Well...
I don't have that much to say about them, that can stick out. They are "nearly" there in terms of speed.
And they produce somewhat strange type of picture quality, that I don't really like.
And they make me feel, that something is not quite in place when doing 3D.

Nothing more to add, than I like to have them in my collection, as a card that wanted so much and
never really made it. A curiosity and a strange dog, compared to those it wanted to rival.

I much more prefer a TNT2-Ultra-32mb, a G400-DualHead or Voodoo3-3500.

Excellent cards for DVD playback. Supports almost the entire MPEG2 pipeline, including the iDCT process. Voodoo3 and TNT2 (or GeForce) can't touch this.

3D is fine too, though quality is lacking a bit. Their filtering isn't quite correct. It's a touch blocky.

TV out is a bit fickle though, doesn't do doublescan for 320x240 in that output etc. At least it gets along with PCX2. 😀

swaaye wrote:

3D is fine too, though quality is lacking a bit. Their filtering isn't quite correct. It's a touch blocky.

Exactly what I was saying. The image quality is not quite in place.
For speed, they seem ok enough, just not great in any way.

Image quality on rage 128 and 128 pro,should be ok when using 32 bits colour setting in games,also performance should't be affected much running games in 32 bits compared with 16bits.

Nahkri wrote:

Image quality on rage 128 and 128 pro,should be ok when using 32 bits colour setting in games,also performance should't be affected much running games in 32 bits compared with 16bits.

The bilinear filtering is a touch blocky. Some kind of precision reduction. I think there may also be a blending quirk but I don't remember.

The 16-bit / 32-bit speed thing is mysterious. Somebody has probably explained it but I don't recall. But it's curious that 16-bit is not faster since 32-bit consumes much more memory bandwidth.

swaaye wrote:

Excellent cards for DVD playback. Supports almost the entire MPEG2 pipeline, including the iDCT process. Voodoo3 and TNT2 (or GeForce) can't touch this.

3D is fine too, though quality is lacking a bit. Their filtering isn't quite correct. It's a touch blocky.

Bingo. Lots of people must have bought them back then for their excellent DVD playback. Image quality seemed alright for the most part, although I did notice some fuzziness. Can't say I agree with you guys on 32bit speed, the hit is still pretty substantial, e.g. running 800x600 32bit == 1024x768 16bit
There's an option in the OpenGL tab to convert 32bit Textures to 16bit which certainly boosts performance quite a bit.

Swaaye, have you used a Rage 128 in recent years? Do you remember which driver version you were using? I can't seem to find a driver from late 1999-2000 and I suspect it will run better than the final release I have. The latest driver even makes the system hang when shutting down/restarting akin to Nvidia's 81.98 😵 .

F2bnp wrote:

Bingo. Lots of people must have bought them back then for their excellent DVD playback. Image quality seemed alright for the most part, although I did notice some fuzziness. Can't say I agree with you guys on 32bit speed, the hit is still pretty substantial, e.g. running 800x600 32bit == 1024x768 16bit
There's an option in the OpenGL tab to convert 32bit Textures to 16bit which certainly boosts performance quite a bit.

Swaaye, have you used a Rage 128 in recent years? Do you remember which driver version you were using? I can't seem to find a driver from late 1999-2000 and I suspect it will run better than the final release I have. The latest driver even makes the system hang when shutting down/restarting akin to Nvidia's 81.98 😵 .

Oh well nevermind the 32-bit thing then. I just remember reading reviews showing 32-bit performing similar to 16-bit....

On the driver front, no I don't know where to find oldies. I'd of course dig around in archive.org.... Not sure what version might be better/worse though.

I've found that using the OEM's drivers are better than using the official ATi ones (which involves tricking the computer into believing you have a Rage Fury Pro). I've got a Gigabyte-built Rage 128 Pro and I just use the drivers from their site. It's never given me a days trouble and the performance is what you would call good enough. In my experience these cards really shine when you pair them with a fast CPU. I got mine in an old Barton 2500+, Gigabyte GA-7VM400M system someone donated to me and I had a blast playing Quake 2, Shogo, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver and even Half-Life 1 on it. Very underrated card if you ask me, but a real pain to get running properly.

I found some Gateway OEM drivers and most of the issues disappeared. Performance was a little nicer too. I couldn't for the life of me get Unreal to run properly though, way too much stutter and input lag. I have no clue as to what was causing this. Evert, I included all of the games you mentioned in my tests and they are indeed running pretty well on the card!

Quake 3 performance however is nothing to write home about, I blame ATI's OpenGL ICD.
1024x768, 16bit textures/colour depth/everything turned to the highest and I get roughly 32fps on Demo 001. I know Voodoo 3 cards do better than that and I'm pretty sure TNT2 can also be faster.

Rayman 2 also couldn't maintain constant 60 fps at 1024x768, go figure. I also noticed the blurry IQ of the card very easily in this game.

What are the clocks on the particular Rage 128 Pro you have?

I didn't bother to check to be honest. Card checks out as Rage 128 Pro GL, so I'm guessing 125MHz? Did they pull a Matrox by not specifying exact clock speed with these?

F2bnp wrote:

I didn't bother to check to be honest. Card checks out as Rage 128 Pro GL, so I'm guessing 125MHz? Did they pull a Matrox by not specifying exact clock speed with these?

Yeah the clocks do vary considerably among the different cards.

That's not a 64-bit RAM bus card is it?

F2bnp wrote:

I found some Gateway OEM drivers and most of the issues disappeared. Performance was a little nicer too. I couldn't for the life of me get Unreal to run properly though, way too much stutter and input lag.

It could be vsync or something similar. I've found that to be quite a nuisance when it comes to input lag. You did mention this somewhere else, but just remind me again please, on what machine are you running this?

swaaye wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

I didn't bother to check to be honest. Card checks out as Rage 128 Pro GL, so I'm guessing 125MHz? Did they pull a Matrox by not specifying exact clock speed with these?

Yeah the clocks do vary considerably among the different cards.

That's not a 64-bit RAM bus card is it?

Nah, it's a 128bit card. I just didn't bother to check the clocks and stored the machine earlier this afternoon.

Evert wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

I found some Gateway OEM drivers and most of the issues disappeared. Performance was a little nicer too. I couldn't for the life of me get Unreal to run properly though, way too much stutter and input lag.

It could be vsync or something similar. I've found that to be quite a nuisance when it comes to input lag. You did mention this somewhere else, but just remind me again please, on what machine are you running this?

Vsync off both for D3D and OpenGL. It could be just Unreal's shitty implementation of D3D causing the issues. The system was a Pentium III 1.0GHz with 512MB RAM and Win98SE.

Okay, that should be able to produce >30FPS. It must be Unreal's terrible D3D implementation then. You could always try and get a Glide wrapper and see if that improves things.

Running a Glide wrapper on a D3D6 card is probably not going to work out well. Plus you would be relying on ATI Rage-era OpenGL. 😀

There may be a UT D3D.dll that works better with Rage 128 than the one with whatever patch he was using. There was a sort of official Epic blog site that followed their learn-as-they-go journey into making Unreal/UT work with D3D and OpenGL.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010202021200/ht … .epicgames.com/

Probably not worth the time and effort in experimentation though.

F2bnp wrote:

Vsync off both for D3D and OpenGL. It could be just Unreal's shitty implementation of D3D causing the issues. The system was a Pentium III 1.0GHz with 512MB RAM and Win98SE.

What version of DirectX are you using? I found that 8.1 basically triples the D3D performance of Unreal over Win98SE's stock 6.1 with my GF4. DX7 might provide the same performance gains, but I haven't tried it.

Unreal / UT D3D is designed for D3D 7 so I could see D3D 6 being problematic. Though some early versions of Unreal D3D were for D3D 6.