Yeah, Rage 128 is 1998. Performance wise think Voodoo2 and Riva TNT, although a bit slower.

The big issue with Rage 128 were the drivers and 16bit IQ. 32bit looked fantastic and took less of a hit than on other cards of the era, however 16bit performance was still very crucial at the time and it does look pretty bad or pretty retro if you're crazy like us here on VOGONS 😈

And for the silly texture filtering debates.........

I believe that the reason why so few people use them in retro builds is mainly due to newer and faster cards being just as cheap or cheaper while having nicer drivers. For craps and giggles or flavor of the month there isn't much of an incentive to use them though they are worth having as part of a collection. They could be very useful in the future should prices surge with other cards.

Radeon naming scheme can get confusing at times. But I always felt the Rage naming scheme was terrible.

Looks like for a 1998 era system, you'd want a Rage128GL chip (Rage Fury). The Rage 128 Pro came 1 year later. I have 2 cards that were Rage Fury Pro or something, so Rage 128 Pro.

dexvx wrote:

Radeon naming scheme can get confusing at times. But I always felt the Rage naming scheme was terrible.

Looks like for a 1998 era system, you'd want a Rage128GL chip (Rage Fury). The Rage 128 Pro came 1 year later. I have 2 cards that were Rage Fury Pro or something, so Rage 128 Pro.

Well, which naming scheme isn't confusing?
Relatively speaking, 3dfx did a good job, I guess.

Agree. I don't get most naming conventions these days, Radeon, geForce & Quadro. All confusing. o.0.

ATi's was pretty straight forward for the Rage128/Rage128pro.

Xpert
Rage Fury
Rage Fury Pro
Rage Fury Maxx

I'm not too sure there was ever a card called 'Rage128 Pro' (thats the name of the chipset o.0), it was *always* called 'Rage Fury Pro' iirc.

I got my Rage Fury Pro (I guess must have been in '99 as it was new), and I specifically got it because it was cheaper than 3dfx and nVidia, yet performed well enough for everything on the market at the time. Glide was dying by this point, Voodoo's weren't the cards making the splashes that they used to, OpenGL was becoming more popular in gaming and the only rival for Direct3D. Hardly anything had TnL so no need for nVidia. Rage Fury Pro did decent FPS and decent resolutions and was compatible with everything I wanted to play at the time. I don't know why it gets so much flak tbh.

spiroyster wrote:

Agree. I don't get most naming conventions these days, Radeon, geForce & Quadro. All confusing. o.0. […]
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Agree. I don't get most naming conventions these days, Radeon, geForce & Quadro. All confusing. o.0.

ATi's was pretty straight forward for the Rage128/Rage128pro.

Xpert
Rage Fury
Rage Fury Pro
Rage Fury Maxx

I'm not too sure there was ever a card called 'Rage128 Pro' (thats the name of the chipset o.0), it was *always* called 'Rage Fury Pro' iirc.

I got my Rage Fury Pro (I guess must have been in '99 as it was new), and I specifically got it because it was cheaper than 3dfx and nVidia, yet performed well enough for everything on the market at the time. Glide was dying by this point, Voodoo's weren't the cards making the splashes that they used to, OpenGL was becoming more popular in gaming and the only rival for Direct3D. Hardly anything had TnL so no need for nVidia. Rage Fury Pro did decent FPS and decent resolutions and was compatible with everything I wanted to play at the time. I don't know why it gets so much flak tbh.

For Xpert series there are:
Xpert 128 - Rage 128GL
Xpert 2000 - Rage 128VR
Xpert 2000 Pro - Rage 128Pro
... and some other Xpert cards with earlier Rage chips that add up to the confusion.

I have had an Xpert 128 for a year or two. Same reason: much cheaper than 3dfx, Matrox, and major branded NV counterparts. Performance-wise it was acceptable. It sure has a place in my heart but I can see why it's not popular in retro-building today: it has almost no killer-feature over its alternatives. If you want good 3D performance go for geforce. If you want good DOS performance go for TNT2 PCI or ARK. If you want Glide then 3dfx. If you want EMBM get Matrix. If you want METAL go S3. Even if you want ATI proprietary CIF you can't get it from Rage 128/128Pro. Back in its days it was good in 32bit 3D performance and DVD playback, but today a machine that can take Rage 128 would most likely be able to take a Geforce or Radeon and eclipse Rage 128 in every way for the same amount of money.

I think my feeling towards ATI Rage cards is tainted by the fact that every system I've used with a "Rage" chip was some system from the early or mid-2000s with a "Rage" serving for cheap basic video. I didn't experience them when they were actually used for 3D gaming.

I had an IBM laptop with a Rage, I got it to run 3DMark2000 originally but later drivers broke it, never to work in 3D again.
Long ago I built a cheap PC for a young relative with some Rage card, it ran 2D okay, 3D wasn't a consideration.

It gets really bad with mid-2000s server boards which very commonly have "Rage XL" chips, but the most likely OS you would use with one of these boards (Linux) has long ago disregarded support for these chips and can't even render a 2D GUI with tolerable performance. I'm sure in the software environment of 1999 they were a lot better.

Rage 128GL 16MB was my first video card. 😎 I remember overclocking the crap out of that thing, getting it up to 115/160 stable over the defaults of 90/90. 😲 I had great Quake3 framerates @ 800x600x32 I think with max settings but texture detail set to medium with a few performance tweaks which in hindsight probably lowered my framerate because of poor documentation from certain sites back in the day (COUGHtweakguides.comCOUGH) 😵

Believe it or not, there was a dedicated community for the Rage series and it was my go to forum 18 years ago (geez). Someone here may have heard of them: RageUnderground.com and then the community left and created EliteBastards.com which was more of a tech site for a few years. Both are gone now, sadly.

I would love to get my hands on a Rage 128GL and do some proper overclocking now that I'm not 13 and I can afford to buy cooling. 🤣

These are PC specs I had while I owned the card:

Fusion wrote:

Rage 128GL 16MB was my first video card. :cool: I remember overclocking the crap out of that thing, getting it up to 115/160 sta […]
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Rage 128GL 16MB was my first video card. 😎 I remember overclocking the crap out of that thing, getting it up to 115/160 stable over the defaults of 90/90. 😲 I had great Quake3 framerates @ 800x600x32 I think with max settings but texture detail set to medium with a few performance tweaks which in hindsight probably lowered my framerate because of poor documentation from certain sites back in the day (COUGHtweakguides.comCOUGH) 😵

Believe it or not, there was a dedicated community for the Rage series and it was my go to forum 18 years ago (geez). Someone here may have heard of them: RageUnderground.com and then the community left and created EliteBastards.com which was more of a tech site for a few years. Both are gone now, sadly.

I would love to get my hands on a Rage 128GL and do some proper overclocking now that I'm not 13 and I can afford to buy cooling. 🤣

These are PC specs I had while I owned the card:

58969c0abc383_bigsticker.jpg.7a876bac77819e960b33d1ae5a2166a2.jpg

Wholly.... I only achieved a mere 100/125 with my card. The dude worked at the retailer store advertised me about the card's OC capability and I had thought he was boasting.

When I think Rage 128, I think of the ATI Rage Dawning demo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjkgLC3w7Xw

Also, at the time, Rage 128 was one of the best DVD accelerator cards. It offloads most of the decoding process. Matrox, 3dfx and NVidia didn't bother to implement much MPEG2 processing. NVidia finally reached parity with GeForce4 IIRC.

swaaye wrote:

When I think Rage 128, I think of the ATI Rage Dawning demo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjkgLC3w7Xw

Also, at the time, Rage 128 was one of the best DVD accelerator cards. It offloads most of the decoding process. Matrox, 3dfx and NVidia didn't bother to implement much MPEG2 processing. NVidia finally reached parity with GeForce4 IIRC.

Ati truly has the best demos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu-A0jqMPd8
So mesmerizing.

My Dell Dimension 4300S came with an ATI Rage 128 Ultra 32MB video card when I got it. I hardly remember how 3D performance was since I didn't have enough 9x-era PC games to play back then, I think I remember Fly! Piper and Cessna in San Francisco lagged on there but that's about it.

I'm not surprised at all that the Rage 128 was considered a budget card because it sounded like a bit of a mismatch on that system with its specifications, a 1.6 GHz P4 seems more appropriately paired with a Geforce2 or a similar Radeon card compared to a Rage 128, even the Intel Extreme Graphics chipset was slightly more advanced than the Rage 128 cards.

I do have a couple Macintoshes with ATI Rage 128 video chipsets so I guess I can see how good it is for OS9 gaming.

And for the silly texture filtering

This flawed texture filtering was noted in reviews though and ATi improved it in Pro. I don't see anything silly here.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

I do have a couple Macintoshes with ATI Rage 128 video chipsets so I guess I can see how good it is for OS9 gaming.

True, even in comparison to a Radeon 7000 it isn't bad.
If I remember correctly, some Mac guys had a heated-up discussion about Rage 128 vs Radeon.
Turned out that the Rage 128/Rage 128 Pro was even faster(!) in some OpenGL specific situations.

(Oh, and there also was a discussion about the importance of hardware-acceleration.
You know, it's hard to find a card which can do accelerate both OS9 and X..
Geforce 2-4 and Rage can do, for can example. But without clever patching, other cards
do lack support for either OS9 or OS X. More than often, even 2D accel. is gone in OS9.
That's sad for GF5200 fans, because it could do CoreImage in Tiger but is on framebuffer-level in OS9.)