Otherwise it's quite fast and should be just fine for performance.

It's plagued by AFR stuttering, so performance is not so good.

If you really want something period specific, try to find original Radeon 256 (R6) with 64mb DDR.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Otherwise it's quite fast and should be just fine for performance.

It's plagued by AFR stuttering, so performance is not so good.

If you really want something period specific, try to find original Radeon 256 (R6) with 64mb DDR.

Yeah I heard about the stuttering issues... don't know if this is chipset dependent or if it's the card. The traces from each GPU go right to the bus so they seem not to depend on syncronization with each other but more with the chipset and cpu.

I don't mind the 256 any more than any other R100 product - they are essentially of a similar design. If I were to make a case for it, it would be on its merits rather than its vintage value. The MAXX is just so much more to me in that department. I mean look at that box. Tell me that isn't the best box you've ever seen before! And those 2 little ATI fans - awesome!

https://www.hwupgrade.it/articoli/skvideo/471/scatola.jpg

...it's just that it might seriously curtail any efforts to play games that really shine with a Vortex 2 since I can't have that card in both machines. As mentioned I have the Santa Cruz in the other one but the tech specs don't hold up to personal testimonies that say the Vortex2 is still better.

Keep in mind the price. One doesn't merely look for a Rage Fury Maxx and find one laying around. I have only ever seen them for sale at eBay collector's item prices, despite how impractical they are for a retro build.

If you find one, it would be a cool thing to tinker with, but its totally up to you to determine if its worth it to spend $100-$150 or more for one. And that's not boxed. A boxed one would easily sell for $200-$300 or more these days. If you really need to go ATI, I'd just try to find the best Rage 128 Pro you can get your hands on (they should be dirt cheap, you just have to find the ones with decent clocks and 128bit memory... there are several neutered OEM models).

A Radeon would obviously work but would probably be bottlenecked by the 448Mhz CPU in many games. What kind of CPU is it?

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Keep in mind the price. One doesn't merely look for a Rage Fury Maxx and find one laying around. I have only ever seen them for sale at eBay collector's item prices, despite how impractical they are for a retro build.

If you find one, it would be a cool thing to tinker with, but its totally up to you to determine if its worth it to spend $100-$150 or more for one. And that's not boxed. A boxed one would easily sell for $200-$300 or more these days. If you really need to go ATI, I'd just try to find the best Rage 128 Pro you can get your hands on (they should be dirt cheap, you just have to find the ones with decent clocks and 128bit memory... there are several neutered OEM models).

A Radeon would obviously work but would probably be bottlenecked by the 448Mhz CPU in many games. What kind of CPU is it?

It's a slot 1 Deschuttes 400 MHz P2 that I bumped the FSB on. It's running on a P2B 1.04 MB.

I saw a MAXX for 200 dollars 😒 No box through, like you said. I do love that box. I'm thinking a 7500 would be more practical - I could never find the first DDR version for sale sadly. I was looking at A3D 2.0 games today to see what the min req's are for them and I should be able to run most of them on min req's so long as I have DX6. Some of the good stuff needs DX7 though, another point for the 7k series.

Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Keep in mind the price. One doesn't merely look for a Rage Fury Maxx and find one laying around. I have only ever seen them for sale at eBay collector's item prices, despite how impractical they are for a retro build.

If you find one, it would be a cool thing to tinker with, but its totally up to you to determine if its worth it to spend $100-$150 or more for one. And that's not boxed. A boxed one would easily sell for $200-$300 or more these days. If you really need to go ATI, I'd just try to find the best Rage 128 Pro you can get your hands on (they should be dirt cheap, you just have to find the ones with decent clocks and 128bit memory... there are several neutered OEM models).

A Radeon would obviously work but would probably be bottlenecked by the 448Mhz CPU in many games. What kind of CPU is it?

It's a slot 1 Deschuttes 400 MHz P2 that I bumped the FSB on. It's running on a P2B 1.04 MB.

I saw a MAXX for 200 dollars 😒 No box through, like you said. I do love that box. I'm thinking a 7500 would be more practical - I could never find the first DDR version for sale sadly. I was looking at A3D 2.0 games today to see what the min req's are for them and I should be able to run most of them on min req's so long as I have DX6. Some of the good stuff needs DX7 though, another point for the 7k series.

A PII will definitely be limiting a Radeon in most situations. Keep in mind the original Radeon (renamed 7200 or 7500 later) was released in mid 2000. By then the first 1GHz CPUs were starting to hit the market... granted they were outrageously expensive, but a top of the line video card was generally meant for a top of the line system.

Anything the Radeon 7500 can do can be done faster with your other system running a 9500 Pro on a faster CPU, so I don't know if you'd really gain much by doing this.

If you really must go ATI I think a Rage 128 Pro would be a better fit for less money. The Radeon is so much faster than the V2 SLI setup that it'd render the Voodoos unnecessary unless a game absolutely doesn't work in anything but Glide. The Rage would at least work without totally outpacing them. Plus, as mentioned, Rage 128 cards are nearly free because they are so common.

Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

Radeon 7500 - I have no attachment to this card BUT it is the first generation of Radeon card, which makes it special in a way, it has DX7, which I think is all I'd need in a 450MHz machine, has T&L and is reasonably fast also. It doesn't have proper pixel shader support in software though so it's somewhat crippled in that regard.

It was ATi's answer to the GeForce256 (and the GeForce2), I would say the first 'proper' 3d accelerator from ATi.
As in: cutting-edge performance and features, and reasonably stable drivers.

Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

Radeon 8500 - It's a 2nd gen card, so even less of a novelty but it does everything else right, everything that didn't work in the 7xxx series works, and it even has some cool stuff that wasn't around for years afterwards like tesselation. It also supports DX8, which is more than I need but will ensure all games play with max features.

Strictly speaking it supports DX8.1. It is the only card ever made that was specifically designed for the full shader model in DX8.1, namely ps1.4.
Only DX9 and later cards support ps1.4 otherwise, and that's basically 'emulated' by the shader compiler in the driver, because DX forces any video card to be completely backward-compatible with all earlier shader models.
Unlike the name ps1.4 implies, it is actually quite a step up from the first 1.x shader models, and is actually closer to ps2.0 than to ps1.3.

I'd probably take the 7500 for a P2 or early P3 system.
Having said that, my PII-350 has a Radeon 8500 in there, 'because I can'...

I fully accept the criticism that I'm mismatching capabilities with a V2 + Radeon and I was thinking that myself... what's the point of a super cool V2 SLI when the Radeon can do a better job with its farts? However I never had the "Voodoo experience" growing up and thought this P2 was perfectly ripe for those cards, which it is. Only problem is no 32 bit colour, directx kind of sucks, no T&L and only 8MB texture memory so either I run 3-4 games on that machine and put everything else on my C700 or I try to use a graphics card that can complement the V2s. A card that can do DX well, has more memory and can allow me to enjoy A3D 2.0 games properly. I could have put my vortex in the faster machine so that this wouldn't be an issue but that machine, being faster, is going to have 98/XP instead of DOS/98 and I hear Vortex 2 drivers suck for XP but are good for 98, while Santa Cruz drivers are better for XP, so I'm more likely to have software issues by swapping those cards. Basically there's no win-win. Either I fight with A3D in software or I fight trying to make A3D games run on a slow processor and graphics card.

If I had a MAXX, the cool factor would be enough to give it a pass for all its "fail" but just barely. Otherwise the Rage's outdated architecture makes it ill-suited to compliment anything the Voodoo already offers, IMO. Despite this, I've always loved the Rage series... don't know why.

This problem could only exist for a vintage computer fanatic...

The Rage Fury MAXX was a bad idea when it was released, and an even worse idea now for a retro build. Finickly and unreliable, you will spend more time messing with it than using it. Buy one to mount on the wall and look at, but not to seriously use.

I would say go with an ATI 7500 or 8500, depending on what is more affordable.

canthearu wrote:

The Rage Fury MAXX was a bad idea when it was released, and an even worse idea now for a retro build. Finickly and unreliable, you will spend more time messing with it than using it. Buy one to mount on the wall and look at, but not to seriously use.

I would say go with an ATI 7500 or 8500, depending on what is more affordable.

I'm sold that I shouldn't buy the maxx... reluctantly 🙁 Also I think it's even worse to muddy the waters and go for some sort of half-compromise with the 7 series so I may as well just get the 8500 so I can have all the cool features it comes with. Can't seem to find any for sale with a vga port but I have a dvi to vga dongle which should be good enough and it does have some cool inputs, including some square thing I've never seen before. We'll see how it goes. The maxx will have to wait for another day when I have money just laying around doing nothing and my mantle has an empty spot on it.