The Next Level - Features

Review: ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon (page 2)

03/23/01

Raziel reviews the most versatile card in the market!

Radeon Gaming Performance

If I were to review the gaming performance of the All in Wonder Radeon, I would be saying the exact same thing as if I were talking about the performance of the Radeon 32 DDR. Why? Because the AIW is basically a Radeon 32 DDR with loads of added features! Anyway, most of us here are interested on how it fares on today's latest 3D intensive games, and the results are nothing more than impressive!

32MB of DDR memory sounds meager compared to most of today's high end graphics cards that have 64MB such as the GeForce II Ultra or even the Radeon 64 DDR. Nonetheless, there's a lot of power in this card and depending on your CPU and RAM, you could play all your games with maxed out settings without a hitch. Clocked at 166Mhz, the AIW Radeon matches up pretty well in comparison to the competition and even outperforms the GeForce II MX cards! In the OpenGL Quake III test, it matched with the Radeon All-in-Wonder 32MB, showing that there are no functional differences between the two besides All-in-Wonder's numerous multimedia features.

Although all GeForce 2 cards outperform the Radeon in games that are set in 16-bit mode, Radeon beats the competition at 32-bit. Why live in the past playing games at 16-bit when games today and in the future are at their most beautiful in 32-bit? I've tested the AIW in Unreal Tournament in 32-bit mode at 1024 x 786 resolution and I get 72+fps without any slowdown whatsoever (with the card over-clocked at 191Mhz, which I'll get into later)! Other games such as Alice and Deus Ex run beautifully at maxed out settings without any slowdown. The picture quality of the games is the best I've ever seen and 2D quality is incredibly crisp.

Unlike some of the GeForce II cards out there, there is no blurring on desktop or general text and with built-in DVD hardware support, movies are amazing clear and sharp. ATI has been known to produce the best videocards with DVD and VIVO support and this tradition has certainly carried itself over to the Radeon series.

Here's a quick chart of the AIW's 3DMark 2000 and gaming performance in comparison to the Radeon 64 DDR's. You'll notice that there's not a whole world of difference between these two cards. When the AIW is overclocked, it will beat the Radeon 64's performance!

	All-In-Wonder Radeon	ATI Radeon 64MB DDR
3DMark2000 (800x600x16) (3DMarks)	5,678	6,221
Game 1 (fps)	39.7	45.6
Game 2 (fps)	37.7	38.4
3DMark2000 (800x600x32) (3DMarks)	5,362	5,839
Game 1 (fps)	37.8	43.5
Game 2 (fps)	37.3	38.2
3DMark2000 (1,024x768x16) (3DMarks)	4,476	4,959
Game 1 (fps)	29.1	33.3
Game 2 (fps)	36.4	36.9
3DMark2000 (1,024x768x32) (3DMarks)	4,122	4,678
Game 1 (fps)	27.7	31.5
Game 2 (fps)	35.1	37
3DMark2000 (1,280x1,024x16) (3DMarks)	3,259	3,612
Game 1 (fps)	20.3	22.6
Game 2 (fps)	32.3	34.6
3DMark2000 (1,280x1,024x32) (3DMarks)	2,880	3,415
Game 1 (fps)	18.2	35.4
Game 2 (fps)	30	36.1
3DMark2000 (1,600x1,200x16) (3DMarks)	2,472	2,783
Game 1 (fps)	15	17.1
Game 2 (fps)	27.8	29.9
3DMark2000 (1,600x1,200x16) (3DMarks)	1,946	2,577
Game 1 (fps)	13.5	16.5
Game 2 (fps)	22.1	31.1
Quake III Arena (800x600x16) (fps)	91.1	93.4
Quake III Arena (800x600x32) (fps)	88.9	91.9
Quake III Arena (1,024x768x16) (fps)	71.3	77.4
Quake III Arena (1,024x768x32) (fps)	67	73.3
Quake III Arena (1,280x1,024x16) (fps)	44.7	52.1
Quake III Arena (1,280x1,024x32) (fps)	32.5	49.1
Quake III Arena (1,600x1,200x16) (fps)	29.6	36.9
Quake III Arena (1,600x1,200x32) (fps)	20.4	34.9
MDK2 (800x600x16) (fps)	82.29	82.41
MDK2 (800x600x32) (fps)	77.95	82.06
MDK2 (1,024x768x16) (fps)	80.47	81.37
MDK2 (1,024x768x32) (fps)	63.95	78.86
MDK2 (1,280x1,024x16) (fps)	55.21	68.92
MDK2 (1,280x1,024x32) (fps)	49.19	59.06
MDK2 (1,600x1,200x16) (fps)	41.15	45.66
MDK2 (1,600x1,200x32) (fps)	28.27	35.16

How much of a pain are the drivers? -->