ATI Radeon 64MB DDR

The Drivers (cont)

The shipping drivers do have a slight alpha-blending problem when at 16-bit color, causing lines to be displayed on the image when running with timedemo on. Not as noticeable, if at all, with timedemo off, ATI knows about this problem and a driver update is should be available soon that fixes it. As always, be sure to get the most recent driver from ATI's website before you go playing any games.

16-bit color Note the vertical lines

32-bit color

Rage128 drivers have a history of not getting along with VIA chipsets, and unfortunately this seems to be the case with the Radeon as well. In the past we have seen some cards not even work on VIA-based systems, such as the Rage Furry MAXX. Luckily, the problems associated with the Radeon in Athlon systems are not as bad as in the past, but they may cause headaches for many.

The first problem with the Radeon's drivers on VIA-based systems is that the install program actually replaces any version of the VIA GART found on the system with version 3.30, which is packaged with the drivers. Although this may end up helping some with older GART drivers, it will hurt power users in the long term as the install program replaces any GART driver on the system with the packaged version, even if the drivers on the system are newer than those in the video card install program. For example, in our Athlon KX133 test system, the older GART version actually prevented us from getting into Windows, forcing us to boot in safe mode to restore the new GART drivers. The newest version of GART, version 4.03, is available from VIA's website.

This flaw will result in decreased card performance, as the older GART versions almost never have the same speed as the new ones. In addition, some systems may even be inoperable with the older GART drivers, forcing the user to boot in safe mode to replace ATI's GART driver with the previous one. Luckily, these problems only arise under the normal install. The custom install option does bring up a check box for "upgrading" the GART drivers which can be unchecked. We highly suggest that everyone with a VIA chipset in their system uncheck this option and gets the newest GART version from VIA's website.

The second issue arose when we tried to use the Radeon in a VIA system with AGP 4x enabled. With this setting turned on in the BIOS, the card would not run Quake III Arena at all, crashing at the ID logo. Although this problem does prevent AGP 4x mode from working, the card worked fine when AGP 4x was disabled. We have shown time and time again that AGP 4x really offers no performance increase over AGP 2x mode, where the card works flawlessly. So, while one may not loose performance over the lack of AGP 4x support in VIA systems, some will suffer headaches due to this issue. ATI notified us that this problem only plagues VIA chipsets with the CD revision of the North Bridge. Newer KX133 motherboards, with revision CE, as well as all KT133 motherboards worked fine with AGP 4x enabled in our testing. The only Apollo Pro 133A chipsets available in the lab at the time of publication were those based on the CE north bridge. However, those motherboards would not work in AGP 4X mode, despite the newer CE revision. Dropping back to AGP 2X mode allowed the system to function as expected.

North bridge revision CD

North bridge revision CE