Price: $160 - $180 (esp)

Shipping: Late October

Today Sharky Extreme was briefed on the newest video accelerator from ATI Technology Inc.

Named the ATI Rage Fury Pro, and based on an accelerated version of ATI's successful Rage128 2D/3D chip, this new card is positioned squarely at the PC entertainment enthusiast.

Building on the 32MB/32bpp platform of the Rage Fury AGP card, ATI has made two major changes to the earlier card's featureset:

1. 40% faster chip clock speed
2. Full video capture capability

ATI doesn't disclose their product's internal core speeds publicly, but since the time of its release Sharky Extreme has known that the initial Rage Fury card's core clock speed has been set to run at 105MHz.

Simple math puts the new Rage Fury Pro's internal core speed at a 140 - 150MHz level, which sources inside ATI have verified (off the record) as an accurate estimate.

It's difficult to predict the performance gains in real-world applications from only core clock speed increases, so we researched and obtained a few early benchmark results from ATI's software engineers on the new prototype Rage Fury Pro:

Q3Test v1.07 Timedemo1
1024x768x32bpp: 25.5fps

Q3Test v1.07 Timedemo2
1024x768x32bpp: 45.7fps

These results jibe well with what readers have come to expect from current generation 140 - 150MHz video accelerators, but until we receive a Rage Fury Pro for evaluation in our lab, we can't guarantee that the figures are accurate.