ATI Rage Fury MAXX Review

Benchmark Results - TreeMark

Here we have NVIDIA's OpenGL benchmark called TreeMark. TreeMark is a high polygon count test that stresses the T&L capabilities of a graphics card or CPU. I ran this test to show you the difference in performance you might see if a game is highly tuned for T&L but have a high-fill rate video card that's depending on the CPU to deal with the T&L requirements.

Here you can see that the GeForce cards obviously have the advantage. I understand that this is a bit extreme being that NVIDIA created this benchmark to show what T&L can do versus non-T&L cards but you can get an idea of what might happen in the future with upcoming T&L enhanced titles. You'll notice that the MAXX must have a pretty optimized driver to pull off one of the higher scores in the bench. Although it didn't come close to the SDR GeForce, it manages the 3rd highest score.

Now we're making things really tough. The GeForce card even bite hard at this test by only scoring about 12 FPS while the MAXX and the rest of the competition stirs in the 2 FPS or less area.

My overall hardware performance opinion of the MAXX (aside from some of the goofball data from 3DMark) is that with its current drivers, it's a SDR GeForce contender at best. It shines in 32-bit, high-resolution situations and falls short in low-resolution 16-bit areas. With improved drivers, I feel that this card could possibly surpass that of the SDR GeForce. However, until that point in time, the MAXX remains on par if not slightly behind the SDR GeForce based board.