Monday, April 10, 2000

Introduction Few of the latest gambit of graphics card would strike an experienced user as being out of the ordinary, but the ATI Rage Fury MAXX may just change that. This card actually sports 2 independently functioning Rage 128 Pro graphics processors. Even more, 32MB of memory has been allocated for each of those graphic processor, summing to a total of 64MB of on-board memory. Even if you do nothing more than read this introduction, one can't help but be left with the impression that you're not dealing with a run-of-the-mill graphics card. Gifted with a RAMDAC that's clocked at 300MHz, the Rage Fury MAXX runs its memory at 143MHz, and its graphic engines core at 125MHz. Now, let's get to the bottom of things, and take a detailed look at the Rage Fury MAXX.

The Dual Rage 128 Pro

As the introduction pointed out, the Rage Fury MAXX is essentially made of two Rage 128 Pro graphic processors. This fashion of doing things is not totally unknown, as is actually borrowed from 3Dfx, who was the first to use such a dual-configuration with their SLI (Scan Line Interleave) technology. The SLI method required two separate graphics cards, as you may, or may not remember. You may also recall that Quantum3D also borrowed from the SLI principle with their multi-pgraphic-processor graphics card - the Obsidian2 X-24. Finally, MetaByte developed the technology dubbed PGC (Parallel Graphic Configuration), which accomplished the same task by dividing each image in two, and sending each half to a one of two cards to be processed. The principle is based on the idea of having one card render all the even numbered lines, and have the other render the odd number ones. Performance under this scheme was practically doubled. Unfortunately for all, MegaByte's technology never had its day in the sun...

In ATI's case, things work a bit differently. There is no need for two separate cards, in this case, because two processors are already located on the card. So, ATI is already equal to Quantum3D on that point. ATI, for another part, has dubbed its particular rendering technique AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering), wherein one frame is sent to one processor, and the next frame to the other one. So, instead of copying PGC, and splitting processing tasks line-by-line, AFR sends an entire image to each processor to be rendered. Once they have been worked over, they are put in the frame buffer, and processed off by the sole unique RAMDAC which is in charge of translating the digital signals to analog video. This technique proves to be very efficient, and suffers from none of the overhead of the other two techniques.

The advantage of this technology is becoming more, and more important to ATI, because they don't have a new graphic processor on-hand to face off against Nvidia's offerings. Instead, they can simply pair up two Rage 128 Pro for 500 Mpixels/sec, and pit them against the Nvidia GeForce 256's 480 Mpixels/sec, all without having to develop a new GPU. On the other hand, the Rage Fury MAXX doesn't benefit from new functions, such as "Transform and Lighting", or "Cube Environment Mapping", both of which are present on the GeForce 256. Still, the GeForce 256's support for T&L is not as spectacular as the current hype would have buyers believe. So, the fact that the Rage Fury MAXX lacks these functions doesn't weigh very heavily against them, in terms of raw performance. Besides, ATI next generation graphic processors are supposed to take care of these missing functionalities.

Last, but not least, let's not forget that the Rage Fury MAXX supports compression of S3TC textures, a method which was developed by S3, along with Direct Texture compression. For that reason, Quake3 fanatics will be able to take special advantage of this particular card.

Next: Installation and Specifications.