I recommend that "Normals" & "Cages" be turned off in the Perspective/OpenGL Portal.

The screen shot above is of LightWave [6] in Modeler mode on the Sony W900 at its native 1600 x 1024 Bit Depth @76 Hz. A resolution which is not widely supported at a high refresh rates with many graphic cards for the Mac.

Note: Only the Shader Panel & Perspective Portal have shaded elements due to the limitations of the 32MB card & drivers. Actual Screen Shot size is 56.27 cm x 35.7 cm @ 72 dpi (22.152 x 13.847 inches)

History: Ever since the Sony W900 arrived to the studio, it has been an endless and extremely frustrating (not to mention costly) experience trying to find video cards that were powerful enough to handle professional 2D & 3D applications. Possibly with the advent of OSX, Dual Processor G4s, and more high end 3D applications being ported over to the Mac Platform, we will see some new and exciting video cards soon. (Or at the very least, better drivers)

Configuration:

Graphic Card: ATI Nexus 128-32MB VGA/PCI
Driver: Mac Radeon/Rage 128 Pro ver. 1.0 with Apple OpenGL 1.1.5

Monitor: Sony W900 22.5 inch CRT Wide Aspect Ration Display
Resolution: 1600 x 1024 @ 76Hz in Millions of Colors

Model: Apple Beige G3 DT/466 (Formac Processor Upgrade)
RAM: 416 MB with Virtual Memory off.
OS: 8.6 with limited extensions & 2K Desktop Pattern

Application Results:

Newtek: LightWave 3D [6]
Overall OpenGL performance appears to be more stable with many less redraw anomalies & long pauses between switching from one window/dialog to the next. (Too little VRAM and weak video cards can cause crashes in many modern 3D applications.)

Modeler redraw appears to have a subtle graphic, but significant motion based performance increases in "Smooth Shaded" mode; managing a 900 to 1038 Polygon NURBS object with metallic orange surface attributes and a level 6 Patch Division with minimal frame skipping during Zoom, Pan, & 3D Rotational movements. On lower polygon/sub patch objects, full 512 pixel textures redraw quickly, but are still inaccurate to some degree; especially at image seams. Some minor glitches with live shader updating (transparency, refraction, image maps, etc.) while using the Surface Panel seem to have disappeared.

Layout has also become a little more responsive in general, but is still not smooth enough to "live" render fully textured scenes when advancing between key frames in OpenGL Preview. At 1600 x 1024 Screen Bit Depth, exceedingly jerky movement & missing pixels seem to persist throughout the camera window. Like that of Modeler, many little redraw mishaps have been resolved in Layout mode. Viper Image Viewer no longer displays incomplete images or disjointed "scans" when updating textures & surfaces in a scene, and Panels no longer leave "shadows" of their original positions when being moved.

Autodessys: Form Z 3.0
Performance increase seems minimal in Form Z with the exception of a little less frame skipping. Transparencies in OpenGL & QuickDraw 3D still seem to affect redraw greatly. (Hopefully these minor issues have been fixed in version 3.5)

Macromedia: Flash 5
I have suffered long enough. But now my wait is over. All my "black box" & "disappearing objects" redraw problems are finally cured! Many people might be aware of the numerous redraw problems that plague Apple Computers with certain ATI components in them (retail & OEM); due to which I have attempted many, many, many different solutions to no avail until now.

Macromedia: Fireworks 3
Pauses between redraw when previewing conversion of TIFF & PICT images to JPEG, PNG, and GIF seem to take less than half the time than before. Intermittent crashes that would also occur due to redraw problems during Zooming In & Out in Preview Export mode are now nonexistent.

Summary and Installation Details:

Positive: A very welcome and long overdue upgrade for this Mac user. In the Finder, basic window maneuvering is much better, especially in the case of multiple "tabbed" windows containing numerous files. OpenGL performance is improved in Both Modeler & Layout modes of LightWave 3D. I can start using Flash 5 with a Sony W900. I almost feel that the Nexus 128 is worth what it costs (minus the time it took for it to work this well).

Negative: Like many other user reports with this driver update, quite a few monitor resolutions were missing after the upgrade including the required 1600 x 1024 resolution for the Sony W900. Improvements do not appear to take full advantage of 32 MB VRAM. Again, Flash redraw issues should have been resolved much sooner.

Installation: At first, the monitor would start up at 1600 x 1024 @ 76Hz Bit Depth and then revert to 1024 x 768 @ 120 Hz as soon as the desktop was visible and "SuperRes" had to be used after every start up to switch resolutions. I did try one reviewer's helpful suggestion of disabling the "ATI ROM Xtender" extension, which did allow me to pass on using "SuperRes" after every start up. However, without the ATI ROM Xtender extension, Viper Image Viewer seems to update or "scan" noticeably slower along with dragging several panels in Layout mode. Holding down the "Control Key" while clicking on the Bit Depth Control Strip Module did reveal many more resolution choices, but not the monitor's native 1600 x 1024 Bit Depth unfortunately. As others have suggested, Radeon specific & TV extensions were disabled after initial installation, which seem to have little to no affect on 2D & 3D redraw performance.

Note: With these tests, LightWave Layout & Modeler were run in conjunction with the HUB active. Though the HUB is reported in Newtek's manuls to be notoriously unstable on the Mac, there were no crashes what so ever during testing.