I'm impressed by this video chip considering it doesn't even have an heatsink and stays cold most times.

That's because it doesn't work at 100% most of the time. Early accelerators usually had forced double-buffered vertical sync.

I've found that the latest 2002 drivers are very bad in terms of game compatibility. The latest driver version I can recommend is version 4.11.2560. https://gona.mactar.hu/ATI_3D_CIF/ is a good resource for finding which driver to use.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-01-04, 21:38:

I'm impressed by this video chip considering it doesn't even have an heatsink and stays cold most times.

That's because it doesn't work at 100% most of the time. Early accelerators usually had forced double-buffered vertical sync.

I was reading old company press releases of the Rage Mobility and it looks like it had quite an advanced auto disabling units logic to save power (7W for the Mobility serie but I think similar to the Rage Pro classic). In fact compared to other chips with similar speed beside having poor performances, freqs, considering the 350nm process it's impressively cold even when stressed by games like the one above, not really a light game.

TheMLGladiator wrote on 2022-01-04, 22:06:

I've found that the latest 2002 drivers are very bad in terms of game compatibility. The latest driver version I can recommend is version 4.11.2560. https://gona.mactar.hu/ATI_3D_CIF/ is a good resource for finding which driver to use.

Thanks, I'll try it. For the Mobility-P 8MB SGRAM I have on a strange AGP 4x connector card, are these drivers also the best ones? And what about the control panel page that gave info on the card I didn't see in the latest 2002 drivers? I remember there was one that gave at least basic info of the card itself. Latest 2002 driver has very basic config panels.

I tried the 2560 drivers, it looks like somewhere (some) things got better in rendering accuracy (3DMark2000), Thief II has still the completely low res black shadows but I noticed OpenGL in Half Life now results in a half screen rendering with wrong colors and crash at the exit. Now this is a time correct memory, the old fashion ATi 90's driver situation.. 😁
But at least it recognize the card with its name "Turbo".. 😁

You might want to consider the ATI Rage XL (also included in the previously referenced gona spreadsheet link). It is the best performing of the Rage 3D Pro line and has bilinear filtering of transparent textures. Be sure to choose part #109-66700-00.

Re: Can we figure out Rage XL?

Meatball wrote on 2022-01-05, 10:36:

You might want to consider the ATI Rage XL (also included in the previously referenced gona spreadsheet link). It is the best performing of the Rage 3D Pro line and has bilinear filtering of transparent textures. Be sure to choose part #109-66700-00.

Re: Can we figure out Rage XL?

Interesting, I was reading it also had the iDCT acceleration for MPEG2 decoding like the Mobility-P. I'm a bit confused by all these old names/models and I was remembering wrong about it being a slower version. So at the end is the last 250nm process improved version of the Rage Pro core. From the specs it seems to also support the Rage Theather chip, interesting but I don't remember any cards with that mostly seen on the R100 cards or the Rage 128 Pro ones.
Sound like what the Riva 128 ZX has been in the 1999 for NV, a late low end still fast enough solution for entry level configs.

I'm even more impressed this card can actually run Quake3 demo @ 640x480 high geometric models, medium textures quality at more than playable frame rate I was expecting without any gfx errors. Latest drivers sure improved OpenGL rendering I suppose.

Interesting enough the first Thief Dark Project game demo sharing similar game engine I suppose, doesn't have any gfx shadows artifacts and plays perfectly at 800x600 high details with latest drivers.