A Strangely Mixed Bag
Written: Jul 30 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Stable with included drivers, nice 32bit output at low resolutions
Cons: Not as fast as more recent 3D chips, poor driver support, no toll-free tech support
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| rhreynolds's Full Review: ATI Rage Fury Pro |
When I was in the market for a video card for my new Athlon system (650MHz, 128MB, 15GB), I read and read and read online reviews. While nVidia's GeForce became the apple of my eye, my budget only permitted a midrange card. Enter the ATI Rage Fury Pro VIVO.
The VIVO stands for video in (from Camcorder/VCR) and video out (to TV/VCR)and for me that was a big purchase point. The card features 32MB of SDRAM, and a plain heatsink attached to the Rage Fury Pro controller - even though all versions of the card reviewed online featured a heatsink and fan (active cooling). This is important to note. ATI does not publicly disclose the clock speed of their graphics chips, but in his review, Anand Lal Shrimpi (of anandtech.com) ran PowerStrip and found the clock speed to be 143MHz/155MHz for the core and memory respectively - hence the need for active cooling. I ran the same software on my card and got 118MHz/125MHz - hence no need for active cooling, and lower performance.
Before I go any further I must say that the one thing that pleased me immensely was the installation. Right out of the box, the card installed and ran without the slightest hitch, and believe me, anyone in the gaming community, especially Athlon lovers, will tell you that this is a rare occurrence. In my three favourite games: Need For Speed High Stakes (NFS), MDK2, and Rayman 2, visuals are beautiful (the card is actually able to render in 32bit 16.7 million colours), and gameplay is relatively smooth at 800x600 resolution, above that the herky-jerky frame rates make them all unplayable.
Now the bad news. The biggest issue for me, and the one most often overlooked in any review, is support. I couldn't call ATI because they don't provide toll-free support - even though their size and earnings give me no impression that it would run them out of business to do so. So e-mail was my only alternative. Their response time is consistently 48hours and the responses are polite and mildly helpful. The problem comes with the drivers. Since the retail release of the card, ATI has released several driver revisions. These drivers are referred to as 'Special Purpose' and according to their website "The Special Purpose display drivers found here are offered AS IS, without warranty of any kind, and have NOT been completely qualified by ATI."
The tech rep told me this was because they were beta drivers but I find it hard to believe that after seven months the drivers are still in beta. Nonetheless, both versions 6.33.21 and 6.33.18 came with a crippled OpenGl ICD and buggy Direct X implementation. MDK and NFS became unplayable and error-full.
The VIVO feature was also disappointing. The TV-out feature was difficult to get working and on my LG Electronics 27" TV, the output was awful. Text was unreadable even at 640x480 and graphics were noticeably blurry. The video in feature worked well with my Sony VTR - I actually watched "The Fifth Element" on my 17" monitor.
Overall, I can't honestly recommend this card to anyone but those who intend to install it and forget it - if it installs without a problem it'll probably stay that way - and have no need for the video output features. Also, with its inability to offer smooth gameplay at 1024x768x32, this is definitely not a gaming card; the card's technology is simply out of date. I recommend this as a replacement for a nVidia TNT-based video card on an older system.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 110
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Epinions.com ID:
rhreynolds
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Member: Raymond Reynolds
Location: NYC
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
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