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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. "
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 -
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.
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
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.
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.
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....