Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-01-08, 01:21:
I used to be a diehard ATi guy. The Rage Pro and Rage IIC really turned me off of their products. I would say the Rage Pro marks the point where ATi stopped focusing on professional products and started catering to "gamers". My previous card was a Rage II+, which I really liked as a 2D card. I believe ATi had actually promised Rage II users a driver for OpenGL support, but that never happened and instead we got a big "F#$% you, please buy our Rage Pro instead". For some reason I actually bought one (at a steep discount), but only kept it in my system for about a week before I returned it, due to the cheap feel and crappy image quality. I think the Rage Pro must have been the card that gave ATi the reputation for having crappy drivers. I always remembered the drivers for their older products being top notch. Shortly after that I bought a Voodoo3. Despite being mainly a 3D card was much better at 2D than the Rage Pro.
Ati Rage Pro was competition to Voodoo1!!! Not voodoo2, or voodoo3. It was not fair, you bought it somewhere in voodoo2 or even voodoo3 era, and expected to run late 1998 and even 1999 flawlesly.
I kinda agree with drivers, but they matured quite good after some time. Maybe you used early ones. Anyway, I just testing these cards right now, and find out, Tomb raider 2 runs good, MDK direct3d patch runs, but GLQuake... that is a problem, it even doesn't run. Ati released some opengl.dll for quake2, claiming it works even with glquake, but when I copy that file into GLquake directory, it doesnt start. Returning some errors in small window messages.
I think it was good card for 1997, and early 1998 (after releasing voodoo2, it should be considered low end/budget card). Rage pro 2x, and pro Turbo, was not new cards. It's still old Rage Pro from 1997, just they upgraded it to 8MB, used SGR on some of them, and released new drivers, that increased performance (it was fraud, because it is same chip as Rage Pro 2x, but they masked it, as it is new chip). So, just don't consider Rage Pro Turbo to be 1998 card. It is not. It's 1997 technology.
Something similiar, as Virge, and Trio3D issue. Trio3D and Trio3D/2X is just Virge GX with some improvements (particulary in compatibility).
Both companies S3 and Ati somehow improved their old primary 3d accelerator card (Virge serie, and Ati Rage Pro serie), to look better than it actually is, but they kept is as budget solution, to their primary one in 1998 (S3 primary was Savage3D, and they renamed Virge to Trio3D, because Virge had bad reputation. Ati primary was Ati Rage 128 for 1998. They tried that thing with Rage Pro Turbo, as to decieve public it is somehow mainstream card, while Rage XL (dieshrunk Rage Pro) is budget card. But I would say, they are same budget card, just Rage Pro Turbo has 75/100 clocks, while XL has 60/80).
Nvidia kept Riva 128 / ZX as budget card , without some renaming, after TNT. They didn't confused buyers by renaming stuff. And 3dfx kept voodoo1, and later released banshee, as mainstream card.
So as you can see, all problem is, you need to consider Rage Pro Turbo 1997 card, it was only 1998 renaming non-sense from Ati, it's not 1998 card. So you need to run only 1996-1997 games on it considering it high-end, and whose games are handled good.
I just tested Tomb Raider 2 on Rage Pro Turbo 8MB and it runs superb for year 1997. - 640x480 x 16bit fluently, -640x480 x32 bit fluently -800x600x16 bit fluently, only choppy resolution is 800x600x32-bit. But still somehow playable, particulary after overclock. I was impressed, for 1997 card, it handled even 800x600x32bit in TR2. It was much better than Voodoo1 I would said, while cheaper, and also 2d/3d solution (so even cheaper for people doesn't have 2D card, and buying first computer).
Overclock results are somehow impressive too.. I was able overclock from 75/100 to 98/116. At that speed, 800x600x32-bit was even less choppy. I have SGR -8ns version, so memories would go probably higher, but from some reason, card refuse to go over 116, and just sets clocks to 60 , when I try going 117 and more.