In late 97 I upgraded from a P120 with a 2mb S3 Trio to a K6-200 with a 4mb Rage II 3D. Remember being impressed by some of the 3D effects in e.g. TOCA touring car racing, and video playback was very smooth, but it was certainly no 3DFX Voodoo.

The following year I got a Pentium 2 with a Matrox G200 AGP which was a lot faster. When that eventually got a bit slow for games I tried a 32mb Rage 128, but it proved to be really unstable, so ended up with a 16mb G400 which lasted me a good while, and was faster despite the memory deficit.

My general experience of the later Rage cards was that they (or at least their drivers) caused more crashes, but they were fairly ubiquitous in laptops and OEM machines, so can't have been that bad.

I have 2 OEM desktops with ATi Rage Pro Turbo AGP on board chipsets. Both are 8MB. One is a TIME AMD K6/2 300, ALi Aladdin, the other is a Toshiba Eqiuum 7100s Pentium II 350, Intel BX both are from late 1998 early 1999.
If you want on specific tests run then let me know, it might take me a few days as neither are set up at present.
Best,
Chris

I currently have a Rage II+ driving my Forte VFX-1 VR helmet (note: the build thread is several weeks behind reality if you've been following that.) The 2D core is basically Mach 64 so it's great for DOS stuff (Descent 1 & 2, Quake, Build games, etc.) The VESA feature header works, and considering you literally can't run accelerated stuff on the VFX-1, the Rage does just fine. If that's not a valid use case I don't know what is. 😜

I briefly had one of the later iMac G3s with a Rage 128 Ultra, it came with Cro-Mag Rally installed which looked great and ran rather well. No complaints about that card's performance. My 450MHz G4 Cube also has a Rage 128 Pro and I did get Unreal going on it but that machine is barely able to boot so I haven't done any extensive playing.

Here's a strange one I pulled out of an old server, a Rage Mobility-P on a desktop AGP card with 8?? MB RAM. Even has composite & s-video out. Anyone know what desktop chip this is equivalent to? Is this card useful for anything? I wish it had the VESA connector.

Those four cards plus a Thinkpad i-series with another 8MB Rage Mobility comprise the entirety of my Rage ownership experience. It's been pretty good actually.

From wiki:
RAGE Mobility P, M, M1 (RAGE Pro-based) (Motion Compensation, IDCT)

in general i have no love for ati rage...
rage and rage2: crap 3d features, making there no need to even look into performance. although the rage2+ is good for dvd playback.
rage pro: first decent true 3d card, no major drawbacks, faster than rendition2200 and permedia2, but driver took a long time to unleash its performance, and still quite a bit slower than riva128 and i740. as for image quality, riva128 is ugly in colors, rage pro has better colors but seems to have something wrong with texture filtering, making surfaces look blocky.
rage2c: as the name suggests, i believe this is a last update of the old rage2 core, rather than a cut down version of rage pro. 3d features are better than rage2, but performance is about 1/3 of the rage pro and comparable to the sis6326.
rage xl: die-shrink version of rage pro for servers.
rage128gl: another decent card and on par with the tnt, but again hindered by drivers for most of the time.
rage128pro: last and fastest in the rage series, but can't clock very high, so it can only compete with the tnt2 but not tnt2ultra. the highest clock i've seen is 125/140 and 133/133. also, performance skydives in windows2000/xp.

xjas wrote:

I currently have a Rage II+ driving my Forte VFX-1 VR helmet (note: the build thread is several weeks behind reality if you've b […]
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I currently have a Rage II+ driving my Forte VFX-1 VR helmet (note: the build thread is several weeks behind reality if you've been following that.) The 2D core is basically Mach 64 so it's great for DOS stuff (Descent 1 & 2, Quake, Build games, etc.) The VESA feature header works, and considering you literally can't run accelerated stuff on the VFX-1, the Rage does just fine. If that's not a valid use case I don't know what is. 😜

I briefly had one of the later iMac G3s with a Rage 128 Ultra, it came with Cro-Mag Rally installed which looked great and ran rather well. No complaints about that card's performance. My 450MHz G4 Cube also has a Rage 128 Pro and I did get Unreal going on it but that machine is barely able to boot so I haven't done any extensive playing.

Here's a strange one I pulled out of an old server, a Rage Mobility-P on a desktop AGP card with 8?? MB RAM. Even has composite & s-video out. Anyone know what desktop chip this is equivalent to? Is this card useful for anything? I wish it had the VESA connector.

CameraZOOM-20170920115629379.jpg

Those four cards plus a Thinkpad i-series with another 8MB Rage Mobility comprise the entirety of my Rage ownership experience. It's been pretty good actually.

Whoa, back up, you have a VFX1? What's the fastest card you've found to have a compatible VESA feature connector for the VIP board? I've heard that Voodoo5s don't work, which is a shame since they're the only cards I have that are even old enough to have VESA feature connector output.

I still want to get my hands on a VFX1 setup at some point, partly because System Shock doesn't support the i-glasses! VPC, partly out of nostalgia (I played Quake with one as a kid at one point), partly because there isn't a fork of DOSBox specifically designed to let you emulate '90s VR HMDs with a modern Rift or Vive yet.

Also on the Mac note, that's actually why I visited this thread; Apple used a ton of ATI Rage chips in their mid-1990s to early-2000s Macintosh lineup, pretty much ever since they ditched NuBus for PCI, and this continued into the Radeon era to the point that you'd be hard-pressed to find NVIDIA in a Mac, let alone any other brand.
-The Power Mac 6500 has a 3D Rage II built in with a paltry 2 MB of VRAM, which is complete garbage for the RAVE versions of Descent II and MechWarrior 2 that it was bundled with, but slipping in a Voodoo2 didn't help matters much because it turns out that a 250 MHz 603ev is just too slow. The V2 clearly needs a G3. As such, I only deem the 6500 (and by extension, the TAM) fit for software-rendered games from the 680x0 era, sometimes very early PowerPC.
-The indigo iMac G3 slot-loader has a 16 MB Rage 128 Pro. Doesn't fare too well in Driver, but that game bogs down even on my MDD G4 with a Radeon 7500 or 9200. Haven't tested MW2 yet because the CD drive has problems injecting and ejecting discs properly. I should probably try Unreal Tournament since there's no CD check once it's patched up.

Given their popularity, though, I figure that most Classic Mac OS games from the PowerPC era would likely optimize for ATI first, and 3dfx second since Voodoo2 cards (particularly Mac-specific variants) were a popular upgrade option for PCI Power Macs and even tray-loading iMacs with the mezzanine slot intact. Nobody's thoroughly documented graphics hardware and quirks on Classic Mac OS games quite like they have DOS/Windows games, so I wouldn't know anything aside from the Nanosaur graphics issue on 12 MB Voodoo2s.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Whoa, back up, you have a VFX1? What's the fastest card you've found to have a compatible VESA feature connector for the VIP board? I've heard that Voodoo5s don't work, which is a shame since they're the only cards I have that are even old enough to have VESA feature connector output.

To be honest, the Rage II+ does perfectly fine but I'm essentially just using it as a Mach 64. I tried a Voodoo Banshee, which didn't work, although other people have reported success with them. I also have a Rendition V2100 and an NVidia Quadro2 that I'll try eventually. I've also heard of people using various Matrox Millenniums and S3 cards (S3s need a small program run to enable the feature connector.)

Theoretically you could run any game on the VFX1 (albeit in mono mode) but because it gets its video from the feature connector you're limited to palleted, 256-colour VESA modes. That generally means 3D acceleration is out the window. So it's a bit moot point to talk about the "fastest" card as most of the popular 2D cards you'd want to use were pretty comparable.

A VFX1 wrapper for DOSbox would be really neat, even if it just displayed the two eyes as separate windows. I'd have some fun with that. 😜

Power Strip says my Rage Fury Pro runs at 120/120

Turns out, I happen to have a machine with a Rage Pro in it. I've got this Latitude CPx H500gt with a Mobility M1. It's just a Rage Pro core with 8MB vram. Played several games that would have been period correct or a little after and my opinion has to be...it's horribly slow and ugly 😀

Tried Blood II and Shogo, had to run at lowest settings. I got more enjoyment out of learning that the audio chip in this thing is A3D 1.0 capable and having my mind blown by hearing Aureal 3D audio for real for the first time.

Going to try a few more games, just to be sure there aren't any outliers or anything.

I tried Rage Fury Maxx inside K6-2+ and its slower as ATI Rage 128 GL SD with 16Mbyte.

Anyone did try it ?

Try Pentium 3 1+ Ghz, preferably on Intel chipset.

i would at least expect equal performance 😀

i know its not blazing fast but..

OK if i pump up the Resolution it works faster.

I get 20 fps Min in First Test with Rage Fury Max. (One GPU enabled)
But over 30 with Rage 128 GL Pro SD ?

So it seems the Fury Maxx runs less Clock Speed ?

Normal Rage 128 Pro should be clock @120 MHz for GPU/mem, some of them can have faster ram, around 140 MHz. There are two slightly different clocked versions of Rage MAXX, 118/140 and 125/142 but its dosen't support AGP texturing. Some "ultras" are clocked 130/130 but often have 64-bit memory bus width.

Since someone Necro'd this old thread will add my 2 cents: Liked many early Rage cards but when you had to update the driver for every new game released or it crashed/pixelated all over screen, it got to be a pain in the arse so switched to Nvidia. At least the games would play w/o issues even if slow w/o newest driver at least they played... Just my opinion.

BigDaddyM wrote on 2021-01-05, 19:57:

Normal Rage 128 Pro should be clock @120 MHz for GPU/mem, some of them can have faster ram, around 140 MHz. There are two slightly different clocked versions of Rage MAXX, 118/140 and 125/142 but its dosen't support AGP texturing. Some "ultras" are clocked 130/130 but often have 64-bit memory bus width.

There also 90/90Mhz Rage 128s out there 😒

Horun wrote on 2021-01-06, 04:35:

Since someone Necro'd this old thread will add my 2 cents: Liked many early Rage cards but when you had to update the driver for every new game released or it crashed/pixelated all over screen, it got to be a pain in the arse so switched to Nvidia. At least the games would play w/o issues even if slow w/o newest driver at least they played... Just my opinion.

That was a legit concern in 1999. Certainly soured me on the Rage cards. I switched to Geforce and it was a relief.

The situation is a little different in 2021.

Pro Rage Arguments:

• The Rage cards are relatively cheap & available, I prefer 32bit color if I have an LCD, and there are no new drivers expected in the near future.
• I find it difficult to argue "max performance" when talking about retro computing. It's not like extra performance is going to "future proof" your rig.
• If a Rage card can play the games you want to play at the resolution you want on your monitor, Rage seems like a good option to me.

My argument against the Rage cards are:

• While not exactly period correct, Geforce 5200 cards are also relatively cheap and available, have good 32bit color, and have better support for windows desktop on wide screen monitors.
• There are a lot of different rage chips ( Rage / Rage II / Rage XT / Rage LT / Rage Pro / Rage 128 / Rage 128 Pro ) and a lot of different memory configurations and there's a big performance gap between the low end and the high end. Don't buy the wrong card.

ATI fell into the brazen marketing strategy that you see when a company can't compete on performance, so they junk up the product branding so much that people might buy the crappy products by accident. Has anyone ever come up with an name for this?

Major flaw of late Rage cards is the lack of proper VBE 3.0 support, with no means to fix that. So if you want custom resolutions and refresh rates - you're out of luck. Rage Pro and derivatives of that core are still fine for late DOS, but they are hardly suitable for anything except very early 3D.

does anyone ever had wrong colors in toca with ati-renderer?