Does ATi Have a GeForce 256 Killer?

A reader wrote to us with Sharky's review of the ATi Rage Fury MAXX. Besides simply being a mouthful of words to say whenever you want to refer to your video card, it's also being setup to go head-to-head with the nVidia GeForce 256. According to benchmarks in the review, it's a really good match.

Comments

Sigh.

[gnarphlager]

The benchmarks are on an i820 . . . AGAIN. Why the hell does everyone keep doing this? Test on something I can possibly buy. Honestly, I think they just wanted to toss out the term "coppermine" once or twice.

That said, it looks like a nice card. I'd like to see how it performs on an Athelon(or however the hell you spell that). I'm personally going to wait; I don't have time to write Linux drivers for it ;-)

Tom's Hardware

[Hartford]

Tom's Hardware put their own preview up this morning:

http://www5.tomshardware.com/graphic/99q4/991108 /index.html

This isn't a geforce killer at all

[platypus]

This is just a sign how far nvidia is in front of it's competition (Disclaimer: I neither own nvidia shares nor even a nvidia graphics card).
Come on, buy this thing a watch newer game titles crawl next year.
And what about CPU-scalability, can I use this with a 266Mhz Pentium II and see a difference to a single Ati-Card? What I have read about the geforce, I will see some difference although this wouldn't be the perfect combination too.
And let's talk about drivers, I assume the next generation geforce will be similar to the geforce256 (like g200->g400), so there is a (slight) chance of getting mature drivers on other OS's like linux.
This product OTOH seems to be a dead end if it needs other drivers than the single chip cards.
Oh, and can someone explain to me the difference of the benchmark results between the sharky review and the one on Tom's hardware?
Methinks on Tom's site the geforce wins most of the bench's.

It's all about the drivers

[debrain]

There's nothing like that brand new blue screen of death when playing on a brand new video card. Still get it with a TNT2 in half-life. Why? Because hardware is released about a year before the software drivers catch up.

I just bought 2 voodoo2's from Creative because I'm finally confident that they have reasonably stable drivers. I'm still waiting for stable Rage Pro drivers ...

Of course, I'm still waiting for a stable OS to play games on (Yay Loki!) besides Windows, which should make a huge difference in the stability of the games. In particular, XFree86 4 DRI should be just great.

Re:It's all about the drivers

[debrain]

This is on an SMB Celeron running Windows 2000. :) We had issues on a PIII 500 as well, but that was a hardware issues (one of the AGP pins was physically bent out of contact in the slot!)

ATI's Rage Pro is quite notorious for driver revisions. It's too bad, because the chip is so common, that the drivers tend to flake the whole system.

Oh, yes, we had some issues with SB Live! and TNT2 Ultra in Rogue Sphere and Homeworld. Yeesh. It's nothing but hardware and software conflicts out the ying-yang. ;)

The sad thing is: some games it works. Others it don't. sigh What can ya do!

Cheers!

Why do reviewers do this?

[ptomblin]

It always seems to me that hardware reviewers, especially Sharky, get really disappointed if the product they are reviewing isn't faster than the ones they are comparing it to. To the point where they make all sorts of excuses for the benchmarks where it *doesn't* beat the competition. Why can't they just be objective?

Refusing to use the new drivers for the GeForce is just another example of the lengths they will go to to make sure the product they are reviewing "wins". I don't get it.

What about image quality?

[dennisp]

I've directly compared ATi cards in the past, and image quality has been terrible. Now, I haven't tried the new MAXX, but I'll assume it's similar due to the fact that it's two Rage Fury chipsets on the same board. Really, the image quality on these boards sucks. First, it's like viewing a game with 10/10 vision. Textures arent detailed until you're like 2 feet away. You can also see the texture qualities directly changing because the most detailed is limited to that which is directly in front of the player. I've tried this on a variety of games and directly compared it to tnt1, tnt2 and voodoo banshee cards, and there's a world of difference.

Now, they may have the "power" to display at similar frame rates, but I've noticed many artifacts in opengl and direct3d. They do seem to use a lot of trickery to achieve similar frame rates, and it doesn't really bode well for picture quality. This is hardly what I would expect from a 32mb video card.
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Killer? No. Competitor? Yes!

[DragonHawk]

First, a disclaimer: I like NVidia and own one of their cards. However, it has been said that Sharky dislikes NVidia, so maybe our biases will cancel each other out. Now, some observations and opinions...

The thing this review shows most is that drivers are everything. The ATI "won" on Direct3D benchmarks, but "lost" on OpenGL benchmarks.

ATI's MAXX card is the moral equivlent of SMP. If one processor is not fast enough, use two. This is a time honored technique, and perfectly valid.

I find it annoying that ATI has patented their "Alternate Frame Rendering" technique, when it is neither new nor innovative. Grrrr.

The reviews were done on very high-end (in fact, unavailable) hardware (i820 motherboard, 800 MHz PIII). NVidia's GeForce is largely designed to take load off of the CPU. It would be nice to know how well ATI's solution works on slower CPUs. For example, I have a 300MHz AMD K6-2. The GeForce's extra co-processing capabilities may make it faster on my machine then ATI's offering if the MAXX is CPU bound.

The GeForce is also something new: Those graphics co-processing features are its big selling point. None of the benchmarks used take advantage of those features. Tomorrow's titles which make use of the GeForce are likely to do better. Of course, today's titles do not, and my motto is "It is all vaporware to me until I can buy a product."

As a Linux Advocate(TM), I have to ask: Does ATI provide specs and/or Linux drivers? NVidia does.

In conclusion: It looks like the MAXX is a good product, and will give NVidia a run for its money. Good. I like choices. However, I don't think it is going to "kill" anything anytime soon.

Just my 1/4 of a byte... ;-)