Yet another issue with an ATi card for me... but it's weird enough that I figured it'd be worth asking about here. If the card is defective\damaged this is about the strangest defect I've ever seen. The card is just like the 16MB SGRAM-equipped card shown here. Despite the lack of chips on the back, the memory bus is a full 128bit.

Going to try to keep this short and sweet. I have tested the card extensively in 2D and 3D games and it works flawlessly except for these problems:

1. If Windows loads with the resolution set to 1600x1200 (any bit depth) the colors will be all bluish and messed up... sort of like there are some colors missing. BUT, certain screen elements are not affected by it! So it isn't a simple color output\analog issue.

And if I load a full screen game, it looks perfect. Sometimes returning from the game will cause the colors to look better but still have bluish colors in places they shouldn't be.

The kicker is that setting the system to any other lower resolution looks fine, and if I set it to 32bit color at a lower res and THEN switch to 1600x1200 (at any color depth, even 32bit) it looks perfect!

Once I've done that I can switch back and forth to any res, 1600x1200 or lower and it's all perfectly fine... unless I restart the computer with it set to 1600x1200, then it'll be blue again. This is just so weird.

2. No matter what refresh rate I choose at any resolution, the monitor always reports the vertical refresh as ~60Hz in Windows. And I can see the flicker so I know that it is accurate.

3. I notice once in a while the monitor (CRT) will start making a faint high pitch sound as if the refresh rate has changed or something, even though nothing has changed. If I switch the resolution or refresh rate setting on the computer, the noise goes away for a while. I haven't noticed any other cards doing this on this CRT. 🤷

All of this is on my tester system running Windows 98SE and mainly using the driver "WME_R128_4_13_7192.exe" . I force-installed another slightly newer Rage 128 Pro driver that said it wasn't compatible (shocker: it worked when I forced it to install... thanks ATi) and that did the same thing.

Is this card broken or is this a known driver quirk? The are some scrapes and scuffs on the back of the card, but nothing is broken off and no traces are damaged (I looked at it under a microscope...). Some of the solder pads for the unpopulated memory chip locations on the back were a bit boogered from being scraped by something, so I ran a needle between them to be sure none were shorting, but I did attempt one power-on before noticing this. It is possible that something was damaged during that first power-on... but... it just seems so odd that everything works fine (other than refresh rates) after switching resolutions.