Looking Back at 2000 Part 2: The Graphics Industry

The performance lead goes to: ATI?

Here's a picture we'd never thought we would see. At the start of 2000, ATI had one of the fastest graphics accelerators available, the ATI Rage Fury MAXX. Just a year earlier we were wondering how ATI would remain competitive with their Rage 128 part offering sub-par performance around three months after we expected to see it.

About six months prior to the official launch of the Rage Fury MAXX, we had the opportunity to talk to ATI and discuss the potential of their Rage 128 Pro chip as a high-end gaming solution. In an interesting response, ATI mentioned that they would be able to produce a Rage 128 Pro that offered performance similar to NVIDIA's previous king of the hill, the TNT2 Ultra. Being very enthusiastic about having another TNT2 Ultra class performer in the market, we gave ATI our encouragement to pursue such a project, and while the card never did surface it did allow us to realize something very important about ATI: they wanted to compete in the gaming market, even more so, they wanted to compete with NVIDIA.

At the time we didn't think it was too likely, however out of all of the graphics chip manufacturers that we had talked to, that was the first time that we actually saw a competitor to NVIDIA realize exactly what it would take to compete with them.

Late in 1999, ATI dropped a similar bombshell on the public, the announcement of the Rage Fury MAXX. The Rage Fury MAXX was more of a pilot run for ATI, designed to test the waters of the 3D gaming market and at the same time, open the doors for what was destined to come.

The Rage Fury MAXX was a brute force solution to competing with the fastest card on the market at the time, the GeForce 256 from NVIDIA. Since ATI's flagship, the Rage 128 Pro, was only capable of offering TNT2 class performance at best, they had no hope of competing with NVIDIA's current generation product based on a single chip design.

The solution they came up with was to combine two of their Rage 128 Pro chips onto a single board design, they had good enough yields on the chips to keep the cost of adding two to a single board reasonable. With that, ATI released the Rage Fury MAXX, their first dual chip solution, and their first product that was able to directly compete with a current generation NVIDIA solution and sometimes even outperform it.

Going into 2000, ATI was all of the sudden back in the game, but they still had a very long way to go before they could be taken as seriously as they needed to be in order to be a leader in the market. At the end of the day, the Rage Fury MAXX was still based on old technology, while both 3dfx and NVIDIA were boasting new features such as Full Scene Anti-Aliasing and Hardware T&L.