ATI Vents Its RAGE, Moves Toward Set-Top Box Market

Emedia Professional, Dec, 1998 by Mark Fritz

With a laser show and indoor fireworks, Ontario-based ATI Technologies Inc. launched its RAGE 128 family of graphics accelerator chips and boards at a media showcase on August 27, 1998, in Toronto.

Using a 128-bit 3D architecture with a SuperScalar rendering engine and up to 32MB of memory, the RAGE 128 is clearly aimed at the 3D gaming market, but its impressive power also makes it a step forward for DVD. Unlike many of its competitors, who are relying on software for DVD playback, ATI is providing hardware assistance for both MPEG-2 and AC-3 decoding. This strategy frees up the CPU so you can actually do other tasks while running a DVD.

The RAGE 128 clearly raises the bar for DVD delivery and sends a challenge to other graphics card vendors to ante up. If they follow ATI's lead, DVD will be pushed quickly into the computing mainstream. According to ATI, the RAGE 128's integrated DVD subpicture decoder produces full frame-rate DVD/MPEG-2 playback even on lower-end systems such as those powered by Intel's Celeron processor. In one particularly compelling demonstration, an ATI representative plugged a Dell laptop into a large monitor and showed a DVD movie, noting that the chip was so fast that frame rate was higher than the screen refresh rate. You could just as easily plug your laptop into your home TV--who needs a DVD player when you've got an ATI-equipped laptop?

Unfortunately, the RAGE 128 is an AGP solution, and therefore a solution for the future rather than the present. It offers nothing for the millions of non-AGP-compatible PCs that make up most of the world's current installed base.

At the launch showcase, ATI also made plain its aim toward the set-top box market with the announcement of a major deal with cable giant General Instrument Corporation. According to the purchase agreement, General Instrument will use ATI's RAGE graphics chips in its next-generation interactive digital cable set-top terminal, the DCT-5000 . The heart of the box is a 175MHz RISC processor. GI plans to roll out approximately 15 million of these boxes throughout North America over the next three to five years. The value of the deal is estimated at $4.5 billion.

One sideshow of the ATI launch showcase was Microsoft's presentation of WebTV. Microsoft aims to combine TV and the Web through so-called "Intelligent TVs," running Microsoft's scaled-down WindowsCE operating system. The demo showed an MTV-like program, whose interactive element consisted of inviting viewers got to vote on which music video would play next. Also just this side of center ring was the demo in which ATI showed how live video could be used as Windows wallpaper--the only thing missing was an explanation of why anyone would want to use live video as wallpaper.

(ATI Technologies Inc., 33 Commerce Valley Drive East, Thornhill, Ontario L3T 7N6 Canada; 905/882-2600; Fax 905/882-2620; http:///www.atitech.com)

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