A few of you guys may remember the Rage Fury MAXX announced by ATI a while back and probably blew it off as "oh, another ATI card" but it looks like the MAXX is a bit different. In fact, SharkyExtreme has a hands-on with the card showing it handily beating the GeForce256 in every benchmark (Yes, Quake3). A pet peeve of mine however comes up, no damn 640x480 benchmarks! argh! I gotta pick on Sharky a bit, check this out:

We opted to set Quake III Test to run in "High-Quality" mode when performing this round of benchmarks, as we suspect most gamers that purchase 600MHz+ PCs equipped with GeForce256 and MAXX cards will do this as well. (No one spends $2,000+ on a PC to play their games in 16-bit color at 640x480 folks).

On further inspection, I came across the MAXX/GeForce article on GamersDepot which ran the card in 16bit with interesting results. GD also ran the card on a Celeron @500mhz which makes the GeForce seem quite a bit better on slower systems. Well, the deal is you can get a GeForce on shelves right now, the new ATI MAXX card will be on shelves next month. I'll try to get one and add it to my benchmarks for you guys.

update: roj over on the Quake3 messageboard has an excellent summary for those of you wondering what is going on with this stuff.