ATI Rage Mobility 128

Preparing "The Test"

It was a bit tricky choosing the test bed for this review since the Mobility 128 will eventually be integrated into a complete notebook system. Our goal in the performance comparison was to simulate a notebook environment for the Mobility 128 and show how it would compare to a typical desktop system (not a bleeding edge one).

To simulate such an environment, we decided to go to use Pentium III processors with the i440BX chipset, currently the most common solution for mid-range to high-end notebooks. Intel even sells packages with both the processor and northbridge on a "mobile module".

Specifically, we selected the Pentium III 650E, 500E, and 400E. The 650E was chosen as it is currently the fastest available mobile processor on the market. It features Intel's Speed Step Technology, which reduces the CPU speed when on battery power. That brings us to the reason we picked the 500E - when on battery power, Speed Step drops the CPU frequency to 500 MHz. Finally, the 400E was chosen as the slowest mobile Pentium III currently available. The 400E is not available on the desktop, so we used a 533EB (normally 4x133=533) and underclocked it to 400 MHz (4x100).

We may see some notebooks using the Mobility 128 in conjunction with the mobile Celeron. However, it will probably be a newer Celeron based on the new Coppermine-128 core, which is identical to the Coppermine Pentium III core but with only 128KB of cache. Thus we had no way to simulate such circumstances and we expect performance in most apps to be similar at equivalent clock speeds.

Without a mobile Athlon, AMD is currently relegated to low-end notebooks that won't be using the Mobility 128 any time soon.

Selecting cards to compare the Mobility 128 to was equally complicated. We knew immediately we would have to compare to the desktop Rage Fury Pro, since the Mobility 128 features they feature the same Rage 128 Pro core. The NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 was selected as a good common baseline level of performance for the desktop that many AnandTech readers can relate to. The TNT2 M64 was thrown in to help illustrate the effects of a 64-bit memory bus as is the case when the Mobility 128 does not have the external 8MB memory upgrade.

Finally, to represent many current notebooks, we've thrown in the old ATI 3D Rage Pro Turbo, which performs like the mobile Rage LT Pro that is still used in many laptops today. Our Rage Pro board featured 4MB, which is probably more than some notebooks using the Rage LT Pro. We only ran 16-bit numbers on the Rage Pro Turbo as performance was already excruciatingly slow at 16-bit. We also only ran resolutions up to 800x600 for this chip since at 1024x768 it ran out of memory. Further, Unreal Tournament simply would not run in full screen on the Rage Pro Turbo. Now do you see the urgent need for better 3D solutions for notebooks? ;)

ATI's original Rage Mobility is also very common in notebooks today and is an enhanced version of the Rage LT Pro that makes it slightly faster. Unfortunately, we had no good way to simulate its performance, but it's not leaps and bounds ahead of the Rage LT Pro/3D Rage Pro we're using anyway.

Note that all the desktop cards, except the 3D Rage Pro, have significantly more memory than the Rage Mobility 128. This will always be the case when comparing the mobile environment to the desktop.

Other competition in the notebook graphics market include NeoMagic and S3. Up until just recently, NeoMagic did not offer any reasonable level of 3D support. The new NeoMagic MagicMedia 256XL+ holds promise but the specs are vague and a sample was not available to AnandTech at the time of this review. S3 has the Savage/MX and Savage/IX on the way, but both offer performance that appears to be significantly below that of the Mobility 128, at least on paper. Samples of the Savage/MX and Savage/IX were also not available at the time of this review and the chips are different enough from the Savage3D and Savage4 that there was no good way to model it's performance on the desktop.

The Test