Q. What did ATI 'wrong' in the near past.
- Thread starter AAlcHemY
- Start date
Heh, the MAXX was a pretty big flop because ATi basically stopped supporting it. This is tied to ATi's one major shortcoming, poor drivers, which they only seemed to fix in terms of public perception about six months after the 8500 was released. Now, their drivers are considered roughly equal with nVidia, leaving only hardware to differentiate the two companies' products.
I say public perception beacuse I had no real problems with my Rage Xpert 128 in games, but I could never get the thing to play DVDs in Win2K. Funnily enough, I later installed a 9100 in the same installation (just changed drivers, but left the old ATi DVD player installed), and now I can at least view VCDs. I haven't tried DVDs yet, but I assume they'll work, which is good, as my Visiontek 9100 doesn't seem to have come with a DVD player.
I say public perception beacuse I had no real problems with my Rage Xpert 128 in games, but I could never get the thing to play DVDs in Win2K. Funnily enough, I later installed a 9100 in the same installation (just changed drivers, but left the old ATi DVD player installed), and now I can at least view VCDs. I haven't tried DVDs yet, but I assume they'll work, which is good, as my Visiontek 9100 doesn't seem to have come with a DVD player.
The MAXX was among other things a proof of concept for ATI....
A lot of people bash the Rage Fury MAXX, but i'm willing to bet the *vast* majority of them never had one in their system.
I did. It was a very competant card under Win9x for its time, and it scaled incredibly well with CPU power... If not for Windows2000 and it being unable to handle two chips with a single ID on a card on an AGP slot it probably would have been a much longer lived card.
However, I expect in ATI's mind it accomplished what they needed... which was give them a card in the performance market, proving their AFR rendering worked, and bought them dev time on the Radeon.
I think the only thing that was much of a dissapointment to me at all of all the ATI cards I've owned was the Rage Fury that I had... It was a reasonably competant card, that had a lot of hardware problems which lead to terribly messy and buggy drivers. The Rage Fury Pro resolved that though and was quite a nice card.
The one thing the Rage Fury did have was excellent 32bit color, that performed very well for its time (better than anything else available) and that sold me on it... I was a believer in 32bit long before most folks. banding = teh evil.
A lot of people bash the Rage Fury MAXX, but i'm willing to bet the *vast* majority of them never had one in their system.
I did. It was a very competant card under Win9x for its time, and it scaled incredibly well with CPU power... If not for Windows2000 and it being unable to handle two chips with a single ID on a card on an AGP slot it probably would have been a much longer lived card.
However, I expect in ATI's mind it accomplished what they needed... which was give them a card in the performance market, proving their AFR rendering worked, and bought them dev time on the Radeon.
I think the only thing that was much of a dissapointment to me at all of all the ATI cards I've owned was the Rage Fury that I had... It was a reasonably competant card, that had a lot of hardware problems which lead to terribly messy and buggy drivers. The Rage Fury Pro resolved that though and was quite a nice card.
The one thing the Rage Fury did have was excellent 32bit color, that performed very well for its time (better than anything else available) and that sold me on it... I was a believer in 32bit long before most folks. banding = teh evil.
