The first incarnation of a T2R4 (Ticket to Ride 4) based card from Number 9 will be called
the Revolution IV. Building on the strong Revolution 3D product that has been available
from Number 9 for about 14 months, the Revolution IV forges a new direction for Number 9 as
a company. The new mission is to offer the finest video "solutions" on the market instead
of one-dimensional products that excel in some areas, yet are poor in others.
To accomplish this goal, Number 9 immediately defined their T2R4 chip's performance
and capabilities list as follows:
- 2.0 GB per second Bandwidth Capacity
- 128bit 2D and 3D integrated engines
- SDRAM or SGRAM Support
- MPEG II 30FPS Playback at Full-Screen
- 430 MFLOP On-Board Floating Point Setup Engine
- 32bpp Z-Buffer Accuracy and Final Rendering Color Depth
- 10 LOD Per-Pixel Mip-Mapping
- Full Scene Anti-Aliasing
- AGP 2X Support, including Sidebanding and DME
- Bi-linear and Tri-Linear filtering support
- Specular Lighting, Interpolated Fogging and Alpha Blending
- Support for DX6, and OpenGL
Maximum Supported 2D Resolutions:
1600x1200x32bpp
Maximum Supported 3D Resolutions (w/ Z-Buffer enabled):
1600x1200x16bpp
1280x1024x32bpp
Number 9 felt that a chip configured on a 16MB board with the above features enabled would
give them a very strong and capable product that would appeal to almost any segment of the
buying public.
The Revolution IV delivers on all of the above listed features, and does it fairly well.
For benchmark testing, Number 9 informed us that the Revolution IV card we received is
running at 70% of its final production MHz speed (70MHz is a good guess, with 100MHz being
the final core speed at launch). They also indicated that they've decided after their own
internal testing that the board will be equipped as follows at the time it becomes available
to the public:
- 16MB SDRAM version only. (Possible 32MB SDRAM version available shortly after the Revolution IV's debut)
- Price = $149 MSRP for initial 16MB version. (32MB version's price is unknown currently)
- Possible Game Bundle
- No-TV Out Port
By switching from SGRAM (which our beta board is equipped with) to SDRAM, Number 9 is
able to lower the cost of the Revolution IV to the $149 figure you see above. Their
own internal testing results have shown a 1.5 to 2% drop off in the SDRAM-based card's
performance versus the early SGRAM powered variants. They also indicate however that by
the launch date they expect to have closed that gap to the point where any performance
differences will be negligible.
The choice to not provide a TV-Out port isn't a strange one, as Number 9's pedigree and
history has always been at the highest professional level. They've never really made an
all-out gaming card before, and their newness to this segment shows by the lack of a TV-Out
capability. It's possible that future editions of the Revolution IV might include a TV-Out
option, but only if Number 9 gets a tremendous amount of feedback regarding the demand for
such a change.
That being said, gamers will have to decide if no TV-Out and the possibly of no included game
bundle will be justified at the Revolution IV's $149 price tag.
