ATI Rage Fury Pro
Introduction
In the early months of 1999 ATI introduced their Rage 128 chipset. Even though it there was a great deal of hype before its introduction, this product really didn’t get the much anticipated welcome from its customers. The fact is though the Rage 128 chipset boasted of superior 3D performance and 32-bit rendering, when the card finally reached the retail market its performance was way behind most cards in its price range. The biggest blow came from the introduction of the TNT2/Voodoo3 boards; guess I don’t need to elaborate on this, we all know how great these board’s performances are. It was all a matter of bad timing for ATI; December 1998 was the scheduled time for their introduction of the first board based on the Rage 128 chipset, the Rage Pro. However the delay of a few months was catastrophic for ATI.
After a few months from the introduction of the Rage Pro, ATI introduced their next successor of this 128 chipset, the Rage Fury, which was very much the same as the Rage Pro but with a higher clock speed. This board received a much greater response than its earlier cousin, yet this really didn’t last long for it lacked features most new boards offered at that time. The only new feature the Rage Fury offered was a TV-out, which wasn’t really great when it comes to quality. So all these black marks contributed for the Rage 128 boards not to be a great success. Uuuh, let me rephrase that, after the introduction of the Rage Fury Pro board, all cards played exactly as ATI wanted. Not only did the Rage Fury Pro have higher clock speeds but it also included a whole new range of cool new features and improved 3D quality. It’s a great thing that ATI understood their mistakes early on or god knows where they would have ended up. Better late than never right!!!!
Even though this Canadian manufacture has won great many awards for their line up of video cards in the past up until now they have never been able to compete with manufactures like 3dfx, Matrox, Nvidia etc. yet they still have the whole range of the Mac line-up which is really great. ATI has decided it’s high time that they change their image, and this new card is a real good stepping stone. In the future months to come they are said to put out some super GeForce cards to their line-up so that’ll really change the table over.
Lets not waste anymore time and lets get to the real deal at hand.
