Furiously Fast Graphics
Written: Apr 19 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Very Fast, lots of memory, looks nice
Cons: Skimpy manual, TERRIBLE install program
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| Seanster's Full Review: Hewlett-Packard Ati Rage Fury |
The ATI Rage Fury is one of several Rage 128 based boards. This card uses an AGP bus, has 32 MB of onboard memory, and screams with speed. It supports OpenGL and Direct3D in Hardware mode. It's a great card in terms of hardware, but the manual and installation are very trying on one's patience.
There's no doubt that this card is fast. Before I bought the Fury, I had an old 3D acceleration that had warped textures and was hardly any faster than Software mode on most games. After I installed the Fury, the speed of Half-Life tripled! I can now run 1280x1024 at a decent speed where before I had to run it at 400x300. The Fury also accelerated basic functions such as bitblts and recursive filling on my Windows desktop. It would fill in the background quickly. The AGP 2x bus and high amount of memory greatly contribute to action games.
The card's features are impressive: it accelerates almost everything except the triangle setup, transformations, and geometry processing. The Fury also sports 32 MB of memory and a TV-out video mode. It comes with the cables necessary to implement TV-out capability.
So far, so good. Unfortunately, the manual is very skimpy. They basically send you three cables, two CD-ROMs, and two leaflet-type things that they call a manual. I ran into some serious trouble getting the software installed. First, it said there was some registry error. After tinkering around, I got past that. Then, it said some files were missing on the CD. I had to perform several searches on the CD and manually type the directory in when the installation should have been automatic. Finally, when I DID get it installed, it gave me two options for video modes: 640x480 and 800x600 in 4-bit color. Not exactly the 32-bit 1600x1200 that they promised.
I thought that it hadn't installed correctly, so I installed it again. And again. And again. I must have installed it 20 times before I finally said, "Okay. Forget this. I'll just try the 800x600 4-bit mode before I throw this away." LO AND BEHOLD! The other video modes appeared! I don't know if this is a problem with my computer, with the card, or with the software, but I don't like it.
On the speed and quality level, the Fury definitely succeeds. But to get it to work was extremely difficult. I'm giving it 4 stars because there no 3.5 star rating. If you can get it to work, then you should definitely try this video card.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Seanster
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Reviews written: 16
Trusted by: 2 members
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