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ATi Rage Fury MAXX Videocard Review
ATi Rage Fury MAXX Videocard Review - PCSTATS
Less than top notch performance in the 3D gaming arena is what caused many gaming enthusiasts to shy away from ATi. Though ATi had the potential for becoming the 3D market leader, delays plagued the path of the Rage 128 chip on the way to market shelves. And in this industry, time is as valuable as money. So rather than being recognized as a leader in the graphics industry, OEM sales for low priced PC's and laptop's were their bread and butter.
 70% Rating:   
Filed under: Video Cards Published:  Author: 
External Mfg. Website: ATI May 26 2000   P. Masrani  
Home > Reviews > Video Cards > ATI Rage Fury MAXX

ATi Rage Fury MAXX Videocard Review


Less than top notch performance in the 3D gaming arena is what caused many gaming enthusiasts to shy away from ATi. Though ATi had the potential for becoming the 3D market leader, delays plagued the path of the Rage 128 chip on the way to market shelves. And in this industry, time is as valuable as money. So rather than being recognized as a leader in the graphics industry, OEM sales for low priced PC's and laptop's were their bread and butter. Sure, ATi did delve into the 3D realm with their Rage line of chips, but never were they considered to be amongst the then current performance leaders.

ATi was determined to make a big entry into the market by building upon an idea conceived by 3dfx with their Voodoo2 line. Somewhat analogous to a dual CPU machine, SLI took graphical horsepower one large step forward. Quite clever actually. While a next generation product is still in development, why not use the best that is currently available in parallel? ATi asked the same question. The result? The ATi Rage Fury MAXX.

Originally dubbed "Aurora", this project was aimed at making gamers take a bit more serious look at ATi and their offerings. Armed with dual Rage 128 Pro chips and a mammoth 32MB x 2 texture space, ATi finally left their footprints in the high end 3D main stage.

What we will take a look at now, is how this product fares against other graphic accelerators on the market. Here we continue with some of the features of this product...

ATi Rage Fury MAXX Specifications


- 64MB 7ns Hyundai SDRAM (32MB dedicated for each processor)
- Dual ATi Rage 128 Pro chips
- 500 Mpixels/sec maximum fill rate
- Alternate Frame Rendering Technology (AFR)
- Hardware DVD support
- Support for 2k x 2k textures
- Maximum resolution of 1600x1200
- Hardware texture compression
- AGP 4x / 2x slot compatible (does not support AGP 4x transfers)
- Drivers for Windows 98

64MB? Wow!

Impressive as it sounds, the 64MB of the Rage Fury MAXX is evenly divided between the 2 Rage 128 Pro chips. As each chip is responsible for handling an entire frame on its own, each chip solely claims right to a 32MB texture cache. So basically, the maximum practical amount of memory that exists per rendered frame is 32MB.

This of course, should not be a disappointment to anyone as games seldom utilize such a large amount of texture space. The good news is that both chips can share the amount of space reserved for a framebuffer. Naturally, this would be the ideal solution in order to make use of double and triple buffering.

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Contents of Article: ATI Rage Fury MAXX
 Pg 1.  — ATi Rage Fury MAXX Videocard Review
 Pg 2.  AFR, SLI, huh?
 Pg 3.  Fillrate and Memory Bandwidth
 Pg 4.  Quake III Arena
 Pg 5.  Unreal Tournament
 Pg 6.  DVD and Conclusion

 
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