Rage Fury MAXX

Through a software engineering technique ATi calls Alternate Frame Rendering, each Rage128 Pro chip on the Rage Fury MAXX board renders every other frame in the image being presented. The end result is that each of the chips is handling half the load that a single-chip board would have to, thereby doubling the potential fill-rate.

By instructing the processors to each render every other frame for the 3D application that's being run, (odd for one, even for the other) ATi eliminated the possibility for load imbalance, as well as visual acuity errors.

In practice, the technique is visually flawless in our estimation. In blind tests we couldn't discern whether the game being playing was running on a single GeForce256 AGP card, or on the ATi Rage Fury MAXX. Both provide very similar levels of visual quality, and more importantly, there were no image jitters or other visual anomalies.

Many readers have been able to witness the improvements that the original dual-chip processing solution, the Voodoo2 SLI, brought to game frame rates last year. ATi's AFR procedure is more practical, as it doesn't require a second card to be utilized in the PC, thanks to both of the MAXX's 3D chips operating on the same single AGP board.