xjas wrote:I currently have a Rage II+ driving my Forte VFX-1 VR helmet (note: the build thread is several weeks behind reality if you've b […]
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I currently have a Rage II+ driving my Forte VFX-1 VR helmet (note: the build thread is several weeks behind reality if you've been following that.) The 2D core is basically Mach 64 so it's great for DOS stuff (Descent 1 & 2, Quake, Build games, etc.) The VESA feature header works, and considering you literally can't run accelerated stuff on the VFX-1, the Rage does just fine. If that's not a valid use case I don't know what is. 😜
I briefly had one of the later iMac G3s with a Rage 128 Ultra, it came with Cro-Mag Rally installed which looked great and ran rather well. No complaints about that card's performance. My 450MHz G4 Cube also has a Rage 128 Pro and I did get Unreal going on it but that machine is barely able to boot so I haven't done any extensive playing.
Here's a strange one I pulled out of an old server, a Rage Mobility-P on a desktop AGP card with 8?? MB RAM. Even has composite & s-video out. Anyone know what desktop chip this is equivalent to? Is this card useful for anything? I wish it had the VESA connector.
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Those four cards plus a Thinkpad i-series with another 8MB Rage Mobility comprise the entirety of my Rage ownership experience. It's been pretty good actually.
Whoa, back up, you have a VFX1? What's the fastest card you've found to have a compatible VESA feature connector for the VIP board? I've heard that Voodoo5s don't work, which is a shame since they're the only cards I have that are even old enough to have VESA feature connector output.
I still want to get my hands on a VFX1 setup at some point, partly because System Shock doesn't support the i-glasses! VPC, partly out of nostalgia (I played Quake with one as a kid at one point), partly because there isn't a fork of DOSBox specifically designed to let you emulate '90s VR HMDs with a modern Rift or Vive yet.
Also on the Mac note, that's actually why I visited this thread; Apple used a ton of ATI Rage chips in their mid-1990s to early-2000s Macintosh lineup, pretty much ever since they ditched NuBus for PCI, and this continued into the Radeon era to the point that you'd be hard-pressed to find NVIDIA in a Mac, let alone any other brand.
-The Power Mac 6500 has a 3D Rage II built in with a paltry 2 MB of VRAM, which is complete garbage for the RAVE versions of Descent II and MechWarrior 2 that it was bundled with, but slipping in a Voodoo2 didn't help matters much because it turns out that a 250 MHz 603ev is just too slow. The V2 clearly needs a G3. As such, I only deem the 6500 (and by extension, the TAM) fit for software-rendered games from the 680x0 era, sometimes very early PowerPC.
-The indigo iMac G3 slot-loader has a 16 MB Rage 128 Pro. Doesn't fare too well in Driver, but that game bogs down even on my MDD G4 with a Radeon 7500 or 9200. Haven't tested MW2 yet because the CD drive has problems injecting and ejecting discs properly. I should probably try Unreal Tournament since there's no CD check once it's patched up.
Given their popularity, though, I figure that most Classic Mac OS games from the PowerPC era would likely optimize for ATI first, and 3dfx second since Voodoo2 cards (particularly Mac-specific variants) were a popular upgrade option for PCI Power Macs and even tray-loading iMacs with the mezzanine slot intact. Nobody's thoroughly documented graphics hardware and quirks on Classic Mac OS games quite like they have DOS/Windows games, so I wouldn't know anything aside from the Nanosaur graphics issue on 12 MB Voodoo2s.