All of Fractal eXtreme's fractal formulae are supplied by plug-ins. This makes Fractal eXtreme easily extensible, both by Cygnus Software and by third parties. The Cygnus Software plug-ins may be freely distributed for use with Fractal eXtreme.

Currently all of the Cygnus Software plug-ins are distributed with the main installer. This includes 64-bit optimized plug-ins with the 64-bit installer. Additionally, there are some third party plug-ins, described at the bottom of this page, and available for download by clicking on the plug-in name.

Recent updates

April 2008:

The 2.000 release of Fractal eXtreme almost doubles the average speed of the 32-bit deep-zoom Mandelbrot calculations and the new 64-bit calculations can be up to five times faster than even the newly optimized 32-bit calculations!

March 19, 1998:

Improved Mandelbrot FPU calculations - 30-100% faster!
Improved Mandelbrot FPU cycle detection.
Added cycle detection to Mandelbrot deep-zoom calculations.
Improved and optimized cycle detection on other plug-ins.

All of the cycle detection improvements offer potentially unlimited speed improvement. On fractal images displaying part of the fractal interior, with high max-iterations settings, speed improvements of over twenty times have been measured. Unlike some fractal programs, the cycle detection is enabled for every single pixel, for maximum benefit, but is designed so that the overhead for cycle detection is minimal.

July 25, 1997:

The Misc1.dll plug-in, supporting six Barnsley formulae was released.
Deep zoom versions of most plug-ins were added, allowing virtually endless zooming!
Most plug-ins were optimized and run up to 100% faster!
The Mandelbrot Complex Power equation was added.
A serious bug in the Newton Complex equation was corrected.
Julia calcs were added to the hidden Mandelbrot formula.
Show calculation path now works for Newton and Hidden Mandelbrot.

Cygnus Software Plug-Ins

Misc1.dll - New!

Sample	Formula	Max Zooms	Julia
	Barnsley1	7200	Yes
	Barnsley2	7200	Yes
	Barnsley3	7200	Yes

Mandelbrot.dll

Sample	Formula	Max Zooms	Julia
	Mandelbrot	7200	Yes

MandN.dll

Sample	Formula	Max Zooms	Julia
	Mandelbrot Cubed	7200	Yes
	Mandelbrot Fourth	7200	Yes
	Mandelbrot Fifth	7200	Yes
	Mandelbrot Sixth	7200	Yes
	Mandelbrot Seventh	7200	Yes
	Mandelbrot Eighth	7200	Yes
	Mandelbrot Ninth	7200	Yes
	Mandelbrot Tenth	7200	Yes
	Mandelbrot Arbitrary Power	7200	Yes
	Mandelbrot Complex Power - New!	7200	Yes

Newton.dll

Sample	Formula	Max Zooms	Julia
	Classic Newton	47	No
	Complex Newton	47	No
	Nova	47	Yes

AutoQuad.dll

Sample	Formula	Max Zooms	Julia
	AutoQuad	7200	No

DistortMand1.dll

Sample	Formula	Max Zooms	Julia
	Hidden Mandelbrot	7200	Yes

Third Party Plug-Ins

fxAbsMand - by Jeremy Thomson - added March 2012

Sample	Formula	Max Zooms	Julia
	Burning Ship	7200	Yes
	Buffalo	7200	Yes
	Celtic Mandelbrot	7200	Yes

To find other plugins it may be worthwhile visiting fractal forums where they discuss such things.

iGeometry.dll - by Ian Smith

Sample	Formula	Max Zooms	Julia
	Sierpinskis Triangle	47	No
	Four Recursive Circles	25	No
	Apollonian Packed Circles	25	No