I personally just built my own system for dos games and I use a rage128 and love it.

I still have my Rage 128 Pro on a Pentium II and yes it does have good DOS compatibility. It also has VESA BIOS extensions 2.1 built-in to ROM thus rendering UNIVBE unnecessary in most cases. It worked with practically every DOS game I tried although as has been pointed out in other threads certain games like Commander Keen have glitchy smooth scrolling.

The M64 version was always bad. I didn't see any point in Nvidia even releasing it - a slower version of the once great TNT2, with Geforce already slamming everything else around...

I have two TNT2 ultras and they are not much faster than a standard TNT2, but they both get almost DOUBLE the fps over the M64.

In your case yeah, get the Rage 128 for the 32bit speed and the pretty windows 2D display. Or get a TNT2 ultra for about £10 from ebay.

Or just go all out for the Geforce 256.

M64 makes an adequate 2D card. Runs XP and Linux xorg (minus goofy compiz stuff) just fine. For games they are not so great but I can think of many worse options 🤣

Rage 128 is interesting but I'd like to see some comprehensive VBE and D3D 3/5 testing of it.

Iris030380 wrote:

The M64 version was always bad. I didn't see any point in Nvidia even releasing it - a slower version of the once great TNT2, wi […]
Show full quote

The M64 version was always bad. I didn't see any point in Nvidia even releasing it - a slower version of the once great TNT2, with Geforce already slamming everything else around...

I have two TNT2 ultras and they are not much faster than a standard TNT2, but they both get almost DOUBLE the fps over the M64.

In your case yeah, get the Rage 128 for the 32bit speed and the pretty windows 2D display. Or get a TNT2 ultra for about £10 from ebay.

Or just go all out for the Geforce 256.

You'll notice, though, that most of the M64 cards you see for sale are OEM and not retail cards. nVidia made it mostly as a cheap 3D card for OEM's to put in their mass market boxes. It may have also been a way to get rid of defective TNT2 chips without taking a loss. It was never intended to be a serious competitor with high end gaming cards.

Yup, it was essentially the bare basics budget choice. And it is a very competent GUI / VGA card. There's absolutely nothing to complain about with one running Win9x-XP at the common 1024x768 rez of the time. Consider too that it probably delivers better GUI performance than very expensive cards like Imagine 128 and Millennium did a couple of years earlier.

It's certainly a nice step up from previous budget favs like Virge, Rage and Mystique.

The crippled GeForce2 MX 200 filled this role later on. Good for 2D and that's what they were used for. There are bazillions of these out there.

Yep. Don't go for the M64 or Vanta variants. Plain TNT2 is nice. I'm not familiar with Rage series, so others may vouch for it. I would recommend TNT2 or TNT2 Ultra if anyone asks me about these.

My experience with the Rage family is that they have terrible dithering effects on surfaces. Is this just the games I've played or did I have an old 16 bit color only board?

I've never had a good opinion of the Rage series.

Admittedly, I wasn't too happy with my first Rage card, ATI Xpert 98. Rage Fury Pro was a huge improvement in both performance and quality in DX6 or 7 games I tried with it (Q3A, NFSHS, UT, NBA 98, Treadmarks) as well as DOS games. I have no experience with TNT so I can't vouch for them but if you're going for legacy ATI get at minimum a Rage 128.

Shagittarius wrote:

My experience with the Rage family is that they have terrible dithering effects on surfaces. Is this just the games I've played or did I have an old 16 bit color only board?

I've never had a good opinion of the Rage series.

I've always thought you should be spending more time focused on playing the game than admiring things hanging on walls, but maybe that's just me. You know, you're running around with 5 other players in a deathmatch and get pwned because you stopped to look at the quality of the curtains hanging in the window.

Some cards definitely have noisier 16bit dithering. Riva 128 is the most intense I've seen personally.

Rage 128 got complaints for grainy 16bit dithering though. The Pro revision improved this aspect. Of course you can just use 32bit color instead.

[Thread moved to Marvin Section]

Shagittarius wrote:

My experience with the Rage family is that they have terrible dithering effects on surfaces. Is this just the games I've played or did I have an old 16 bit color only board?

I've never had a good opinion of the Rage series.

Nearly all the old video cards have very visible (relatively simple/odered) dither patterns in 16-bit colordepth, the exception would be those lacking that feature entirely (I think the Voodoo1 can't dither at all) or games specifically disabling that feature for other cards. (Playstation and N64 do it too -though N64 has more advanced dither patterns, as do later PC GPUs)

Dithering was used to add smoother shading to limited colordepth and is absent (almost always) in 24/32-bit color. (this is also different from the stipple/dither mesh "transparency" effects used by the Matrox Mistique and a few other cards and software renderers -those are simple meshes with "holes" left in them for transparency, dithered interpolation OTOH adds dithered patterns to approximate blending in higher colordepth for both shading and blending)

The old Rage series (I/II//Pro) wasn't the best at dithering (like most early cards, limited to relatively simple patterns), but some were actually worse. I believe the RIVA-128 was regarded as uglier in this respect (though it has other visual advantages over the RAGE) and the S3 ViRGE cards have some additional dither artifact issues on alpha textures. (odd mattes/boarders/halos, though more of a blending artifact than dither-related -it's also not there in 24/32-bit color modes)

But to the point here with the Rage 128: this shouldn't be a problem for any games supporting 32-bit color (which should perform quite well on the RAGE 128 Pro) and I believe the dithering in 16-bit color is a bit better than the original Rage cards as well. (plus, most/all later D3D/OpenGL games have detail options allowing dithering to be disabled entirely, at the expense of heavier banding/posterization native to 16-bit color)

swaaye wrote:

Some cards definitely have noisier 16bit dithering. Riva 128 is the most intense I've seen personally.

Rage 128 got complaints for grainy 16bit dithering though. The Pro revision improved this aspect. Of course you can just use 32bit color instead.

This problem wasn't really solved (for 16-bit renderers) until error-diffused dithering was introduced around the time of the early Radeon/Geforce cards, right? (ganted, you're always going to get some graininess, but ordered/pattern dithering has a much more obvious "digitized" grid or crosshatch look while diffused dithering is more organic/natural/analog looking -more like grainy film or noisy analog video)

And again, any game supporting an option for no-dithering in 16-bit color will also avoid that problem at the expense of heavier banding/posterization. (which could be preferable for some games -especially at lower resolutions) Then-again, most games supporting that will also probably have an option for truecolor rendering, which would be preferred in general.

Hi guys, thanks for all your posts, and sorry for the late reply.

I've decided to give ATI a chance and see how it goes, I bought 2x Rage 128 Pro's off eBay.
Failing that I'll try a the Diamond Viper V770 or the Creative CT5823 TNT2's, which are both
significantly more expensive (Int'l Price+Shipping) than the Rage 128's.

The biggest headache with the TNT2's, is that it's almost impossible to distinguish between
a TNT2 and a TNT2 M64. TNT2 Pro and TNT2 Ultras are easy to spot, but they're not what
I'm looking for.

Anyone know of a good place to find archived ATI Rage 128 pro drivers for Win9x? I like to
test various different drivers to find the "Sweet Spot".

For example, I found that my current TNT2 M64 works best using the VANTA TNT2 drivers
released by a company called Jaton.

Thanks

AMD still offers the Rage 128 drivers, though I want to mention I have had some issues with the installer not detecting the card and canceling the install depending on who made the Rage 128 exactly. If this happens to you, you can unrar the drivers into a folder and do a manual install in Win 98 from the device manager area, pointing to the folder with the drivers. It will present you with a list of files, and you need to select the top win9x related one, then select the card from the list of Rage 128 powered cards that it will present you with. For normal Rage 128 Pro cards I believe you will want to select the Rage Fury Pro from the list. The card will then install fully, including its ATI control panel options for DX and OpenGl.

ati drivers use "run setup.exe" style to install, so you know what to do.

Totempole wrote:

The biggest headache with the TNT2's, is that it's almost impossible to distinguish between a TNT2 and a TNT2 M64. TNT2 Pro and […]
Show full quote

The biggest headache with the TNT2's, is that it's almost impossible to distinguish between
a TNT2 and a TNT2 M64. TNT2 Pro and TNT2 Ultras are easy to spot, but they're not what
I'm looking for.

Thanks

thats very easy, tnt2(standard) uses 128bit memory bus, so it takes 8 tsop ram chips. while tnt2m64 uses 64bit memory bus, hence 4 tsop ram chips.
but really, there aren't much difference between tnt2standard, tnt2pro and tnt2ultra. they are mostly the same chip of different quality, capable of different clocks, thats all. so why are you caring about that?

TNT2 Pro used 220nm chip.

Really? It's that easy? So for example. The Creative CT5823 has 8 Ram
modules, therefore it's obviously 128-Bit. But how do you tell whether it's a
TNT2 or TNT2 Pro or TNT2 Ultra? I know the latter 2 usually have fans, but
are there any other indications when shopping for these cards on eBay?

Another card I'm considering, failing the Rage 128 is the Matrox G400. I had
a slower Matrox G450, and it works brilliantly with DOS Games, but actually
runs slower than the TNT2 M64 in D3D.

I noticed in Benchmarks the G400 was very competitive and surpasses the

TNT2 in most instances, but real-world gaming performance is lower than
that of a TNT2 M64. Anyone know why?

Thanks.