Welcome to early ATI naming bullshittery, for the most part they are the exact same GPU with different names depending on where they came from, OEM, Retail, 3rd Party etc. The worst part of all this is that cards produced by DELL had different hardware IDs from the Retail ATI cards even if they were exactly the same, thus ATI drivers wouldnt work with DELL cards and DELL drivers wouldnt work with ATI cards . .all in all it was messed up so now you have to be certain who made the card you have. (I may be miss remembering the driver situation here and that may have been isolated to Rage 128 GPUs)

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?archit … sort=generation if you look here you can see that there were some differences with bus width and speeds once the Rage XL was released but all cards used the Rage 3 GPU and all the ones you listed are identical aside from memory sizes and slot.

The AGP 2x cards are the same as the AGP version, perhaps they decided to show off the 2x part for marketing but they were all 2x regardless.

Funny thing is . .ATI continued this bullshittery with the Rage 128 series ...they really didnt learn. (Still love the Fury MAXX, glad I own a working one)

The whole Xpert@Work, Xpert@Play 98, Xpert 128, et al naming scheme was terribly confusing as well. I'm also a proud owner of a Fury MAXX. What a terrible card.

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-02-27, 10:02:

The whole Xpert@Work, Xpert@Play 98, Xpert 128, et al naming scheme was terribly confusing as well. I'm also a proud owner of a Fury MAXX. What a terrible card.

Ohhhh yes terrible doesn't quite describe the card, but I think its a terribly wonderful bit of computer history that is a complete pain in the arse to actually get running.

Its too damn picky about which boards it will run in and you need to use different driver versions to get different games to run on it .. too much fun.

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-02-27, 09:45:

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?archit … sort=generation if you look here you can see that there were some differences with bus width and speeds once the Rage XL was released but all cards used the Rage 3 GPU and all the ones you listed are identical aside from memory sizes and slot.

It is true that only Rage XL upped the clocks. But don't believe the page, they somehow state wrong clocks for every card.

TechPowerup caused the "quadro is geforce256 on jan 1 1999 you must remember" kerfuffle so i'd grain of salt on that whole place with regards to prior DX10

Speaking of clocks, I was able to overclock my Rage XL using Powerstrip for a nice little speed boost. The chip is still cool as a cucumber without a heatsink.

XL has a better chip in more ways. Yet, there are none with 16 MB, I think in 1999, if it was possible to put that much memory on it, somebody would do it.

I bought a Rage Turbo from eBay with the chip labeled as "Rage Pro Turbo AGP" and it was recognized by Windows as an "XPERT 98 AGP 2X". So it seems that the AGP 2X moniker can apply even to chips where it isn't explicitly labeled.

These same drivers also have separate device ID entries for "Rage Pro Turbo AGP" and "Rage Pro Turbo AGP 2X", so there are different revisions. Whether it's in the silicon or the card's BIOS, I don't know.

There was a marketing Rage Pro and an actually better Rage Pro that the XL and XC based on.

Is this different Rage Pro new silicon or is it all drivers/marketing?

Rage Pro, Rage Pro 2X and Rage Pro Turbo are most likely the same silicon, just different revisions with refined hardware bugs. XL and after are shrink lithography plus some minor hardware adjustments (SDRAM support, etc).

And XL finally filters alpha textures. It is not just a die shrink.

There's an ATI specifications document on the VGAmuseum site that lists the differences, here's the relevent part.
Edit - sorry the attached is such poor quality, you can just about make it out though.

I finally found an example to demonstrate a visual difference between the Rage Pro and Rage XL, thanks to Spark's attached datasheet. There is definitely a difference with how textures are filtered, and this is particularly noticeable in Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Note that the text is very hard to read.

Here are screenshots from the Rage Pro/Turbo:

Here are the same screenshots from the Rage XL:

The Rage XL while too late for any serious competition wasn't bad. It's like the Rage IIC position few years before. Also the improved MPEG2 decoding was a good thing to have.
What instead felt bad even for its times is the PCI version of the original Rage Pro in the old package.

386SX wrote on 2024-03-02, 05:41:

The Rage XL while too late for any serious competition wasn't bad. It's like the Rage IIC position few years before. Also the improved MPEG2 decoding was a good thing to have.
What instead felt bad even for its times is the PCI version of the original Rage Pro in the old package.

Maybe it seriously competed at the low end.
Do you mean Rage Pro with slower memory? Then yes, that hurts performance.

Putas wrote on 2024-03-02, 13:21:

386SX wrote on 2024-03-02, 05:41:

The Rage XL while too late for any serious competition wasn't bad. It's like the Rage IIC position few years before. Also the improved MPEG2 decoding was a good thing to have.
What instead felt bad even for its times is the PCI version of the original Rage Pro in the old package.

Maybe it seriously competed at the low end.
Do you mean Rage Pro with slower memory? Then yes, that hurts performance.

I mean the Rage Pro PCI with SGRAM upgradable to 8MB. I was expecting it to have similar speed of the AGP version but at some point I even wondered if that old package was more some Rage II engine than a real Rage Pro. While oriented to different market sectors the Riva 128 PCI destroy that more than it should. Even the MPEG2 acceleration can't fully work as expected but only on paper on the sw that supported it.

That's interesting, I wondered why that RTCW menu looked so bad on Rage Pro. They were expecting the text to be filtered.
There are some other examples I noticed while using the rage pro where the rage xl might do better. I don't have a rage xl so my comparison shots are rage pro on the left, and voodoo on the right.
First is Unreal using D3D driver with the final patch v226 from Epic. The voodoo shot is glide of course. The unfiltered lighting on the left gives it a pretty unique look on the rage pro.
Second is Half-life using OpenGL where you get both the smoke on the wall and the decals on the floor unfiltered on rage pro in the left shot.
I would have hoped the rage xl would look more like the voodoo.