May 2002 3Digest - ATI RADEON 7200 64 MBytes SDR

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May 2002 3Digest - ATI RADEON 7200 64 MBytes SDR

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Comments

By Andrey Vorobiev

This chip is presented by ATI RADEON 7200 64 MBytes SDR, AGP videocard.

Features:

ATI RADEON 7200 chip, 155 MHz clock rate;
64 MBytes SDR SDRAM memory in 8 Hynix 6ns microchips, 155 MHz clock rate, 128-bit bus;
Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 310 megapixels/sec and 930 megatexels/sec with three texture blocks on each pipeline and 620 megatexels/sec with two texture blocks on each pipeline.

I've already described reasons for release of these cards on former RADEON in RADEON 32 MBytes SDR section. Now ATI focused efforts on maintaining a single line of newer 7500/8500 and former RADEONs. Only weakest of former cards remain: RADEON SDR and RADEON VE renamed to 7200 and 7000 models accordingly. RADEON SDR 32 MBytes is not manufactured now, it has been replaced by a 64 MBytes variant (it's obscure why they installed 64 MBytes of such slow memory). In addition, clock rate of RADEON 7200 was decreased comparing to former RADEON SDR (155 instead of 160). ATI seems to get rid of remaining a bit unconditioned chips, selling all "normal" ones to partners. I'll remind that this card is a close competitor of GeForce2 MX400, still having a bit higher price. As ATI makes this card no more, and the partners make cheap based only on RADEON 7000 or 7500, we cancel the monthly reviewing of this card and place its section into the archive.

Wasn't overclocked.

For the 10th of May 2002 the latest drivers from ATI are 9.030, 9.031 for Windows 9x/ME and 6.071 for Windows XP.

I shall note there's Radeon2.ru web site that tracks all software novelties from ATI and offers improved drivers versions with preset registry settings for increasing RADEON cards perfomance.

Windows ME

Windows XP

We see that 9.021 version was the best in several cases, but the situation was ambiguous under Windows XP. A number of versions demonstrate the problem with refresh rate setting. The fix methods are described at Radeon2.ru. You can also read about problems users of various ATI cards face with various drivers.

And now I want to attract your attention to another important 3D feature - filtering. As many of you know, all chipsets support bilinear filtering that is an important instrument in MIP-mapping, some chipsets support trilinear filtering (true, not the approximation) and only few support anisotropic filtering.

Due to the fact that RADEON does support anisotropic filtering, I recommend you to pay attention to the article concerning this feature.

Below are some screenshots taken on RADEON and reference ones taken on NVIDIA GeForce3. Pay attention to Need For Speed: Porshe 2000. As we've already said all ATI cards lack fog in this game. But it can be enabled either with the help of RadeonTweaker utility (download the latest version from RADEON2.RU) or by means of manual registry editing. You'll need to enable WFogEnable and TableFogEnable. This method proved to be efficient with 7.041, 7.131, 7.153 versions.