ATI Rage Mobility 128

Final Words

Basically, if you want a notebook that offers reasonable 3D performance in the next few months, there's nothing better than the Rage Mobility 128. As of the product announcement on October 25, 1999, ATI claimed a price of $55 in quantities of 10,000 - that's nothing compared to the price of a good notebook. There's obviously quite a bit of room for improvement, but there's simply nothing that's been announced that even challenges the Mobility 128. As mentioned previously, we'd like to see ATI go to a 0.18 micron process, increase the clock, and integrate 16MB of embedded DRAM with a 256-bit bus. While it's certainly wishful thinking, it doesn't seem too far out of reach at this point and that would allow for a huge boost in performance.

Rumors have started circulating about an mobile NV11 part from NVIDIA. We haven't been able to confirm or deny such rumors, but throwing T&L and 4 texels per clock could certainly cause trouble for the Mobility 128. Nevertheless, these are still rumors, while the Mobility 128 is real and available today (more on availability below).

If you're a gamer and think you'd like to play on the road or would just rather take a notebook to LAN parties instead of a full desktop system, a notebook with the Rage Mobility 128 is a no brainer. The same is true if you need to do any sort of 3D work on the road or are just looking for a no-compromise desktop replacement. While it won't be as fast as the latest and greatest desktop offerings, it still offers reasonable performance. It's doubtful that notebooks will ever be able to fully catch up to desktop performance due to space and heat considerations. If you don't care too much about 3D support, but desire the other features of the Mobility 128, such as hardware DVD decoding, ratiometric expansion, etc., consider one of the other Mobility options from ATI.

If 3D performance is very important to you, definitely go for the additional 8MB of memory if you can - it widens the memory interface to 128-bit, which can result in significant performance increases as we've seen. While it is possible to offer a graphics memory upgrade slot, we doubt many OEM's will do so in the interest of saving space and cost. To complicate the situation even further, 8MB is already quite a bit of graphics memory for a notebook, so don't be surprised if the 16MB configuration is virtually impossible to find in all but the highest end models, if at all.

The big question is when will such notebooks be available. ATI's excellent relationship with Apple continues on as Apple is currently the only one shipping a Rage Mobility 128 based notebook at the moment with the new G3 Powerbook. No other design wins have been announced, but we suspect that as soon as ATI is able to ramp up production of the Mobility 128 to provide enough for Apple and then some, we'll see a flurry of announcements Major OEM's typically don't like to announce products until they are actually available for delivery.

ATI would not disclose any of those OEM's to us - all they would say is "announcements are coming soon" - but we can certainly speculate on our own. Of course there are the guys that have used ATI products for quite a while - Dell, Gateway, and IBM, although all 3 manufacturers also use NeoMagic chips in some of their products. Toshiba is also a likely candidate as ATI has already announced support for Toshiba's new 1400x1050 LCD's. Earlier this year, ATI got their first design win with Toshiba on the Satellite 1605CDS and 1625CDT.

Remember that when you buy a notebook, you buy a complete system, so don't ignore the rest of the system. Look for notebook reviews from AnandTech in the near future.