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ATI Rage Fury MAXX Review
Johan Jonasson writes "There's an excellent review of the ATI Rage Fury MAXX over at Tom's Hardware. For those unfamiliar with the product it's a monster graphics board with two Rage 128 PRO chips, each with isolated 32MBs of memory per chip which adds up to 64MB on one board. There's another review of the same board at Sharky Extreme. I've got to get me one of these. "
From the Sharky review:
As the Rage Fury MAXX is meant for gamers, ATi has written drivers for Windows 98 only. While we'd agree that most gamers don't run NT4, it will be interesting to see the impact Windows 2000 has on the gaming community. Other then that, Linux users will have to look elsewhere and Win 3.x users should definitely think about upgrading.
When will these people learn???? Sounds like a nice card, but I'm certainly not in the market for Windows-only hardware.I already read both reviews a week ago...
As far as I can remember both articles mentioned that for online-gamers the card would have a slight delay because of the dual-cpu design.
It said something about rendering twice as slow as a nVidia GeForce but made up speed by rendering each frame on the idle cpu. So frame one would be rendered by CPU1, frame two by CPU2, frame 3 by CPU1 and so on...
Anyway, what they said was that if you would have a framerate of 50 frames/sec that would give you on a normal nVidia a time difference between an action (movement, shooting and stuff) and rendering of the actual frame about 0.02 seconds. Giving the ATI has dual-CPU it takes about 0.04 seconds to render.
According to Sharkeyextreme you would certainly "feel" the difference.
Anyway, another reason why I personally would prefer nVidia is because of their good native openGL support.
- Artificial Intelligence usually beats real stupidity -
1) No Linux drivers, win98 only.
2) Great DVD BUT no TV output.
3) Slower frames/s than GeForce and marginally better than TNT2 Ultra for some games.
Seems enough for me to leave it alone for a while.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
That's a sure sign of a weak card. When you have to put 2 of your best chips in one card to equal the competition, that just means you have a real shoddy chip. I don't see a big performance increase gained over its competition. I'm sure Matrox can put 2 G400 chips on the same board and kill ATi on performance.
Why are you talking about a card that has no linux drivers. The company has made it a point to just support linux enough to barely use the card. The 3d support for the Rage Fury chipset period isn't even finished yet. Why bother? I will never buy another ATI card again. Hell, I would of been rid of the card if SuSe didn't release a free X server for it. Enough ranting
In simple, why support something that you can't use? Yeah "you gotta get one of those" but what are you gonna do with it? The holidays are over so hanging it on your tree as an ornament would be rather redundant.
I would love to tell you the real story here but I don't think these hardware companies would appreciate it
Tom lost all my respect. And if you feel you need to read the surrounding text, look at the URL below. Wow. http://www6.tomshardwar e.com/graphic/99q4/991230/fury-14.html
Sosumi. just kidding. DONT!
"It offers instant gratification for the games that are out now. When T&L-enabled titles start hitting the shelves later in 2000, ATi's next generation chip should be ready for them." - Sharky Extreme
This review seems almost as biased as the last one based on the board before it was released. Do they think that nVidia will be sitting around and not have something better by the time ATi release their next generation chip? If I'm going to spend upwards of $250 on a graphics card, I don't want to be shelling out for another card later in the year to get the new features. Stupid reviewer! The ATi card is no cheaper than the geForce DDR, but with lower performance and fewer features. It's obvious which card to get when chosing between the two. Besides, who cares about the hi-res results: no serious gamer would play at 1280x1024, the framerate is half what I consider the miniumum for games like Quake 3 - where the difference between 50 and 60 fps is noticeable, let alone playing at 30 fps! - and with Quake 2 I would suggest that there is no need to go to resolutions above 640x480 or 800x600 as there is no real gain.
The cheapest Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro (geForce DDR) is available for $233, according to computers.com (can't find the MAXX yet):
Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro, sorted by price
There's a few problems with this card.
Some people have raised the concern that there will be an additional latency in first person shooters that some gamers would notice, since it's rendering the next frame ahead before it displays when you haven't hit the key to decide your actions in that frame yet. Maybe not noticable to some people but for the hard core gamer....
The Voodoo2 SLI and multichip Voodoo4/5 cards don't have this problem because they render portions of the same frame.
It's also very inefficient to have 32 MB per chip rather than a shared 64MB pool.
You're better off going for a Voodoo5 if you want the absolute highest fill rate or a GeForce DDR if you want maximum geometry throughput.
Seems to be a lot of ATI slamming going on. I for one know that ATI has NEVER made the fastest card in the market (although their marketing department seems to think so).
But, I do have an ATI AIW 128 (not Pro). Boy is it nice to watch TV, or record a TV magazine for later. Its nice to be able to broadcast video in netmeeting or CUSeeMe. Its nice to be able to do all of this on one board. I have OpenGL driver support (even in NT!). I have DirectX support. It compensates DVD playback. Its a very well rounded board. And what's more, I get very decent game play at 32bit (whereas most traditional 3D boards cringe at 32-bit color and stick to 16-bit).
Now, there were two ways to proceed in enhancing game performance:
GeForce did one and ATI did the other. The reviews I've seen place them very close. No which one of these guys will figure out how to use TWO T&L chips first?
Anyways, I just wanted to point out that ATI is most prominently a marketing company selling to an OEM market. And they're doing a DAMN GOOD job at that. Their boards are not the best, but they're certainly far from the worst.
Let me get this straight; The card ONLY works in win98, doesn't have native OpenGL support, has a SLOW framerate, and it's ungodly expensive... Boy, sounds like a real winner to me. Why don't we all just go buy some old Cirrus chips, put 50 of them on a board, and sell it. Oh yeah..
=======
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Sure, you can buy a MAXX product for $200~250 and have yourself a kick-ass video card. Or, you could shell out $200~300 for a GeForce-based card and get a kick-ass video card that might just have a longer lifetime in it.
S3's and nVidia's new chipsets support hardware transformation and lighting--done right on the video card, instead of the CPU (which would be software). 3dfx's and ATI's new products don't. Now, it depends on game developer's support for this new technology, but chances are good that many games in the coming couple years will count on offloading these calculations to the video card in hardware T&L enabled cards. If that happens, then owners of these cards will experience serious performance boosts or be able to run games their non-T&L-card-owning bethren can't.
Don't be fooled by the 64 Megs of RAM on the MAXX, either. It doesn't increase the total textures the card can handle, because each chip has to keep track of (almost) all the textures simultaneously. The RAM on this video card is not a particular selling point compared to other 32M cards.
One point ATI might be able to score on is price. The MAXX is expected to retail for less than GeForce products, and may offer a better deal. Only time and the market will tell.
Of course, MAXX products will really succeed in the OEM market, where ATI's strength is. And when (if) this technology gets ported to the Mac, it'll be a major boon to Mac gaming. Given ATI's current stranglehold on the Mac 3D video card market, I expect this card will find it's way there soon enough.
Jonathan Pearce jonathan@pearce.name
3EAAFB2A http://www.jonathan.pearce.name/
Is it just me, or has Sharky been infected with the "suck up to our advertisers" disease that hit Tom a while back? Get this quote from here:
Well, excuse me, since ATI has thrown two chips at the problem compared with one for the NVidia card, I would expect the words "raw power" to be applied to the GeForce. On top of that, he says that the ATI card "almost overtakes" the GeForce DDR; the framerate differences between the ATI and the SDR card on the three tests on this page were 0.4 FPS, 0.1 FPS and 0.4 FPS again, whereas the gaps between the ATI and the DDR card were, respectively, 5 FPS, 5.4 FPS and 5.1 FPS. Since we're talking about a nearly 20% difference in F/R between the ATI and the DDR cards, his comments strike me as being just this side of dishonest. He then goes on to say that the DDR GeForce card has better bandwidth and T&L, as if NVidia were cheating or something.
If you look at the tests, many of them show the ATI card getting its ass well and truly kicked by the GeForce cards, sometimes by margins of 100% or more, yet Sharky skims by these figures as if they were of little importance, even though he's the one who did the tests. Faugh. Show us your list of advertisers, Sharky.
for that price,
lay low for a couple of months,
and buy yourself a Playstation 2
J.
ATI seems to have a very definite anger in its product names.
*Rage* 128 *Fury* - whoa!
*Rage Pro* (how to be professionally mad?)
Is the next board going to be a buget version?: *Rage 128 Mildly-Upset*
And of course dont forget their next board:
*RAGE 256: HOMICIDAL MANIAC*
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
The PSX2 is set for a Christmas 2000 release in the US, Spring in Japan. I could wait "a couple months", but what good is a game if I can't read what it says? And even so, a PSX2 is not going to make Drakan or any of the other pc games I play run any quicker, until the software is available for it.
But I agree. The PSX2 is going to kick severely large ammounts of ass. And I'd rather shell out for a Geforce now anyway
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
patience young Jedi, the world at large just realized Linux existed last year. Buy your Linux copy of Q3 and wait a little while longer. BTW, good 3d drivers won't do much for Linux without LOTS of good 3d games.
+&x
It's not that exciting! The graphics card only really uses 32Mb (two lots of 32Mb with the textures, etc., duplicated in both.) It sounds like your computer uses its memory more efficiently! ;)
Considering that between him and Gareth Hughes, there's pretty much an alpha driver for the Rage PRO available for the brave at heart to play Q3 and other OpenGL games on. He doesn't like the chip much (seems it's still missing some things- but you apparently can get by with it) but they've gotten the framerates close to what a G200 does right now. We're going to clean it up and use that driver as a reference Utah-GLX driver because it's the cleanest one to date. Shortly, you can expect a RAGE 128 driver to pop up (Beings that they've given a hell of a lot more info for it to us...).
It's not so much the chips themselves but the drivers that make the chipsets worse than they actually are. Yes, the ATI offerings are nowhere near as good as the Matrox, NVidia, etc. offerings- but they're everywhere, cheap, and are serviceable. As for this card, we'll have support for the basic configuration shortly- all we need for the full support is the info to interlace them from ATI.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Quake runs fine.
'Fine' is insufficient. If I can't see every individual rendered blood droplet when I blow your head through the back of the screen from all the way across the level without any slow down with ALL of the eye candy turned on then it isn't good enough!
>:)
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
We have reached a sort of plateau in computer game graphics: we can squeeze X triangles on the screen in any one frame (around 10K, given q3a's r_speeds), and render them damn fast. The problem is, the CPU is still doing the T&L in most cases, and that puts two limits on current games:
1. We can't have any more than X triangles per frame, limiting geometric complexity.
2. Nearly all (90%) of the computing power is going toward rendering, leaving precious little left for AI, physics, or anything else.
The future is obviously in cards with T&L, and it will become clear in the next year that games that expect a T&L card will run MUCH faster. With a T&L engine, we can now fit many more tris on the screen (5x? 10x?) at the nearly the same frame rates. We can also have much more complex worlds.
So while the MAXXXXX might be ok for now, it will lose out to the GeForce. Maybe not today, but it will. While most companies are pushing fill rate to beyond the max (1600x1200 at 120 fps? who needs that?), the geforce is the only card that will could run Myst in real time at 60 fps.
What's with these idiotic macho names that video cards have these days? "Rage Fury Max Extreme, D00D!" Are these computer hardware or skateboards? Oh well, I guess their primary target market is the same: 12 year old testosterone-poisoned boys....
The Voodoo 5 also need to be plugged into an electrical outlet because the motherboard can't supply enough power for its processors. Doesn't that seem like a serious design flat to you?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.