Shipping: Early December

Last month Sharky Extreme brought the story of ATi's newest high-performance 3D accelerator, the Rage Fury MAXX, to readers for the first time.

During that first look at the new product we detailed the technology behind the MAXX, including its dual Rage128Pro graphics cores, and their Alternate Frame Rendering capability.

As the December launch date approaches for the Rage Fury MAXX, ATi's software engineers are making great strides in completing the drivers for the card. Therefore, today we've decided to give readers a performance update on the MAXX using drivers that are less than a week old.

Thanks to the introduction of the Coppermine class of CPUs from Intel last week, we're also able to test the MAXX with a new P3-733 CPU clocked to run at 800MHz, along with 128MB of PC800 RDRAM mounted on an i820 mainboard.

With that high performance hardware recipe in place, lets revisit the technology and specs behind the MAXX, along with the plans of ATi towards implementing the technique in future products.

Based on the foundation of two independent Rage128 Pro chips operating on the same video card simultaneously, the Rage Fury MAXX seeks to double the effective graphics rendering speed of the single chip-based Rage Fury Pro video card which hits retail channels next week.