In the past, the only way to effectively test a mobile chipset was to put the entire platform through the benchmarking suite. While this gives us a good idea how a system performs, it is difficult to judge what role the graphics chip plays in the final score. To get a better idea of how the Mobility 128 performs, ATI made one of their mobile Intel platforms available to our lab for testing along with a Mobility-equipped AGP 2x card. Paired with a Pentium III 500MHz mobile CPU, we weren't quite sure what to expect as far as portable gaming performance was concerned.
Let's just hope you don't hold stereotypes.
- 2 pixel pipelines
- 8 million triangles
- 210 MPixels/s
- 8 KB texel cache
- 8 KB pixel cache
- Single-pass multi-texturing
- Texture Compression (DXTC)
- Anisotropic filtering
- Improved 16-bit rendering
- Dual display support
- HWMC (Motion compensation)
- Hardware iDCT
- Alpha Subpicture Blending
If some of these specifications look familiar, it is because the core of the Mobility 128 is essentially identical to that of the Rage 128 Pro with optimizations for power management. Consuming 2.1W running 3D applications and .85W with a static screen (8MB frame buffer), the Mobility is surprisingly power friendly considering the performance it offers.
