In response to Kythilin :

You'll probably be better off with a voodoo3 3000 AGP, I have one and they're utterly beastly fast for high resolution VESA gaming, but you'll need a really beefy cpu for that (likely 2ghz+) if you want 30 (or more) FPS at 1600x1200 I've found. The only cards I can find that are faster at higher VESA modes is the geforce 2 ultra (possibly the high-end GF3 cards). The GF2 ultra can be had pretty cheap, the voodoo3's are usually dirt cheap today (like < $10 cheap). I've yet to find any PCI video card that's very speedy at anything above 800x600 in VESA gaming modes, and I have quite a library of about 25 PCI cards so far. Maybe make a thread about those ATI 128VR cards and discuss the performance or something?

Well I've had the Rage128 VR 32 MB PCI for a while now and I find it to be really good. I found the DirectX and opengl quality to be some of the best out there, and DOS games run very stable on it with no glitches.

16-bit color dithering can be enabled for any 16-bit color games. It's also funny how the vga output isn't the best. It has a sort of cross-color warm look, but it actually makes the dithering look better IMO. It's probably not as great as a Voodoo 3/4/5 but the dithering certainly isn't as bad as some Nvidia cards I've seen. I might even say it's better in many ways than the voodoo cards, but it's very different and I think most modern gamers might prefer a more digital dithered look (I might be wrong), instead of a composite look with analog character. Also newer cards don't even support dithering and only upsample to 32-bit output (if they let you choose it), and you end up with a 16-bit game that doesn't look any better (except for alpha blending). There are models with DVI output but it probably takes away from the analog character and makes the dithering flaws stand out more. The card also lets you do 32-bit color with minimal slow down, which is unlike any other card from the same era; 32-bit color is actually free in some cases.

DOS performance is great but it has some odd bottleneck that probably isn't too great for those that want max FPS and high resolution Vesa modes. It isn't bad but if you're playing Build games at SVGA or higher, you'll notice slowdown and choppiness. Supposedly the mach64 DOS driver gets around this but it didn't on my end. Fastvid didn't work either. I found that it actually speeds up in Windows if you disable directdraw acceleration. This makes it run quite a bit faster in Doom95 (faster than PCX 5750) and Build games at svga. Also, I bought a PCI to PCIE 1X bridge and that made FPS jump considerably for Dos SVGA and directdraw games with acceleration off; I can actually run Blood this way in Windows at 1280x1024 (which is the max Vesa resolution on this card) with directdraw acceleration off with no corruption-glitches and it is playable (on the other hand I lost 20FPS at lower resolutions on Incoming with the PCIE 1x bridge). I find it is an odd card for DOS games, but on very fast systems it can actually help games that run too fast ( unless you buy the PCI to PCIE 1x bridge maybe 🤣).

VGA quality isn't the best and it can be kind of soft at high refresh rates with a switch box. Had to use powerstrip to go beyond 60hz; the drivers seem to have LCDs in mind. The cross color warmness might be a turn off to those that seek accuracy. If you want digital accuracy you'll probably need a DVI model.

The only bad thing I can say about this card is the univbe support. It seems non-existent and I cannot play Mortal Kombat Trilogy in DOS or Windows. I've tried the modified univbe driver that makes nvidia cards work and the mach64 TSR driver, but no luck on my end. On the other hand it is very stable with games that do work. I can play Blood in Windows and watch the cutscenes without vesa corruption (the cutscenes cause problems on Geforce PCX 5750, forcing me to alt-tab). It doesn't suffer the modeX (320x200) bug like the Voodoo4/5 and looks good.

No glide support unfortunately haha and I haven't tried any wrappers. Otherwise the opengl and Direct3D support is very good. The drivers are solid from 12-2000. The only problem is having to reboot Windows everytime I change a setting (e.g. vsync off-on, paletted textures, etc). It has paletted texture support for games like Final Fantasy VII-VIII. I can enable anti-aliasing without causing 2d mis-alignment on games like Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII-VIII. The Opengl performance surprised me as I have the VR model from 2001 but it performs like the Pro; it installs as a VR Pro so who knows. I can actually play Quake 3 Arena with maximum options, cg_shadows=3 and 32-bit all with about 20-40FPS (peaks into 100+ at times), albeit at 640x480 (and ext_compiled_vertex_array=0 to fix lighting glitch) but that is really impressive IMO. It reminds me of a Voodoo 4 I used to have (albeit a slower one).

Overall this is a really good card. Was a great deal for $15.00 brand new after shipping. It doesn't do glide, but it does everything else with a bit more than expected sometimes. Univbe support is non-existent however and I'm not too happy about that; this is the only thing that gets in the way of this being one of the best options for me. Great card but I'm let down without univbe support.