I am curious why nobody considers the ATI Rage Pro series. It's not the fastest video graphics card, but has overwhelming support for *all* operating systems, even modern ones.
If you're looking for software drivers, visit https://archive.org/details/500-cd-8 first (a CD image). Drivers for newer OS can be found easily, too just by googling.

Peter z80.eu wrote on 2025-02-03, 10:43:

I am curious why nobody considers the ATI Rage Pro series. It's not the fastest video graphics card, but has overwhelming support for *all* operating systems, even modern ones.
If you're looking for software drivers, visit https://archive.org/details/500-cd-8 first (a CD image). Drivers for newer OS can be found easily, too just by googling.

ATI Rage Pro and earlier ATI cards are nice for 2d Windows stuff and almost all DOS games > 1991. If that's all you do, then the Rage Pro is fine. They also have an MPEG decoder that can be nice if you wanted to watch DVD's on your retro PC for some reason. It was the go-to video chipset for servers for years. There are companies that still make a PCI version of the card, believe it or not.

But there are some well documented issues with the Rage Pro:

• Some DOS side scrolling games(notably Commander Keen) have stuttering issues. (https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/)
• If you are trying to do OPEN GL or DirectX games < 2000, the ATI Rage Pro cards are missing some hardware features that can affect visual fidelity, even if you use drivers that came out much later.
• If you are trying to do OPEN GL or DirectX games >= 2000, the ATI Rage Pro cards usually don't have enough muscle to play the games at all.

ATI Rage 128 cards are a noticeable improvement over the Rage Pro. Full DirectX 6 support, reasonable OpenGL, Support for Fog, Texture Filtering, etc. The fully 32-bit rendering path & 128 bit memory access also give these cards much better performance than the Rage Pro. The price difference between the Pro and the 128 is negligible. Save yourself some headaches and get the 128 if you want to get a Rage card.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/505/11

Guys, I read the entire thread and concluded that
the S3 Virge series cards are the most compatible with dos and win 3.x-9x. Right?

msdos9 wrote on 2025-04-28, 16:19:

Guys, I read the entire thread and concluded that
the S3 Virge series cards are the most compatible with dos and win 3.x-9x. Right?

I'd say they are among the top compatibility wise, as long as you don't intend to run anything 3d on them. An S3 trio64 would be very close if you dont care about the 3d cough cough"capability" or the extra 2mb the virge can offer.

One undesirable thing about virge/trio is the "high pedestal" card bios "bug" (well really it's a feature) - about 50% of the card's I've seen are like this. This manifests as 100% black color appearing as a very dark brown when you use an LCD monitor-it would be unnoticeable on a CRT. Afaik this has something to do with the brightness level set by the cards bios. Not sure if there was a software workaround (I didn't care enough to try and find out).

I actually consider Cirrus Logic 5464 "Laguna 3d" one notch up from the virge, again as long as you don't really need the 3d part. No black issue, perfect dos and windows compatibility, imho better image quality, somewhat newer then virge and faster in 2d in windows

Rage128 does not support Win3x. G200/400 are most compatible. S3 Savage3D seems to be conpatible too.
RagePro is also nice . If we are talking 3D in Win95 then G200/400 are best. G450/550 only supports Win3x in WinOS/2.