I had an ATi Rage 3D Pro until 2006.
There's nothing to love, only to hate. It was slower than my dads Riva 128 and had broken textures on Jedi Knight. Garbage trash, it was all trash until the radeon if you ask me.

Putas wrote:

kanecvr wrote:

I have a OEM (Dell?) Rage Fury Pro 32MB / 128bit clocked at 143/166 that outperforms my TNT2 cards in 32 bit color.

What reported these clocks?

RivaTuner or atitool - don't remember. I know it could do 180/175 stable.

SRQ wrote:

I had an ATi Rage 3D Pro until 2006.
There's nothing to love, only to hate. It was slower than my dads Riva 128 and had broken textures on Jedi Knight. Garbage trash, it was all trash until the radeon if you ask me.

Maybe I was used to the S3 Trio3D back in those days but I remember the Rage Pro Turbo being quiet good in speed and quality considering the alternatives.

386SX wrote:

SRQ wrote:

I had an ATi Rage 3D Pro until 2006.
There's nothing to love, only to hate. It was slower than my dads Riva 128 and had broken textures on Jedi Knight. Garbage trash, it was all trash until the radeon if you ask me.

Maybe I was used to the S3 Trio3D back in those days but I remember the Rage Pro Turbo being quiet good in speed and quality considering the alternatives.

I remember the Rage Fury Pro being cheaper then the tnt2 m64. They were good value.

Phil made a pretty nice video about the older Rage 128 Pro - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxTF85QUjzk

it performs better then I remember. I'll bench my Rage Pro Fury this weekend and see exactly how she stacks up against a TNT2.

That would be helpful. My next machine to piece together is between a viper v770 or a rage series of some kind.

Doesn't Rage Pro lack some blending functions? I think it has problems with Unreal D3D.

It's a shame that Rage 128 doesn't support ATI3DCIF. It's a pretty nice chip. Certainly has top quality DVD acceleration.

In the early to mid 90's, before DVD's, I had a small collection of Video-CD movies. I always recall the "ATI Player" software that came bundled with most Rage cards tapped into the acceleration features of the ATI cards and provided a very decent movie experience, better than VHS, well before DVD's.

So if you have any old Video-CD's (or are just looking for the next thing to collect), I think ATI cards do well in that MPEG/Video-CD video player role.

Rage Pro lacks native alpha blending so it does it through software rendering with its driver and it's slow. 🙁

it also cannot modulate alpha blending, so stuff like the fading smoke in q3 won't be able to fade. Most games that had to fade an alpha during Rage's prime had to do it with an animated image sequence or atlas

Just get a first gen Radeon and pretend that it is a Rage!

ODwilly wrote:

Just get a first gen Radeon and pretend that it is a Rage!

You mean a Rage 6? 😀

Rage 6 is the pinnacle of Ragebility, truly a weapon to surpass even the Metal Gear, truly an unstoppable force to be reckoned with! In all aeriousness you could still throw a Rage sticker on the case and not be lying ;D

swaaye wrote:

ODwilly wrote:

Just get a first gen Radeon and pretend that it is a Rage!

You mean a Rage 6? 😀

The Rage 6 is indeed a really nice card.

Late to the party, here, but since this is linked as a reference thread, I should clarify a few things - the Rage II_C is a lesser version of the Rage Pro. The Rage Pro and Rage XL and essentially Mach64 variants, not Rage 128 variants. This mattered quite a bit to us Linux users back in the day - early on, before about 2002 or so, the Rage 128 had little to no support in Linux, but all the Mach64-based cards worked just fine (2D only, but really, 2D is all they're good for).

To the best of my recollection, all the Rage 128-based cards had "Rage 128" or "Rage Fury" in their name somewhere. Any card that's just "Rage" without "128" or "Fury" is probably a Mach64 variant. Those are, indeed, garbage for 3D acceleration. Like the S3 Virge/Trio3D, or the pre-G200 Matrox cards, they're best thought of as solid 2D performers that, oh, by the way, have some afterthought, tacked-on 3D support if you want to mess with it.

So you can confirm that Rage IIC is a cut down Rage Pro (3rd gen) and not an enhanced Rage II (second gen)?

Err, sorry, was a bit unclear on that - what I meant to say is that the Rage IIC is definitely not a neutered fourth-gen (that is, Rage 128) chip. I believe it's a cut-down Rage Pro, rather than an enhanced Rage II, but I'm not 100% sure of that part.

It wouldn't have been terribly relevant in the context I draw most of my experience with these chips from. The Linux drivers of the day supported every Mach64 and Rage II/Pro/etc version, but none of the Rage 128s, so the really relevant distinction was what's a Rage 128, and what's something before that. Even at the time, though, there was a bit of unclarity in nomenclature between some of the last 3rd generation Rage chips and some of the neutered versions of the Rage 128, especially with card vs chip names. (Xpert98: Rage Pro. Xpert2000: Rage 128, for example.)

Back in early 99, I was living with my dad and did all of my gaming on his NEC Ready 9889. It had a Rage Pro Turbo. Honestly, I didn't really know what the fuck a "3D Accelerator!!!" was back then. I would grab every gaming mag that had a cover CD and run the demos they had on that machine.

Thief, Blood II, one of the Krondor games...I couldn't tell if they were pretty or not, I just knew that they looked AMAZING compared to the p200mmx with a Trio3D I had left at my mom's house.

Relevant PDF

That's pretty much the extent of my experience with the Rage chips, which was the main reason I started the thread. All I know is what I've read from others.

Next question: How does a 128 Pro behave with later DOS games? Bouncing around the idea of either a TNT2 Pro/Ultra or a 128 Pro for a PIII 550mhz win98 machine. Going to be keeping the machine to DX6 or older games and possibly very late DOS games that can take advantage of the CPU over my p200 machine.

From my experience, it's pretty much as good as a TNT2 in DOS. You might be able to benchmark a difference one way or the other, but it'll pretty much never make a playable vs unplayable distinction. There might be some compatibility issues - I don't know the particulars, because I never ran into any of those problems myself, but I do remember hearing tell of such things in older games. The same is said of Matrox cards, but again, I can't say I've ever bumped into it.

For Windows, my recollection from the time was that, assuming DX6 cards are the ceiling, Voodoo3 3500 > TNT2 Ultra = G400 MAX > TNT2 Pro = Voodoo3 3000 > Rage Fury PRO > TNT2 M64 > all other Rage 128s > all the other also-rans. (The Kyro2 is fast, but it's also weird - I don't have much experience with it.) The TNT2 Ultra is slightly faster than the G400 MAX, but it's a lot harder to find, doesn't do EMBM or dual-head and usually will be slightly worse on image quality.

Today, err, throw a dart. You'll do OK with any of them. Any game that won't run well on one probably won't do much better with another, unless you go up to the GF256 or GF2 generation, or later. I'd favor the Matrox, but any of them work well. The ATI and Matrox cards probably are the cheapest - the good TNT2s command a premium, Voodoo3s even more so.

I've been kinda curious about the Matrox cards for awhile. Never really used one. I've got a Millennium I in my DOS/Win95 machine, though I may be swapping that out if I run into any DOS compatibility issues.

I have a single 8MB Monster II for glide in the win98 machine, but that's more of an afterthought at that point. Even the gaming mags of the time were including one "just because". There weren't any glide-only games coming out at that point.

The machine is primarily for Win98 games that the earlier machine can't handle, but later DOS games is the secondary concern.

The ATI Rage PRO PCI makes a fairly decent 3D accelerator alternative for Socket 7 systems and actually has pretty good DOS compatibility to boot, it really is kind of like a slightly inferior TNT in many ways.

As for the Matrox cards; well, I built my Socket 7 system with a Matrox Mystique 220, and I can say that it's a great Windows 2D card but it's a terrible 3D accelerator as well as a surprisingly poor DOS card. I ended up adding a Voodoo 2 (Later upgraded to SLI) to that system to get the 3D games I wanted to run work well. Now, a Voodoo 2 is obviously magnitudes faster than a Mystique 220, but to be honest even a Voodoo 1 would be a very welcome 3D improvement over the Mystique 220.

Later Matrox cards, let's see.. I have a G200 AGP that I never tried.. That card is a contemporary with the i740 and Savage3D and falls right in between I believe. All three are pretty fascinating, but that era of cards to me screams Voodoo 2, so if I ever do say a Pentium II build with one, I would definitely use that card for D3D/OpenGL and a Voodoo 2 (or SLI) for GLIDE.

I also have a G450 PCI that I was going to use in a non-AGP Pentium III build, on the merit that it is the most cross platform compatible later PCI card I have - what was essential to me at the time of planning was OS/2 drivers. It is I believe contemporary with the TNT2, Radeon VE, Voodoo 3 and Savage 4.. It is also the slowest of the lot. Its DOS compatibility, similar to the Mystique, turned out to be a surprising disappointment. I have found some BIOS updates on Matrox's site that apparently improves a lot of VESA related support for the card so I am hoping to try the card in DOS and see how much mileage I can get out of it anyway.. If I am not happy, I will probably go with a Radeon 7000 PCI instead.

Matrox cards are interesting.. Great Workstation/2D cards all of them, but for gaming they have stupid shortcomings I feel. And it's sad, because I always had a thing for Matrox. I still collect their hardware, but whenever I try to use them, I regret it.

Anyway, back on topic - I feel anything earlier than the Rage 128/Fury line for gaming is a very suboptimal choice. In a pinch, the Pro can do as a Voodoo 1/Rush replacement for earlier systems, but it will start looking long in the tooth as soon as you hit 1997 game sand onwards.