ATI Rage Fury Pro Review

ATI's AFR Technology

ATI stepped in next and created AFR (Alternate Frame Rendering). With this technique, each chip would render every other frame. Even if one chip fell behind, the "idle" chip would queue the next frame so it wasn't wasting any time. This proves to be a very efficient solution.

Look at the slide of ATi's Rage 128 Pro presentation that demonstrates AFR.

Still there may be one problem of the 'golden Rage Fury', which may come into account when benchmarking. Due to the alternating nature of the rendering process, once done by the one chip and the next frame done by the other, there will be at least some issue with synchronizing the chips and rendered frames. This will hardly be a problem for actual game play, but in case of a benchmark where the famous 'VSYNC' should be turned off, 'Aurora' may have a problem and report lower frame rates than what the 'golden girl' is really capable of. We'll look into this issue once we're testing the final card.

So where does that put the Fury MAXX as far as performance? Theoretically this gives a 500MPixel/sec fill rate and 4 GB/sec memory bandwidth. Although we're not allowed to publish numbers, we'll give you an idea of where the Fury MAXX sits as far as performance. From tests that we've run here in the lab, the benchmark scores in Expendable were some of the highest we've ever seen while in OpenGL (Quake Arena/Descent3) we saw performance numbers only topped by NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce256, which comes with 480 Mpixels/s. Keep in mind this was with beta drivers, so performance may vary with the released product (should be on shelves around Christmas time). I want to also let it be known that it looked possible in future models to have a dual output from this card although it's not planned yet (think Dual Head).

ATI Rage Fury Pro Drivers

The drivers for the Rage Fury Pro are basically the same as the Rage 128 so please refer back to our comments here.