ATI Rage Fury MAXX

The Infamous "Lag" Issue

There's been some talk around the internet regarding the issue of "lag" or "latency" introduced by the Rage Fury MAXX due to the nature of its dual chip solution and ATI's AFR technology. The theory goes like this: the response to an input will not occur until two frames have passed because those two frames are already being rendered when the input was made. This is in contrast to a single chip solution which renders one frame at a time, so the response should occur with the next frame.

As with just about anything in life, it's a bit more complicated than that simple analysis.

ATI's response was posted over at Gamer's Depot and went like this:

Q: There are rumors that the Fury MAXX causes lag in fast-paced action games because of its dual chips. Is this true?

A: No, the rumors centered around the claim that since each Rage 128 Pro chip on the Fury MAXX takes almost twice as long to draw a frame as a GeForce does (although the overall frame rate is the same or higher for the Fury MAXX because it has two chips working together), that there would be a noticeable delay between the time the computer receives input from the user and the time the resulting movement is displayed on the screen. This argument is simplistic and fails to take into account factors such as CPU processing time, scene complexity, frame rate, and screen refresh rate. Extensive testing has found that there is no noticeable difference when playing games on a Fury MAXX or a GeForce if they are running at similar frame rates.

We'll first state that a number of gamers were given the opportunity to play a few games of Quake 3 on the MAXX, followed by a game on an NVIDIA GeForce. None of them noticed any lag issues, whether they were on a LAN game or a modem game (of course the modem itself introduced lag). Playing at high resolutions or low resolutions did not have any effect either. In fact, even with all this talk on the internet, we've yet to see claims of anyone actually feeling the lag - it has all been theoretical so far.

Our take on the situation is this: a "normal" 3D card is actually already rendering the next frame while the current one is being displayed. This technique is called double buffering and is used by all current 3D accelerators. An optional mode of many cards is the use of triple buffering, where one frame is being displayed while two more are being rendered. Sound of kind of like the MAXX? You bet. In essence, you can think of the MAXX as performing a complex version of triple buffering. Of course, there have never been any complaints or issues with triple buffering, so there shouldn't be any with the MAXX either. As far as we're concerned, the issue of lag is a no longer an issue with the MAXX.