I’m not (currently) an owner of a Rage Pro card. The extent of my experience with ATi cards is with testing a few games (Jedi Knight and POD, mostly) on an on-board Rage II chip in my Pentium MMX 200 machine and using all sorts of ATi Radeon cards, spanning the years 2001-2006. That said, I will try to come up with some suggestions for games that may work with the Rage III/Pro.
Drakan: Order of The Flame (August 1999) — The readme-file lists a pretty generous number of chipsets that are compatible with the game. If the PowerVR PCX2 shows up among the candidates, there’s a good chance that the Rage Pro will be strongly supported too, considering how poor PowerVR compatibility typically was by 1998 and beyond. In my own experience, I’ve had success using even the PowerVR PCX1 (no bilinear filtering) in Drakan, although I don’t believe it was a particularly strong performer. I’ve also used Voodoo2 (12MB), which has no visual or speed issues.
SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle (November 1999) — Seems to suggest that it will work with specific drivers, at least on the Xpert@Play card. What’s concerning is that it doesn’t describe how it performs on the Rage Pro, unlike a lot of the other chipsets listed. Personally, I’ve had no issues playing the game with a Voodoo2.
The Operative: No One Lives Forever (October 2000) — It sure sounds like the game supports the Rage Pro. No words on performance, though. I will just quote the readme-file:
“CORRUPTED GRAPHICS IN THE MENUS WITH THE SAVAGE CHIPSET, ATI ALL-IN-WONDER CHIPSETS AND ATI RAGE 128 CHIPSET CARDS: Turning down all display settings in No One Lives Forever to the lowest settings will help remedy this issue.
*Also it can only be corrected via a future driver update.
ATI ALL-IN-WONDER/PRO: We have found that running NO ONE LIVES FOREVER with the drivers that ship with the video card is more stable compared to the newer drivers that are currently available.
*ATI will address this issue with a future driver update.”
I’m fairly sure that I’ve tried the game on both the Voodoo2 and Riva TNT, and it did work just fine with those cards, but you can’t max out the texture detail.
Hitman: Codename 47 (November 2000) — OK, this one is a shot in the dark. The readme-file doesn’t explicitly state any support for Rage Pro, and asks for a 12MB video card/3D accelerator minimum. However, I couldn’t help but notice that the Matrox Productiva G100 shows up on the list of supported chipsets. Unless I’m mistaken, that card maxes out at 8MBs, so there is maybe a possibility that the Rage Pro and Voodoo2 8MB also work. The oldest card that I’ve personally tested with the game is the Voodoo2 12MB, and it looks and runs alright.
Hostile Waters (February 2001) — The author of the readme-file claims that the game technically works on Rage Pro, albeit with broken blending and bad performance. “Not recommended for use with Hostile Waters” seems to be the verdict. Haven’t personally played this one yet, so I can’t comment on how older cards fare here.
I also wanted to suggest Sheep, Dog ‘n’ Wolf (August 2001), which claims to support 8MB video cards, but also has an oddly specific list of cards (on the back of the box) that are incompatible with the game: Banshee, i740, MGA G100A, Savage 3D, Savage 4, Savage 4 Pro +, Riva 128 zx. The readme-file doesn’t add any more clarity to the compatibility question, other than that a Voodoo2 8MB does in fact work with the game. Personally, I’ve only used a Voodoo2 12MB as the lowest spec card.
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