Double processors, not double performance - A comparison
Written: Jul 07 '00 (Updated Jul 15 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Dual video processors, AGP 4X compatible, 64MB video memory
Cons: Improvement is marginal and not as much as hype would lead you to believe
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| Gr8ful's Full Review: ATI RAGE FURY MAXX, (64 MB) AGP Video Card |
This review is a comparison between the "Rage Fury" and the "Rage Fury Maxx", as well as a review on the Rage Fury Maxx itself.
I waited until the price dropped to reasonable before buying this video card. I was under the assumption from all the hype surrounding the card that it would be "twice as much card as the Rage Fury". I guess I am not the only one who bought into this propaganda, but I am a little unsatisfied with the performance of this card.
About the Rage Fury Maxx
The card itself is a decent video card and 3D accelerator, it just doesn't live up to it's advertisers claims. It has dual Rage 128 Pro video processors and 64MB of SGRAM. With this kind of power one would think it would be one of the best cards on the market. Although it does show a marginal improvement over the Rage Fury which uses a single Rage 128 processor with 32MB of SDRAM, the improvements are not really noticeable to the average gamer or common PC user.
Frame Rates:
The frame rates I got with the Rage Fury on Quake II were between 50-60 fps and using the same computer with the same hardware (except the video card) using the Rage Fury Maxx were between 55-70 fps. The additional memory really doesn't affect game play as much as you would think it does. I did notice however, at certain places in some games where my Rage Fury would bog down and glitch, the Rage Fury Maxx glides through without incident.
Texture and Lighting:
As far as texture and lighting effects, I really could tell no difference between the two here. The textures and lighting effects were virtually identical and even my friend who is an intern artist for a 3D effects company could not tell any improvement from the old Rage Fury.
DVD Hardware and Software:
The Rage Fury Maxx has a built in hardware DVD decoder just as it's predecessors, the Rage Fury and the Rage Fury Pro. The hardware decoder works great and is one thing that is a real improvement over the Rage Fury. On the Rage Fury, DVD playback sometimes would become pixilated or opaque especially noticeable in dark scenes as the decoder seemed to have a hard time keeping up with the frames. The Rage Fury Maxx doesn't do this and is virtually perfect as far as playback is concerned.
The software DVD player however, is a different story. The DVD player for the Rage Fury Maxx is extremely buggy and the most prominent of the bugs are the pause and resize features. Whenever you resize the video screen (not the resolution just the window), the DVD stops playing and will start over. The same thing happens if you pause the DVD playback and do anything in the setup menu. The Rage Fury's DVD playback software never did this and was virtually perfect. If they could only use the Rage Fury software player with the Rage Fury Maxx decoder hardware they would have a perfect DVD player. Alas, I await the next patch to download.
Effects on the System:
The Rage Fury Maxx has two video processors and shows up in Windows device manager as two separate cards. In my newest computer (AMD Athlon 800MHz) with the latest BIOS update and virtually everything "up to date", it runs fine and I have no problems with it. In my older computer (AMD K6-2 500MHz) even with the latest BIOS update I have a few problems with some games locking up and some that don't run at all. I found a way to fix this problem but it involves disabling the dual processor support. In the advanced properties of the video in Windows, the ATI software adds a way to do this, but why would you spend the extra money to basically have a Rage Fury Pro?
If you have Norton Utilities and pull up the system information, Norton Utilities can not find any Windows registry information for the video. This is really not a problem but it is odd.
If you are wanting to use the dual video feature that Windows 98 supports, you might not want to use this card either. The reason is, since the card has dual processors and shows as two different video controllers in device manager, you can't add another PCI video card. Windows won't allow it, or at least it wouldn't allow me to do it when I tried. If someone knows how to make this feature work with the Rage Fury Maxx, I would appreciate them letting me know what trick they used to do it.
Conclusion:
I have come to the conclusion that the Rage Fury Maxx is a decent video card/3D accelerator and performs as well as most other cards in it's price range that are out today. It is not the high end performer some may think it is but it is a well rounded card for all purposes. You may want to make sure your computer is compatible with it before you spend the money and go the "trial and error" way. I want to stress here that this card is a good buy for the price and does perform well, it just doesn't perform as well as I was made to believe it would. I would recommend this card to my friends, but if they had the money to spend I would steer them toward the GeForce 2 DDR instead.
Recommended:
Yes
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