Specifications

The Spec Sheet

64MB Memory
Dual ATI RAGE 128 Pro
500Mpixels/s fill rate
Alternate Frame Rendering Technology
Dual engine acceleration for full-screen 3D
Single engine acceleration for windowed 3D
Twin Cache Architecture
Superscalar Rendering
Single-Pass Multitexturing
32-bit True Color Rendering
Triangle Setup Engine
Bilinear/Trilinear Filtering
Line & Edge Anti-aliasing
Texture compression
Specular Highlights
Z-buffering and Double-buffering
Bump mapping
Fog effects, texture lighting, video textures, reflections, shadows, spotlights, LOD biasing and texture morphing
Hardware DVD support
AGP 4X/2X compatible
Windows 98
OpenGL ICD for Windows 98
DirectX, Direct3D, DirectDraw

Notes

The Rage Fury MAXX card basically uses two Rage Fury 128 Pro chips to get the new 500Mpixels/s frame rate. As you may recall, the original Rage 128 chip was only clocked at 90 or 100MHz. The new Rage Fury Pro chip has a 125MHz core clock. Each 125MHz chip is capable of pushing out 250Mpixels/s for a combined total of 500Mpixels/s.

The MAXX card has the supports the same features as the regular Rage Fury 128 Pro, which means the card has 32-bit color and ATI's famous hardware DVD support. While other graphics chips still rely on software DVD players to do all the work, the Rage 128 chip can offload most of the work from the CPU and onto the video card.

The card also features support for DirectX Texture Compression, which is the same TC technique S3 contributed to DirectX. ATI also improved the 16-bit rendering image quality while updating the Rage 128 engine. The Rage 128 Pro now uses higher precision on texturing filtering calculations.

Notice that the card only currently supports Windows 98. ATI assured us that they are working hard on NT and 2000 support for the December release.

Let's take a look at ATI's new Alternate Frame Rendering technology.