Rage Fury MAXX on Win2K/XP

[animekenji]

For anyone who doesn't already know or found this thread in a Google search, the Rage Fury MAXX card CANNOT be used in AFR mode with Win2K/XP. It's not an ATi driver issue, it's the way that NT5 based OS's handle drivers. Trying to get these to work in AFR mode would require a complete rewrite of the way Windows 2k/XP handles drivers. Win 9x/ME OS's allow the switching between the two GPU's on the AGP bus but 2k/XP do not. The best you're going to do with the MAXX on these Windows versions is single GPU operation which means a huge performance hit. You may as well go with an early GeForce or Radeon for your vintage 2k/XP gaming rig and put the MAXX in a 9x based machine that can use it because you probably won't like how your games perform with a single Rage 128 Pro. (I'm assuming higher performance is the reason you bought the MAXX in the first place, right?) I post this information here because from time to time I still see people who recently acquired one of these cards asking the question about getting it to work under 2k/XP and the short answer is that you can't, not as a dual GPU card at least, and if you're going to run it as a single GPU card, there's better alternatives available that will run your older games faster under 2k/XP.

[noko]

hmmmm, Vista? 7? Drivers?

[@md_Guy]

Trust me I know all to well the issue you are referring to .. I had 3 seperate machines all with Win98SE that all recieved MAXXs with plans to upgrade to Win2K. IIRC, the original box/literature says Win95, 98, 2000 however once 2K was installed on 2 of the PCs I found out the hard way it wasn't so. The short story of it being I emailed ATI, got a refund for 2 of the MAXXs (kept the 3rd running 98SE, still might have it somewhere) and did some more digging. You are partially correct, the issue was with how NT (2K) deals with PCI devices and AGP (going from memory here .. been some years). In Win9x ATI was able to use AFR however in 2K, the OS saw the AGP card as having 2 PCI devices, thus only 1 was able to work. I used to run a website (RadeonFAQ) and I believe there was a section covering it as well as the OLD Rage3D forums I had a write up under a different name (RageMAXX I think) that addressed it, gave support links to Intel's AGP spec as well as copies of the product boxes/manuals if any others needed to contact ATI for support/refunds. In the end the card was a great bridge product, it allowed ATI to remain competitive with the original Geforce 256 by using two Rage 128s until they could come out with the Radeon 256.

Edit: to make matters worse, VIA's implementation of Intel's AGP spec wasn't up to 100% and sadly they were the almost largest chipset supplier (just behind Intel) and trhe only real choice for AMD platofirms.

A bit OT:
BTW anyone still have the original Radeon 256 flash animation saved somewhere ?? Looked like a oval badge when completed.

[jima13]

Found this interesting site> http://abitabout.com/Radeon+256

Might find some info on the demos there...

Sorry, that info is just copied from the wiki...or vis versa.....AMD has a few legacy demos> http://developer.amd.com/archive/leg...s/default.aspx

I thought Alex might have it on his site, but no. I had Rage Dawning and the Ark demos on disc, but don't know where they went...

Edit: Both links are long dead now