Toronto-based graphics-chip manufacturer ATI always seems to get lost among the hubbub created by its competitors. When the company announced its Rage Fury MAXX last fall, news of this dual-chip video card was smothered by the hype surrounding Nvidia's GeForce 256, S3's Savage2000, and the 3dfx VSA-100 (then known only as Napalm). That trend threatens to continue in this season of new product announcements. ATI, however, is ready for 3dfx's Voodoo5 and Nvidia's GeForce 2 GTS, and as you read this, the company is unveiling its own next-generation chip at WinHEC in New Orleans: the Radeon 256.

　　The Radeon 256 is ATI's fastest performer yet, and with a quick glance at its specifications, looks poised to give 3dfx and Nvidia a run for their money. At 30 million transistors, the chip is easily ATI's most advanced GPU to date. Its architecture is designed to handle up to 128MB of 200MHz double data rate (DDR) SDRAM for a memory bandwidth capable of achieving over 6.4GB/s across its bus. In comparison, Nvidia's NV15 chip tops out at 5.3GB/s. At the heart of this architecture are two features that are designed to add horsepower and visual splendor to the Radeon 256: the Charisma Engine and Pixel Tapestry.

　　Despite their strange monikers, the Charisma Engine and Pixel Tapestry are key elements in the Radeon 256's rendering capabilities. The Charisma Engine is ATI's fancy name for the chip's transformation, clipping, and lighting engine, and it can support 30M triangles per second at the chip's peak performance. A character-animation accelerator lets polygons move and bend naturally without causing tearing at the polygons' seams. What does this mean to gamers? Through the use of the Radeon 256's Charisma Engine, games that take advantage of T&L acceleration will boast 3D models that don't look like a mesh of stringed polygons, and instead will look and behave realistically.

　　Whereas the Charisma Engine enhances the way polygons are animated, the Radeon 256's Pixel Tapestry architecture dramatically improves the overall visual value of 3D games by implementing a number of 3D features, some of which will be supported for the first time in any 3D accelerator. Its impressive list of features includes support for all three kinds of bump mapping (dot product 3, environment mapped, and emboss); priority buffering, which is used primarily for shadow mapping; a simplified deformable geometry setup; full-scene anti-aliasing; and motion blur and depth of field blur. Additionally, thanks to the Pixel Tapestry architecture, the Radeon 256 has the ability to texture a pixel three times in a single pass, meaning that light maps, shadow maps, and reflections can all be accomplished in a single rendering pass - a feat that normally cost other 3D chips two or three passes. While today's games might not see a big gain in performance because of this feature, it's only a matter of months before the first games in a flurry of multitexture 3D games become available that will thoroughly make use of this technology. Duke Nukem Forever, Warcraft III, Halo, Giants, Black & White, Vampire, and Team Fortress II are only a few of the titles that will support and benefit from ATI's technology.

　　ATI hasn't announced a complete video card based on this new chipset, but the company is expected to unveil such a board in the coming weeks. Gamers can expect this Radeon 256-powered card to land on store shelves sometime in July. In the meantime, we'll be bringing you more coverage of this new technology as it's unveiled.