Rage Pro was very long in the tooth by late 98 and performance wise was similar to Voodoo 1, but with significantly worse compatibility/image quality. Banshee was more in the realm of Voodoo 2. Honestly, I'd say you should look into Rage 128 (pro) for a period correct, lower cost solution. You're not getting glide support obviously, but the performance is solid and 32 bit color support is pretty nice. TNT or TNT2 would also be nice options.

Rage Pro is a 1997 chip that isn't even at feature parity with a 1996 Voodoo1. It has problems with Unreal and Quake 2 for example. It does support ATI's proprietary 3D CIF API and there were a few games that used that so that could be interesting but it's not remotely as useful to have as Glide support.

Voodoo Banshee is more or less a Voodoo3 and a better chip all around. Glide is very useful for 1996-2000 games. It can run higher resolutions than Voodoo2 SLI and also give more consistent frame rate because it has more texture memory available. If you get a 16MB card.

I would say not a Rage Pro, for sure. Unless you have some specific curiosity for that card.
I was stuck with a Rage Pro in 98 and it wasn't much fun. More recently I did get it to do a decent job with Unreal and Quake II, after a bit of fiddling.
But in 98 I would have been very keen for a Banshee instead.

Banshee.

As above, from those two options go with the Banshee. I had one in '98 and it was great. I will say though it does lose out to a Voodoo 2 in some situations, and I'd be hesitant to compare it with a Voodoo 3. The Banshee was really just a slightly cut down Voodoo 2, with 2D bolted on.

Shadzilla wrote on 2024-01-14, 09:32:

The Banshee was really just a slightly cut down Voodoo 2, with 2D bolted on.

In performance, maybe, but it has a number of features that the Voodoo 3 built on including: 22bit postfilter, windowed 3d, unified memory, higher resolutions.

Yes when running multi-texture the V2 is faster, but it isn't that massive. The banshee is a big upgrade tech wise.

The Banshee is a nice card, 3dfx really should have pushed harder and released the rampage as the Voodoo 3 and the Voodoo 3 as a Banshee 2.

mwdmeyer wrote on 2024-01-14, 11:56:

In performance, maybe, but it has a number of features that the Voodoo 3 built on including: 22bit postfilter, windowed 3d, unif […]
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Shadzilla wrote on 2024-01-14, 09:32:

The Banshee was really just a slightly cut down Voodoo 2, with 2D bolted on.

In performance, maybe, but it has a number of features that the Voodoo 3 built on including: 22bit postfilter, windowed 3d, unified memory, higher resolutions.

Yes when running multi-texture the V2 is faster, but it isn't that massive. The banshee is a big upgrade tech wise.

The Banshee is a nice card, 3dfx really should have pushed harder and released the rampage as the Voodoo 3 and the Voodoo 3 as a Banshee 2.

Oof, well there you go, learned something new today!! Cheers 😀

The Banshee solution for that period would have been a better choice beside the multimedia support were the Rage Pro was better with the Motion Compensation acceleration for MPEG2 decoding if needed. But driver still needed all sort of updates to get where latest releases went.