Soyo SY-6IBM i440BX microATX Rage 128VR

Rage 128VR Performance

AnandTech's test bed consisted of the following components:

• Soyo SY-6IBM with onboard Rage 128VR
• Abit BH6 with 32MB AGP ATI Rage Fury (Rage 128GL)
• Intel Pentium II 400 OEM
• Western Digital Caviar AC28400 - UltraATA/33
• 1 x 64MB Mushkin PC100 SDRAM or 1 x 64MB Memory-Man PC100 SDRAM

Quake 3 Test 1.08 and Expendable were used to represent OpenGL and Direct3D performance respectively.

The effects of the 64-bit memory bus are quite evident in high memory bandwidth situations, such as 32-bit rendering or high resolutions. Clearly the Rage128VR is more impressive than the i810 or any of the more commonly integrated video chips such as ATI's own Rage Pro Turbo. Today's hottest games are playable at 640x480 and image quality is superb compared to the i810 and Rage Pro Turbo. Some visual anomalies, primarily flickering textures, were detected in Quake 3 and appear to be a driver issue. Of course, users of the Rage 128 family all know about the 16-bit dithering issue that causes a haze over the entire screen with 16-bit rendering. The i810 does not support 32-bit rendering at all and hence the exclusion of the i810 from tests involving 32-bit rendering. Scores for Quake 3 Test at 1024x768x32 for the Rage 128VR were omitted since entering that mode in Quake 3 causes the whole system to bog down to a completely unusable level.