I have an ATI Rage 128 Pro 32 MB laying somewhere, also have the Mac version with DVI port too. I also have a Radeon 8500 LE which is basically an underclocked 8500

Nice!

A viewer asked me to test GLQuake and Star Siege as he remembers having issues. They worked fine:

In GLQuake, the grain in 16 bit is quite noticeable now. It wasn't as obvious in other games...

because the dithering is part of the blending functions on rage128. The driver should let you switch the pattern to an ordered dither IIRC (or was that Radeon7x00?

The ATI Rage 128 Pro is a cool card, indeed.
My old G3 Bluw/white came with the Mac Version of it, running in the PCI slot at 66MHz.
Like the AGP version, but without advanced features like GART.. It even competed quite well with later cards, like Radeon 7000..
So yeah, the old Rage is was quite phenomenal in this regard. If it only had support for Quartz Extreme or Core Image..
Anyway, it was good enough to drive Mac enthusiasts nuts.. 😁

leileilol wrote:

because the dithering is part of the blending functions on rage128. The driver should let you switch the pattern to an ordered dither IIRC (or was that Radeon7x00?

There is an OpenGL option to do with dithering and blending:

I played around, but couldn't re-produce the severe grain I saw earlier. 32 bit is a bit brighter.

32 bit:

16 bit:

Also I followed up that paletted textures option.

When you disable it, the Final Fantasy VII configuration tool fails this test. Enable it and it passes it. But you say it's emulating this function? How good is it? What would you look for to judge the quality?

Game in action:

As far as I know, ATIs error-diffusion dithering alternates the dithering from frame to frame, so screeshots don't show the actual image quality that you usually see on the screen.
Error-diffusion dithering works in direct3d, in OpenGL I think it's always ordered dithering? (not sure!)

Here are some comparison screenshots I found, these were made on the Rage128pro:

Ordered dithering:

One frame of error-diffusion dithering:

8 frames of error-diffusion dithering blended in one picture:

source: http://forum.3dfx.cz/viewtopic.php?t=1070

Jo22 wrote:

The ATI Rage 128 Pro is a cool card, indeed. My old G3 Bluw/white came with the Mac Version of it, running in the PCI slot at 66 […]
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The ATI Rage 128 Pro is a cool card, indeed.
My old G3 Bluw/white came with the Mac Version of it, running in the PCI slot at 66MHz.
Like the AGP version, but without advanced features like GART.. It even competed quite well with later cards, like Radeon 7000..
So yeah, the old Rage is was quite phenomenal in this regard. If it only had support for Quartz Extreme or Core Image..
Anyway, it was good enough to drive Mac enthusiasts nuts.. 😁

I owned a Beige G3 333 when Apple announced the new ATI 128 Pro exclusively for the new Smurfintoshes. I got called a heathen on some forum, because I predicted that ATI would not release the retail version of this card until after the next Mac model was released... I was right... 😒

Did some captures:

Colin McRae Rally

ATI Rage Dawning Demo

Hmm imho activating the fps indicator would have been nice in the dawning demo for comparison.

elianda wrote:

Hmm imho activating the fps indicator would have been nice in the dawning demo for comparison.

It's running at 60 fps v-synced most of the time. That's at 800x600x32. At 1024x768x32 the card cannot sustain 60 fps most of the time.

Did you try OC te card?

MCGA wrote:

owned a Beige G3 333 when Apple announced the new ATI 128 Pro exclusively for the new Smurfintoshes. I got called a heathen on some forum, because I predicted that ATI would not release the retail version of this card until after the next Mac model was released... I was right... 😒

Oh, sorry to hear! 🙁 Yeah, these Mac forums are quite heated up at times. Don't take it too personally.
But may I ask you something ? What card did you had in your Beige G3 ? An ATI Rage IIc ? I'm curious. My knoledge about this stuff is limited and I'm still learning.
Btw, never heard the term "Smurfintosh". Sounds kinda funny! 😀

http://www.oocities.org/ziyadhosein/index.html
An archive of the old site with quite a bit on the 128 - I seem to recall that there were possible gains from certain mixes of D3D and OpenGL ICD module - I think there was another site that picked the best mixes, but looks like that is lost in the mists of time

Jo22 wrote:

Oh, sorry to hear! :-( Yeah, these Mac forums are quite heated up at times. Don't take it too personally. But may I ask you some […]
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MCGA wrote:

owned a Beige G3 333 when Apple announced the new ATI 128 Pro exclusively for the new Smurfintoshes. I got called a heathen on some forum, because I predicted that ATI would not release the retail version of this card until after the next Mac model was released... I was right... 😒

Oh, sorry to hear! 🙁 Yeah, these Mac forums are quite heated up at times. Don't take it too personally.
But may I ask you something ? What card did you had in your Beige G3 ? An ATI Rage IIc ? I'm curious. My knoledge about this stuff is limited and I'm still learning.
Btw, never heard the term "Smurfintosh". Sounds kinda funny! 😀

This was back when forums were pretty civil. 😀 But speaking of Mac forums, I stopped going to sites like MacRumors a few years back when its entire community changed and I'll leave it there.

I can't recall which video card came with my Beige, but that sounds about right. I ended up installing a 3rd party video card called Proformance( I think this was the name? ) in it, and also got all of our Smurfintoshes** at work upgraded to the same video card. It was FAST for 2D, noticeably faster than the ATI Rage 128, so good for all of Adobe's programs at the time. The downside is that some of the video cards had flaky VRAM and had to be exchanged more than once.

**( I called them this and then my little bubble of Mac friends started doing so. I even made a Smurf icon to put on our HDs at the time. )

I tested the Rage 128 Pro AGP on a Celeron 333 in DOS awhile back. My findings were that it was the fastest VGA card in the bunch, but one of the slowest in SVGA/VESA modes.
10 Way DOS Graphic Card Benchmarks on Celeron 333

clueless1 wrote:

I tested the Rage 128 Pro AGP on a Celeron 333 in DOS awhile back. My findings were that it was the fastest VGA card in the bunch, but one of the slowest in SVGA/VESA modes.
10 Way DOS Graphic Card Benchmarks on Celeron 333

That is interesting.

But good to know that the Rage 128 Pro is a great card for DOS benchmarking.

if anyone happen to test lost vikings... let me know (if it behaves like my 9500pro, with poor scrolling) 😎

There is newer Rage128 driver available for 9x,nt, 2k and xp, driver date is from end of june 2002.

4.13.01.8006 Windows 98/ME
5.13.01.5016 Windows 2000
6.13.10.5016 Windows XP
4.3.4019 Windows NT 4.0

One of the download links for these:
http://priede.bf.lu.lv/ftp/pub/OS/grafiskasKa … TI/RAGE_128_PRO_/

I really love the Rage128pro in my G4cube. It's the standard card for that machine and it has a very good image quality.
It's directly supported on some mac-software like Connectix Virtual Game Station (VGS) PS1 Emulator!

I just tried out the Rage 128 Pro myself for the first time and I agree that it's much better than expected! The quality and performance was excellent in the few tests I ran and I didn't experience any graphics glitches or other problems.