ATI Rage Fury MAXX


ATI Rage Fury MAXX - Page 1

The ATI Rage Fury MAXX
ATI's New Twin Engine Hot Rod

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.
 

Rage Fury MAXX - Features and Specifications
Dual Rage Fury Pro GL Chips - Ganging Up On You
 

  • 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.

 

 

Set  Up, Installation, DVD and Overclocking - This way... 

 

Tags:  ATI, rage, Maxx, fury, AG

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