Another feature the Rage Fury incorporates is a full TV-Out ability. TV-Out is fairly standard in the industry now, and the Rage Fury includes both an S-Video out port as well as a standard RCA composite jack. The drivers are still fairly immature on the TV-Out support side, but ATi is confident that they'll be able to throw out a standard 800x600x16bpp level of Win95/98/NT desktop resolution to TVs without a problem. To assist in the placement of the TV image, the Rage Fury drivers allow for manipulation of the horizontal and vertical axis on the TV itself. Perfect positioning is fairly easy to accomplish, with the centered image aligned at all four corners.

800 x 600 is nothing to write home to the folks about, but considering that most TVs can't support any resolutions higher than that, it seems adequate.

DVD support has been a popular topic on the old Sharky Extreme Discussion Board lately, and with good reason. With large monitor prices continuing to erode, and DVD-ROM prices looking better than ever, many gamers are wondering if their next upgrade should center on a DVD-ROM drive with an AGP 2D/3D card that can properly accelerate the DVD images.

ATi has long been a supporter of DVD, and has included the two most critical features for its support (hardware motion compensation and iDCT) on its cards for more than a year now. The Rage128GL also includes these critical features, and thereby offers true fullscreen, full color depth DVD playback without the need for an MPEG-2 decoder card.

Thanks to the motion compensation ability combined with other hardware specific DVD routines, the Rage Fury is able to produce near-perfect DVD playback while only utilizing 15 - 20% of an Intel P2-350's total output capability. Compared to the upcoming Voodoo3's 60% utilization score for the same procedure (60% is actually a good score) the Rage Fury shows that true DVD playback in a window while downloading a file and working on a document is not only possible, but a reality.

In our objective testing, the DVD abilities of the Rage Fury were the best we've seen from a non-MPEG-2 decoder card based solution. In fact, several members of Sharky Extreme's staff couldn't correctly identify whether the movies they were being shown on two 21" monitors were being displayed via an MPEG-2 decoder card, or with just the Rage Fury. ATi has definitely done their homework here as buyers can now go and pick up a stand alone DVD-ROM drive ($100 esp) and then use it in tandem with the Rage Fury to achieve a great movie-viewing experience.