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The
ATI Rage Fury MAXX
ATI's
New Twin Engine Hot Rod
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In
the world of 3D Graphics Accelerators, there are
a number of ways to approach the issue of
increasing fill rate, image quality and overall
performance. One of these ways would be to
redesign your graphics chip with faster internal
pipelines, larger caches, more hardware
supported features, etc. |
On the other hand, you could just populate your
current graphics card with two processing
engines based on your original design.
This is an over simplification of the latter
approach as there are many issues with respect
to getting these two engines to work together in
unison. This technology was first
pioneered by 3dfx with their "Scan Line
Interleave" approach. This is
an arbitration of the processing resources of
the two chips on separate cards, setting them up
to render alternate Scan Lines of the image on
the screen. One card renders the odd lines
in sequence and one the even. The problem
with this technique is that both graphics
processors have to set up triangles for every
frame, thus making it somewhat
inefficient. Here 1+1 doesn't exactly
equal 2 with respect to frame rate.
ATI decided to
take a different approach. It is more of a
"parallel processing" approach in
comparison to multi circuit board SLI. ATI
uses their "Multiple ASIC Technology"
(ASIC stands for Application Specific Integrated
Circuit. In this case, a Rage Fury Pro GL
chip) to implement "Alternate Frame
Rendering" or ARF if you like
acronyms. This method instructs one Rage
Fury Pro GL chip to render the even frames and
the other chip to render the odd frames.
Each chip provides its own triangle set up for
its own frame without having to wait for the
other chip. This is a more efficient
approach versus "traditional" SLI
and provides for better "load
balancing" of the rendering requirements.
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| Rage
Fury MAXX - Features and Specifications |
| Dual
Rage Fury Pro GL Chips - Ganging Up On
You |
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- 64MB
of local texture memory
- Powered
by dual ATI RAGE 128 PRO graphics engines
using ATI's MAXX? technology.
- Delivers
500 Megapixels/sec fill rate.
- High
resolution, true color (32-bit) quality
graphics.
- Features
ATI's Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR)
technology.
- Full
OpenGL ICD, Direct3D and DirectX support for
all popular 3D games
- Direct
X Texture Compression
- 2X
AGP Universal bus (Compatible with AGP 2X/4X
systems)
- DVD
Hardware Motion Compensation and IDCT
Support
- Dual
engine acceleration for full-screen 3D
- Single
engine acceleration for windowed 3D and 2D
Desktop
The
first thing that comes to mind is how
"bad" (as in "cool" and
"mean") this board looks. It has
dual Rage Fury Pro GL chipsets, dual active heat
sinks and dual 32MB texture memory for each Rage
Fury Pro GL chip. The design of the board
is clean, elegant and efficient. In the
bullet list above you'll notice the 500
Megapixel Fill Rate. This theoretically
puts it slightly ahead of the NVidia GeForce
which comes in at 480.
Another
nice feature, is this board's capability to
support Hardware Motion Compensation and IDCT
for DVD playback. More on this
later. One more thing to note is that the
Rage Fury MAXX only enables the second Rage Fury
Pro GL chip when you are in full screen 3D
mode. In a 2D desktop or 3D in a window
setting, it will only activate one of the chips.
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Set
Up, Installation, DVD and Overclocking - This
way...
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