Product Features :

1) What kind of accelerator card does Infinity support ?

Through Rave, Infinity can use any ATI 3D board or 3DFX card provided with a Rave driver.

Speeding up :

1) How can I speed up Infinity ?

The first thing you can do is decrease the rendering size but of course, you may not want to and keep up with 640x480.

You may turn off texture filtering and aliasing: these features slow down a lot the rasterizing time.

If you use the ATI chip on the G3 motherboard as the rasterizer, get 4Mb of VRAM for your Mac: this way, Infinity will be able to store all the textures at the beginning of the game in the VRAM and won't have to dynamically load and unload textures while playing.

If you use the ATI Rave engine, you might turn on the low resolution flag. Infinity will then render in a smaller buffer and use the ATI chip to scale the image with bilinear filtering to the normal rendering size. This results in awesome performances and allows you to render up to 1024x768 on a Rage II!

Trouble shooting :

1) The "low resolution" flag doesn't work and there's garbage on the screen :

This happens when the final rendering size is smaller than the screen size and Infinity tries to center the rendering zone on the screen. This is due to a bug in the ATI Rave driver which is corrected by the ATI Universal Installer 3.4 or later. You just need to download this installer, install it and restart the game.
See the French Touch support page for more info.

ATI 3D chips :

1) Which Macs do have ATI 3D chips on their motherboard ?

• PowerPC 6500 - ATI Rage II w/ 2MB VRAM, non-upgradable
• G3 Tower - ATI Rage II w/ 2MB VRAM, upgradable to 6MB
• G3 Tower (newer) - ATI Rage Pro w/ 6MB VRAM
• G3 powerbook - ATI Rage II w/ 2MB VRAM, upgradable to 6MB
• G3 powerbook (newer) - ATI Rage Pro w/ 6MB VRAM
• iMac (Rev A) - ATI Rage II w/ 2MB VRAM, upgradable to 6MB
• iMac (Rev B) - ATI Rage Pro w/ 6MB VRAM
• G3 Yosemite - ATI Rage 128 w/ 16MB VRAM
• G4 - ATI Rage 128 w/ 16MB VRAM
• IBook - ATI Rage Mobility w/ 4MB VRAM

2) Which video cards do have ATI 3D chips ?

• ATI XClaimVR w/ Rage II, 4-8 MB VRAM
• ATI XClaim3D w/ Rage II, 4-8 MB VRAM
• ATI XClaimVR w/ Rage Pro, 4-8 MB VRAM
• ATI XClaim3D w/ Rage Pro, 4-8 MB VRAM
• ATI NexusGA w/ Rage 128, 8-16 MB VRAM

2) What are the differences between the Rage II and the Rage Pro ?

Unfortunately, the RageII can't do texture highlighting, fog or multi-texture i.e. texture compositing (2 textures in one pass).

3) How fast are ATI chips compared to 3DFX Voodoo chips ?

It is true that the Rage II on many G3's is not as fast as the Voodoo1 chips. On the other hand the Rage Pro on all newer G3's are virtually identical in speed with a Voodoo1 card. On some games the Voodoo1 is faster, on some the RagePro is faster.

Now, there are Voodoo2 cards out there and ATI has the Rage128 and both might run at the same speed...