Sharky Extreme first learned about the existence of ATi's closely guarded Aurora secret back in March of '99, at the San Jose, California Game Developer's Conference.
Back then our contacts at ATi only spoke in whispers regarding the then new project and hinted at what it might be capable of when it was scheduled to arrive some six months later.
Now that the Aurora's production is imminent and the final design specs are complete, it is time to let the card out of the bag...
That day is today.
Although still under debate internally, the Aurora project will ship in November and will likely be named "ATi Rage Fury MAXX" when it arrives on the market.
If the USAF's theoretical Aurora spyplane (to this day no one knows if it really exists or not) utilizes advanced pulse-wave detonation engines to propel it to speeds approaching Mach 8, how does ATi's "Aurora" plan to achieve the performance needed to beat NVIDIA's high-flying GeForce 256 as well as 3dfx's upcoming Napalm part?
The answer is a little bit of old, a little bit of new, and a lot of good old fashioned raw horsepower.
Right away ATi knew that they'd want to focus on a few different areas when it came to boosting the power of their Aurora project to record levels, a sort of mission statement that the card would have to live up to.
First, AGP4X had to be supported.
While widespread support of AGP4X intensive applications is still months away, ATi wanted to make sure the Aurora was capable of handling an immense amount of texture loads, both locally and across the host system's bus no matter what the conditions were.
Second, visual quality had to be a priority in addition to all out speed.
