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Page 5 of 8 - The GPU Scene in Year 2000
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The GPU Scene in Year 2000
The GPU Scene in Year 2000
- To combat the threat that was the awesome GeForce 256, ATI came up with the radical ATI Rage Fury MAXX, which was probably the first card to ever feature 2 GPUs (Rage Fury chips) on a single PCB. It employed something called Alternate Frame Rendering (AFR) and was fast enough to match the GeForce 256 cards which used SDRAM. However, its lack of T&L support ultimately meant that it wasn't a card for the future and it had operating system compatibility issues outside of Windows 98.
- It wasn't much of a matter, because later in 2000, ATI unleashed the Radeon. We had the ATI Radeon 64MB DDR VIVO AGP in our labs and found it to be a quite a capable card. At this point, things were really looking bad for 3dfx and they had to respond. Fast.
- 3dfx soon released the eagerly anticipated Voodoo 5. Looking back, Voodoo 5 was too little too late and some of its other features were too soon for its time. At that time, however, we thought that despite its shortcomings, the Voodoo 5 was still a good card and could even possibly herald the comeback of 3dfx. And ever present in the minds of the techies was the legendary Voodoo 5 6000, which had four GPU cores, powered by an external power brick and never saw the day of light in retail.
- Ironically, later in the year, 3dfx declared bankruptcy and was eventually bought over by NVIDIA. From this point on, the graphics card market was dominated by ATI and NVIDIA.
- In 2000, NVIDIA also built on the success of their GeForce 2 line by introducing the GeForce 2 MX GPU. The MX denotes that the chipset is for the more budget-conscious. It was much more affordable than its higher-end siblings and therefore was extremely popular, especially amongst OEM system builders, who now had a low-cost 3D solution.
Despite being targeted at the budget-minded, it was still a capable performer, as evidenced by the Asus AGP-V7100/Pure 32MB SDRAM .
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