Spark wrote on 2024-03-02, 15:02:

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 confirm that this blocking shape is gone with Rage XL and it is with Rage Pro / NFS5: visible in menu by looking cars (using same pc and same driver).
Rage3 drivers are using 15bit colors by deafualt with 16bit colors option, with Rage Pro tweaker possible to force real 16bit back for all ATi Rage3 cards.

ATI made a total mess of the drivers for this entire range of cards the question is how. You would think the guys developing the drivers would have a clue about the hardware they are developing them for. Its almost as if they had an A team and a B team working on alternating driver versions and neither team talked to the other. One team would fix something broken and the other team would break it again in the next version. Just look at how janked the drivers were for the Fury MAXX, you needed to switch drivers depending on what game you wanted to run even in single GPU mode.

Funnily enough nothing much has changed with AMD at the reigns, their driver/software department is still underfunded and understaffed compared to nVidia or even Intel and is hit and miss with their GPU drivers. (Nvidia was good till the RTX5000 cards shit the bed)

The Radeon 5700Xt and its horrible drivers is the reason I switched to nVidia and have never gone back, they burned a lot of people with that card and never got it working correctly till RDNA2 released.

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-05-19, 10:02:

ATI made a total mess of the drivers for this entire range of cards the question is how. You would think the guys developing the drivers would have a clue about the hardware they are developing them for. Its almost as if they had an A team and a B team working on alternating driver versions and neither team talked to the other.

They made RagePro Win9x drivers from early 1997 to the end of 2002 for Rage3, From late 1998 or 1999 we got already good drivers for RagePro.
I have played even GTA VC / GTA3 with RageXL 8MB AGP @ 640x480 resolution if 12 or 16mb limit was removed from it (for that latest is the best).

ATi had mobility and desktop line of the drivers and many variations of them, luckly you could mix many files, good compability there.
ATi Rage3 OpenGL also did take some time to mature. Rage3 drivers did get better by time, sometimes slower with bug fixes / patches.

marxveix wrote on 2025-05-19, 10:50:

They made RagePro Win9x drivers from early 1997 to the end of 2002 for Rage3, From late 1998 or 1999 we got already good drivers […]
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Trashbytes wrote on 2025-05-19, 10:02:

ATI made a total mess of the drivers for this entire range of cards the question is how. You would think the guys developing the drivers would have a clue about the hardware they are developing them for. Its almost as if they had an A team and a B team working on alternating driver versions and neither team talked to the other.

They made RagePro Win9x drivers from early 1997 to the end of 2002 for Rage3, From late 1998 or 1999 we got already good drivers for RagePro.
I have played even GTA VC / GTA3 with RageXL 8MB AGP @ 640x480 resolution if 12 or 16mb limit was removed from it (for that latest is the best).

ATi had mobility and desktop line of the drivers and many variations of them, luckly you could mix many files, good compability there.
ATi Rage3 OpenGL also did take some time to mature. Rage3 drivers did get better by time, sometimes slower with bug fixes / patches.

Yes and some never got finished before the next card came along and they started over again.

My thinking mans guess is that they simply had too many cards with feature creep thrown in and never had enough time/man power before the next one came along. The whole industry at the time was moving at breakneck speed too, from about 98 till 2010 things were crazy fast at improving, especially GPUs.

marxveix wrote on 2025-05-19, 07:37:

Nexus GA has 16MB of WRAM already from 1997
It has ATi Rage Pro and FullHD resolution support

What a unique card. The WRAM support depends on the TVP3030 chip. Is there any chance it could work outside of Mac?

Putas wrote on 2025-05-20, 08:34:

marxveix wrote on 2025-05-19, 07:37:

Nexus GA has 16MB of WRAM already from 1997
It has ATi Rage Pro and FullHD resolution support

What a unique card. The WRAM support depends on the TVP3030 chip. Is there any chance it could work outside of Mac?

Unique yes, it has 3D RAGE PRO AGP 2X chip, but has PCI connector, has WRAM up to 16MB and its the only 16MB Rage Pro?
https://videocardz.net/ati-nexus-ga

It would be more fun if its also PC compatible. 😀