Video Cards in 2001: Preview

The Art of ATI

ATI’s acquisition of ArtX back in February left them with quite a bit of interesting technology.  We brought you pictures of Nintendo’s new Gamecube from ATI’s booth in our Fall Comdex 2000 Summary and the reason behind ATI demonstrating the Gamecube was because the technology behind it is driven by a highly integrated ATI/ArtX graphics processor.

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With the Gamecube design already complete, the ArtX team has been working on bringing this technology down to the PC level as well. 

Another project that ATI’s ArtX team has been working on is a PC North Bridge with integrated graphics.  The first product from ATI to use this technology is the S1-370TL.  The S1-370TL is a North Bridge for Slot-1/Socket-370 CPUs that features integrated ArtX graphics aimed at the value PC market.  It also happens to be the first integrated graphics solution with hardware T&L support, hence the TL in the S1-370TL product name. 

Since the S1-370TL is based on a UMA architecture it shares the system memory for its frame buffer, meaning that by default it has a 64-bit data path to your system memory.  However, the North Bridge also supports a 128-bit data path to system memory which means much more than faster video memory since your video memory is your system memory. 

With a 128-bit data path to system memory the S1-370TL has the same amount of bandwidth as a DDR SDRAM solution, but while still using regular SDRAM.  The only requirement in this case will be that you install SDRAM in pairs since each SDRAM only has a 64-bit interface width. 

In terms of video performance, the S1-370TL’s integrated video was never intended to be a high performance solution.  The graphics core features four pixel pipes, clocked at 83MHz, resulting in a 330 MPixels/s fill rate.  While ATI hasn’t published anything on textured pixel fill rate we can assume that the core is only capable of processing one texture per pixel pipeline, meaning that it will most likely have a 330 MTexels/s fill rate.  The T&L engine on the S1-370TL is rated at 12.5 million polygons per second. 

As a North Bridge, the S1-370TL supports 66/100 and 133MHz FSB frequencies, and the same frequencies for the memory bus.  With a 128-bit memory interface running at 133MHz, as we mentioned before, the S1-370TL has the same amount of memory bandwidth as a PC2100 DDR solution, 2.1GB/s.  This could help overall system performance significantly, you can expect to see a 10 – 20% boost in performance over regular PC133 North Bridge designs.