Project Aurora: Rage Fury MAXX 64MB

With two full speed Rage128 Pro graphics processors on one board, each processor requires 32MB of independent local memory to provide 3D resolutions up to 1600 x 1200 x 32bpp in entertainment apps. This is where the "64MB" figure from the Aurora's spec sheet comes from, which is similar to how two 3dfx Voodoo2 cards each with 12MB of SDRAM offered a total of 24MB of memory in SLI mode while their effective memory total was still just 12MB.

With the hardware support in place, ATi turned to the difficult question of how to most effectively capitalize on the two parallel running Rage128 Pro chips without any performance loss due to crossover.

Twice before, video companies have attempted to devise a way to allow two or more video processors to operate simultaneously on the same image from a desktop PC platform.

The first was 3Dfx, and their amazing SLI or Scan Line Interleaving solution which hit the market in early 1998 in the form of the Voodoo2 card lineup ushered in a new era of desktop 3D acceleration.

SLI allowed a user to connect two independent PCI-based Voodoo2 accelerators in one PC, which then would effectively double their throughput by having the two cards render every other line in the image being produced.

The design worked well with the fastest CPUs of the time, and performance increases were dramatic, particularly at then-high resolutions like 1024 x 768 x 16bpp.