ATi XP

I felt like the coolest kid in the block....No wait, in the country, maybe.
All the low scores in the tests are not going to keep me down. Infact, now nothing mattered than waiting for my mére to come to India.

For the few weeks before my mother's arrival, I was walking on air. I was ranting to anyone and everyone that stopped by to talk to me about this preciousss...my precciousss...

It all started when I first heard that ATi was tired of sleeping in the ashes and decided to rise out of it. They did and NVidia didn't like it. ATi planned to release a graphic card that skipped many generations. The ultimate cutting edge of a graphics cards were to be released under the name, the ATi Radeon 9700 series.

The ATi 9700 pro, which I had ordered via my brother-in-law and my sister, whom my mother had went to the US to meet, was like a Goliath in God mode. The David of an NVidia watched baffled at the giant while he captured all the market from NVidia, the former one and the only champion.

My old computer was a boxed PC from HCL. It had some antique parts like:

PIII 450 MHz processor,
Intel 440BX motherboard,
32 MB Ram,
20GB Hard drive,
Built-in graphics,
a 15" monitor and
other cheap cards from Aztech(bankrupt) and BitWare.

I was proud to run MS Millennium edition on it. Soon, as it happens in the hardware world, my machine was the slowest in the block.

The timing couldn't have been perfect. I had been planning on upgrading my old jalopy of a computer for some time and was about to proceed to the infamous Ritchie Street to grab some cheap hardware. Since I was, and am, a regular to www.TomsHardware.com, I followed the ATi Radeon's slow progress from a side-bar news headline to a full blown review. I was amazed, like everyone in the hardware world, at the new architecture and all the stuff that I could not comprehend, but I was astounded nevertheless.

I used the fact that my mother was in the US and the fact that my dad isn't too tech savvy (My father asked me if it was essential for my computer education, and I said "Totally!" all the way thinking of Max Payne and other contemporary "educational" softwares). And all that remained was choosing the online reaseller ad sending that list to my BIL and sister. My BIL paid for the card which was reimbursed by mom. All through the weeks that my mom stayed there, I would ask her in the phone if my Radeon has arrived. Even when it did come to them via mail, I bugged them asking how the card looks like and then asking them not to touch it incase some static remained in their fingers and damaged the precioussss circuits.

My biological clock played fool with me almost everyday. Everyday, I will wake up thinking that the day my mom came home will be this week. And almost everyday, I go check the calendar. I wished I was encased in liquid N2 in some suspended animation and thawed me on the day that I would receive my Radeon. Thus went the three weeks....

Another day, and I went to check the calendar. This time, it was not only THE week, but also THE day! My brain seems to have taken the brute-force method of finding out the day or whatever....

My mom landed. We greeted her. We came home. I looked at my mom and my mom just said, "It's in this bag". The world seemed to go slow-mo, as I turned and marched toward the bag. The slow motion was filled with all the junky details like the number of vertex pipelines, the fill-rate, the level of anti-aliasing, the level of anisotropic filtering, the various benchmarking tests and yada yada yada....

For the first few days, I was afraid to try the video card in my old computer. My old computer was AGP 1.0 or AGP 2x, meaning that the maximum data transfer rate was 512MB/sec running at 133MHz (where, x = 66MHz, the speed of pci). The signalling current for AGP 1.0 was 3.3Volts.
This scared me as the Radeon 9700 pro was designed for AGP 3.0 or AGP 8x, at a signalling voltage of 0.8Volts. The 32bit bus runs at 533MHz (8 x pci) with a maximum data rate of 2GBytes/sec.
I knew that the card was a Universal AGP one, but I wasn't gonna risk it. So after countless referencess to ATi's site, tomshardware, AnandTech, sharkyextreme and countless forums, I decided to try my card in my old mother board.

The result was nothing short of amazing. The difference between my old built-in and ATi radeon was evident right from the BIOS screen. I had my mother and father assembled near my monitor and I was like all over the screen while pointed the difference the card made to the display. I was like, "See, look how deep the colors are? It's unbelievable!". And my mama was like, "Uh..huh...You sure it works fine? Then it's ok. I think I see the quality.... I think I left something in the kitchen."

I didn't matter if my mama saw the difference or not. The fact cannot not be denied. I spent the following days playing all the old games and just stood there as the Radeon Pro redefined the way to paint a pixel on the screen.

Then, after a week, I went to the Ritchie Street. Had a blank cheque in my hands. My mind preset with the configuration that will not make my computer the bottleneck for the Radeon God. But unfortunately, this is India, where the costs are sky high and generations old components are the only ones available.

But as it turned out, many of the components that I had in my mind won't fit in the budjet (The Blank cheque? Yeah, but my pop said, "Fifty's tops"). So I squeezed in all these into the Fifty big ones.

P4 2.4GHz processor,
512MB DDR266,
80GB 7200rpm HDD,
Intel i845GBV MoBo,
Microsoft kbd and wheel-mouse optical,
a 17" flat samtron and
philips 2.1 1200Watts speaker

It looked prety neat config back then, trust me. Everyone, after hearing my config, said that that will be their config in two years. All that made me feel good. But I still feel bad not to have bought a 3Gig processor and maybe a faster MoBo. The problem with my current MoBo is that, it has only a AGP 4x slot. Which translates to around 1.1GBytes/sec only :-(

Though all my hardware sources said that no game in the market will require more that an AGP4x and also that only at UXGA resolutions (Ultra eXtended Graphics Array) and more, I still can't help feel that I am not experiencing all of Radeon's goodness.

The night we (me and my "Ritchie street" friend Venkatesh) took all the parts from the store and to my house, he started unpacking the processor. He held the processor and Mother board in his hands, with the anti-static packaging material gloving his hands. I was in a hurry to see the config assembled, bu he kept studying the components and said, "Wait for some time...Do you think it's everyday that I come accross such components?"

After drooling over the components (not literally, ofcourse), we finally started putting it all together. The tower seemed to lack a few screw holes and we had to wait for the next day to go to Ritchie street and change the case. He left. But I was relentless. I assembled the mother board on top of a newspaper spread over my desktop and installed everything there. I even used a screw driver to short two jumper pins to make the machine boot-up. Before the day was over, I had installed a few games and was catching glimpse of how well the card handled all the games.

Enter DaD.

Now I have to tell ya, my dad was opposed to my idea of going to ritchie street to buy my computer. He was into "Branded" PCs like HCL and the like. I for one, knew enough than to buy boxed PCs. They are usually over-priced junks hiding behind colorful and attractive boxes (Kinda reminds you of some expensive software, doesn't it? An OS, maybe. Not sure.)

So now you can imagine the attitude in my father's voice till I got back my Tower. It was one of the, "Told you so"s.

The new configuration felt very light as my radeon took away the burden of graphics processing and rendering from the rest of the computer.
I acquired a lot of games from friends at first and then slowly I started buying them myself. The first few weeks must have driven my radeon crazy. I was constantly running banchmark utilities, in-game benchmarks and yada yada yada, while constantly trying to beat or atleast equal the benchmarks reported online by peers. Then slowly the mania faded, but still lives, leaving only the passion for games.

But I don't enjoy a game completely, if I don't look at the beauty with which my Radeon rendered it. For example, If I had finsihed playing, say DoomIII or Farcry, I usually go through the game again, if possible in fly mode and take in all the beauty with no hurry.

ATi's catalyst (Driver for the card) team is called the best driver team in the graphics industry. Even as the Radeon series was introduced, ATi announced that it would be releasing atleast 8 or so drivers a year. Though it would mean no artefacts in a new game and better stability, it also means that you have to update the software constantly, in addition to updating the DirectX API.

At some point of time, as the Radeon 9800 XT and NVidia's FX series were released, my sister and BIL were preparing to come home to India. I asked them if they could buy me one of those, but they were seriously in need of money and couldn't spare a dollar. Infact they didn't even have money to buy me a iPod or an XBOX.

So I wait. And thus, waiting, I write this blog post, hoping that some of the present tenses would become past tenses.