Accelerate Your Mac! - ATI Rage128 vs IXMicro Game Rocket Video Card Review

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ATI Rage128 Orion vs IXMicro Game Rocket Rage128 vs 3Dfx Banshee Video Card Comparison Review date: 7/13/99
Movie Playback Performance
Intro \| 2D Performance \| 3D Performance \| Game Performance \| Movie Playback \| Controls/Design \| Summary
Movie Playback Performance
Since I was pressed for time and the review was late, I used a simple but stressful test to determine movie playback performance - Macbench 5.0's uncompressed movie tests (320x240 move stretched to full screen at 1152x870, millions color mode). The movie was loaded into RAM to prevent the CDROM drive's performance from affecting the scores. Be aware that Quicktime will not use the hardware scaling/acceleration features of your card if you scale the movie up an exact 2X factor. For exact 2X movie size playback, software scaling only will be used. In the past (RageII/RagePro) ATI cards only accelerated Quicktime movies that use the CinePak and Indeo codecs. In the past these two codecs have been the most popular, but the Rage128 also offers MPEG acceleration now (as does the Banshee/Game Rocket reportedly). In real world movie playback on G3 systems, both cards performed very well. Macbench 5 would not allow me to select a MPEG movie for the tests, but playback of a 30MB MPEG movie scaled to full screen played fine on both cards with identical (to the eye) performance. (Note: For the many readers that asked, Orion owner reports generally say Sorensen video performance is very good.) The graphs below shows the results of the frames played and max framerate tests in MacBench 5.0 (uncompressed movie expanded to full screen): MacBench tests: 320x240 movie stretched to 1024x768 (full screen) As shown above, the ATI cards were about 16% faster in this torture test than the Game Rocket and 11% faster even when running in a 33Mhz slot. In actual use I saw similar performance but apparently the ATI chip has a bit more horsepower, so I rated it a bit higher. ATI Rage128 Orion: 9.5 IXMicro Game Rocket: 9 The next page has details on the software controls and hardware features.

Index of ATI Rage128 Orion vs IXMicro Game Rocket Review Intro \| 2D Performance \| 3D Performance \| Game Performance \| Movie Playback \| Controls/Design \| Summary - or - Back to WWW.XLR8YOURMAC.COM
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