Quakecon '99

Each tournament machine was an AMD Athlon 550 (some later machines were actually 600MHz Athlons) using the AMD made Fester motherboard, which won't be made commercially available, 128MB of SDRAM, a Western Digital HDD, running Windows 98 SE and Quake 3 Arena Test v1.08. Quakecon '99 was centered entirely around Quake 3 Test and the tournament itself took place on two of the three currently available maps, Q3TEST1 and Q3TOURNEY neither of which are the dreaded "pit" level that Mike seemed to hate so much when playing on AnandTech's private Q3Test server. The systems used Aureal Vortex 2 sound cards coupled with Logitec speakers which unfortunately didn't sound all that great, however the fact that every set of speakers was no more than 2 feet away from the next setup didn't help improve the sound experience too much (many users decided to stick to headphones).

The video card present in each one of the systems was ATI's new Rage Fury Pro which is based on the ATI Rage 128 Pro chipset, a tweaked version of the old ATI Rage 128. The Rage 128 Pro chipset used on the 32MB Rage Fury Pro that was present on these Athlon systems is essentially a Rage 128 clocked at 133/133MHz (core/memory) and offers performance similar to that of a regular TNT2 clocked at 125/150MHz. Although the Rage Fury Pro was no TNT2 Ultra killer, it definitely got the job done. The 16-bit dithering still looked a little on the poor side under Q3Test however we were informed that the problem has been fixed and will experience a noticeable improvement in image quality with the next revision of the card/chip (the cards that were used were of the first spin of the silicon which is two revisions away from the final product due out in Q4 99). The image quality of the Rage Fury Pro in 32-bit color was very crisp and clear, easily comparable to the TNT2 and other cards in it's class of image quality.

The Tournament Athlon 550 Systems

Surprisingly enough, the Athlon (running on a non-production motherboard) combined with the Rage Fury Pro (a beta product in itself) did turn out to be a very stable setup. Kudos to AMD and ATI for putting all that together for such a smoothly run operation at this year's Quakecon, although there were a few hiccups, overall the hardware had no problem making these gamers happy. For those of you that are more interested in the video card, the response from a few of the gamers that tried out the Athlon systems was generally positive, and a few users even thought that the video cards used in the machines were TNT2s. If you're judging solely on 32-bit color image quality, telling the difference between the Rage 128 Pro and the TNT2 is next to impossible.