Ah, yeah that was back in the PowerPC days.

This thread should be a sticky!

EscapeVelocity wrote:

This thread should be a sticky!

I think if we make every very interesting posts a sticky, we'll need "super"stickies to supersticky the normal stickies or we won't find any of the normal topics. At least not on the 1st 3 pages!

Awesome thread. Although, looks like you left out the Rage Pro............ but it wasn't too impressive in terms of graphics quality and performance nonetheless. But the special ATI Rage edition of MechWarrior 2 did look pretty nice on it (in some ways better than the 3dfx version, if you can get past the 512x384 resolution limit). One interesting quirk with the Rage Pro is that it can't do bilinear filtering on transparent surfaces, which can make some games look really ugly:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3d-accele … step,51-26.html

That's because the Rage isn't doing that transparent surfaces itself - the cpu is, through the driver!

and that's what made rage suck. You can't even modulate the alpha blend or even use GE128 alphatest. I even tried getting OA to run on Rage Pro better - turns out my optimal effects don't make a difference

"Rage Pro" indeed. It puts the rage into programmers 😠

leileilol wrote:

That's because the Rage isn't doing that transparent surfaces itself - the cpu is, through the driver!

and that's what made rage suck. You can't even modulate the alpha blend or even use GE128 alphatest. I even tried getting OA to run on Rage Pro better - turns out my optimal effects don't make a difference

"Rage Pro" indeed. It puts the rage into programmers 😠

🤣 that must be it then, but I guess very typical of ATI products from that era. Oh well, at least it made the Rage line somewhat usable (at least you can play Quake 2 in hardware-accelerated mode now, even if it is downright ugly 😀) To me they didn't get things right till they released their DX9-compliant products (Radeon 9700).

Tetrium wrote:

EscapeVelocity wrote:

This thread should be a sticky!

I think if we make every very interesting posts a sticky, we'll need "super"stickies to supersticky the normal stickies or we won't find any of the normal topics. At least not on the 1st 3 pages!

We have those "super" stickies, they're called "important", while the normal ones are called "useful".

This thread is on-topic and the first post is well-written and informative. There is also currently only one other sticky thead in this section of the forum. I'll go ahead and sticky it.

Unfortunately Rage Pro is one of not many cards that I am missing. 😁 I just can't get excited over it so haven't gotten one.

And thanks much for the sticky!

swaaye wrote:

I ran a Rage 128 Pro, which is the same chip as Rage Fury Pro. The 3D Rage Pro is different and I don't have one (not interested in them).

Actually there are two distinct Rage 128 chips. The Rage 128 and the Rage 128 Pro. The original chip has some problems and missing features compared to the Pro edition.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/displa … ti-furypro.html

Well no, there are 3 Ati Rage 128 chips, or better say cards
128GL - 128bit mem, agp2x
128VR - 64bit mem, agp2x - lowcost version of GL with lower clocks
128Pro - 64bit mem, agp4x, higher clocks with many differents variants (GL, Ultra)

I have a feeling that the Pro came in both 128 and 64 bit configs. I think my card is too fast to be using 64bit SDRAM... it is a Rage 128 Pro Ultra.

ATI really played the name game back then though so its hard to decipher just what the cards were. Mine seems to be the high end OEM offering of the Pro.

swaaye wrote:

I have a feeling that the Pro came in both 128 and 64 bit configs. I think my card is too fast to be using 64bit SDRAM... it is a Rage 128 Pro Ultra.

ATI really played the name game back then though so its hard to decipher just what the cards were. Mine seems to be the high end OEM offering of the Pro.

I remember Dell (and some other OEMs) putting those (labeled as "Rage 128 Ultra") in their lower-end machines as recent as 2002. Did you purchase the card in retail packaging? Yeah ATI often sold their chips out to unknown board manufacturers who tinkered with them in every way possible (and yes, NVIDIA and others are guilty of doing this too, but as long as you purchased a reputable brand you were assured you were getting the real thing. But with ATI cards, even non-ATI manufactured OEM cards were labeled as "built by ATI.") Also one thing to mention is that ATI did come out with variants of their original Rage 128 that had AGP 4x support (I used to have an Xpert 2000 that I got for free, and it had AGP 4x support while using the 128VR chip with the 64-bit memory interface). So getting the "real-deal" was kind of a risk when you were purchasing an OEM version.

I remember a lot of people getting PO'ed back in the day when they purchased 32MB Radeons off newegg with DDR memory, thinking that they were getting the retail board, when in reality they got a 3rd-party-manufactured that operated at lower core/memory frequencies and had HyperZ disabled in the registry. Luckily those were hackable via software to turn them back into "real" Radeons

Nope I'm sure mine is a Dell pull. you can see benches of it in the first post. It performs rather well.

I tested all Virges (except VX which seems kinda rare) in more then 20 games, found out the DX/GX chip is about 50% faster clock for clock then original Virge. The GX have chip ticking at usual 55 MHz, it is faster by some 10% then DX only because of memory. Also there are often S3D files in newer drivers, should solve the compatibility.

The GX/DX seems to be about as fast as a Verite V1000 in D3D. Judging by Jedi Knight at least. Unfortunately the drivers suck even worse than Rendition's and so not many games work right.

I'm pretty certain that the GX and DX are the same chip. After all there are GX boards with EDO such as the STB Nitro 3D. GX was supposed to be the SGRAM chip whereas DX the EDO version.

I had a VX board about 10 years ago. It was the Diamond Stealth 3D 3000. It was blurry, which was laughable considering it was supposed to be a professionally oriented product. Speed in 2D is nothing special and 3D is slower than plain 325 chip. I think the clock speed is lower for some reason relating to the VRAM. I imagine they are rare because they cost too much and sucked at the same time (good reviews were not common).

I'm drowning in those S3 Virge cards. Got a lot of 4MB parts too, some with (filled or empty) memory sockets and some without.
I even found one Virge(?) card which had 4 memory sockets, and I mean just the 4 filled sockets! You could try to run it without any memory 🤣.
But it looked awful when I found it (mud, twigs and rust 😜).

edit:I just had a check and I don't have as many Virge parts as I originally thought, about 10 or so. Virge GX, DX and just Virge. And no VX parts...interesting.
I do have many more Trio's but I keep those in a separate box. I may have a couple more Virges in a few forgotten rigs of mine though. Also iirc the S3 card with all memory chips socketed was probably a Trio also.

I originally thought the GX was meant for AGP, but the box I checked were PCI only. Or maybe that was the GX2

Well clearly that junk pile needs to be filled out with a VX so get to it. 😈

DX and GX are the same Gen. GX is supposed to mean SGRAM while DX meant EDO but it didn't turn out to mean anything in the end. GX2 is the first AGP one.

The Trio3D also seems to be another interesting one (available in both AGP and PCI); I would say it's a slightly-improved ViRGE (i.e. a ViRGE with somewhat acceptable performance in older games). It was released pretty late though and couldn't compete with chips released around its time (TNT, Voodoo2), but I recall one of my work computers had one and Jedi Knight worked pretty well in D3D mode, but that was pretty much the only game that worked correctly (other games I tried, such as Aliens vs. Predator and Half-Life, would run with severe rendering anomalies, and forget about Quake 2 - no OpenGL support). Still wonder how well it handles the S3D-accelerated MechWarrior 2 though.

Trio 3D is next step in Virge evolution, rebranded and marketed as business accelerator. AVP and HL fails on almost all first generation cards.

I'm pretty sure that Virge is actually newer then Trio.
There were many different Trio's made also. I remember them being so common that when gutting a machine I found, I didn't even bother to take it with me anymore!

leileilol wrote:

That's because the Rage isn't doing that transparent surfaces itself - the cpu is, through the driver!

and that's what made rage suck. You can't even modulate the alpha blend or even use GE128 alphatest. I even tried getting OA to run on Rage Pro better - turns out my optimal effects don't make a difference

"Rage Pro" indeed. It puts the rage into programmers 😠

The most insane thing about that architecture is that the Rage Pro's hardware was conditionally capable of multitexturing. To say it was a quirky design would understate things, though it might explain why its drivers were shaky for so long.

I actually snagged an 8 MB Trident Blade3D from a $10 rummage bin years ago. The 2D was functional, and Direct3D support was maybe Voodoo1-level but marred by terrible dithering and green alpha filtering. As I was using it on a Windows 2000 system, there was no OpenGL support. Later I gave that system to a friend, who slapped it into a spare Pentium II performing torrent and routing duties for his house. Without a video card it wouldn't boot, and it displayed 80x25 console text without issues. Let that stand to its credit.

Tetrium wrote:

I'm pretty sure that Virge is actually newer then Trio.
There were many different Trio's made also. I remember them being so common that when gutting a machine I found, I didn't even bother to take it with me anymore!

I believe the Virge was built directly on the Trio32/Trio64's 2D core, and that the later, nominally 3D-capable Trios were all just rebadged Virges.