With any new 2D/3D accelerator chip, there's always a ton of issues that need to be addressed. The first thing sharp readers will notice on the spec sheet for the Rage Fury is the card's support for Win95/98 as well as full support for Windows NT. As per ATi's usual high standard of driver development, the Rage Fury will ship with a complete NT OpenGL ICD.

Next on the list is support for the quickly growing standard of ATi's "AMC Channel". This is a port on the top of all Rage Fury cards that allows a user to join their base card with some ATi-specific products, in this case their TV tuner and video capture PCI cards.

There aren't many details about this relationship yet, as the Rage Fury is still a few weeks from hitting the retail channel. From the PR sheets ATi has sent over it appears that the link will allow users the luxury of being able to have total control over both cards simultaneously. When the ATi-TV Wonder press-eval cards ship we'll do a full review on the benefits of this configuration.

Memory plays a big role in the foundational requirements for any video card, and the ATi Rage Fury is no exception. A massive 32MB of SDRAM is included on the card, specifically for the speed benefits it provides at higher resolutions/color depths. Many people have chided 3Dfx's upcoming Voodoo3 performance chip because it doesn't include an option for 32MB of ram. The reality is that since the Voodoo3 doesn't make use of any 3D color depth settings beyond 16bpp, it really doesn't need the extra ram, as 16MB will perform within 10% of what a 32MB variant would perform at when used at the lower color depth.

For the Rage Fury, 32MB is necessary because of support for 3D color depths up to 32bpp, which requires a lot more on-card ram to be able to generate high frame rates. As you'll see in the performance tests, the 32MB of ram helps the Rage Fury edge out the TNT-based card we used to test it against which was limited by only 16MB of SDRAM in the higher color depth specific benchmarks.

The only other Win95/98/NT targeted video card on the market that includes 32MB of on-card ram is the relatively low 3D performance Number Nine Revolution IV.