the rage128pro is fairly good but a major drawback is abysmal win2000/xp driver, a large drop in performance is inevitable.

I was equally impressed with how much less 32bit color depth hits the Rage 128 compared to the competition. That is really impressive! Drivers are kind of a mess though, it took me a while to find the proper ones ( I don't think I tried looking at AMD's site, good call).

F2bnp wrote:

I was equally impressed with how much less 32bit color depth hits the Rage 128 compared to the competition. That is really impressive! Drivers are kind of a mess though, it took me a while to find the proper ones ( I don't think I tried looking at AMD's site, good call).

What drivers did you use and what issues did you run into?

The ATI Rage 128 Pro was the standard graphics card shipped with the first G4 PowerMacs, supported by OS 8.6 onwards I think. MacOS had to have built-in support for them and its APIs for 3D presented less of a challenge, thus the drivers were of higher quality than their Win9x counterparts. Overall it was one of the better cards for that era of Macintosh gaming, including Connectix VGS hehe

I have had an Mac G4 with Rage128Pro once. It ran good and (I guess) ok enough on MacOS-9.
Though running OsX Tiger was a pain, even with 1gb of Ram.

On the other hand. If the Rage128Pro cards are fast enough, compared to TNT2-Ultra/Pro's,
then why not? Especially if they are cheaper than TNT2 card's.
Seem's like a perfectly sane choice for persons that are new to this hobby, and want a 1997
to 2000 era gaming machine. Just pair it up with a V2, seems like a good choice.

Thanks for mentioning my site retronn.de
I basically had the same problems that some card software is not available at AMD anymore. I know that it often needs a bit search on the ftp to find stuff. It could be worthwhile to look at the original CD image for the Rage Pro 128 or even the one from the Fury MAXX.

So what clocks did your Rage 128 Pro had?
Also DVD acceleration features are a point where the chipset is ahead of the NVidia solutions. (iDCT etc.)
In the beginning the drivers were really bad (typical for ATi at this time). It got better when the card had aged a bit and thus it was very often used as mid/low end card later. There are a hell of versions (nearly as many as the Rage128GL), some even with deviating DEV IDs. These need a bit manual work to get it running in Win9x/2K as the driver installer complains about 'no fitting card detected'.

Thank you for hosting these files!

True, the Fury MAXX ISO can be downloaded from the VOGONS driver archive, I think it also includes the Media Center, but I didn't think of checking.

PowerStrip reports 118 MHz for the core and 140 MHz for the memory.

Love just how much it poops all over the M64 🤣, I always thought good of ATI cards of this period.

IIRC for the Rage128, the paletted texture option is emulation and isn't real paletted texturing.

(and remember, do not forget r_primitves 2 in Q3, and "use opengl display lists" in the latest MDK2 version for that boost)

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

I was equally impressed with how much less 32bit color depth hits the Rage 128 compared to the competition. That is really impressive! Drivers are kind of a mess though, it took me a while to find the proper ones ( I don't think I tried looking at AMD's site, good call).

What drivers did you use and what issues did you run into?

Seems like I was using the driver from AMD's site.

Rage 128 Pro

Almost exactly one year ago 🤣 .

Nice write up, Phil! How did the 32-bit image quality compare to the TNT2 and Voodoo3? I know you said it was a little weak in 16-bit.

IMO the title is misleading, as many of your tabloid-style subjects you choose(d).. 😢

Your benchmarks actually unveiled nothing unexpected. The card does perform exactly like expected. Not worse, not better.
The Rage128 has always been a competitor to the RivaTNT2 and does compete well, at least regarding speed and image quality, let's not discuss the inferior and more restrictive drivers.

clueless1 wrote:

Nice write up, Phil! How did the 32-bit image quality compare to the TNT2 and Voodoo3? I know you said it was a little weak in 16-bit.

It looked great, didn't notice anything that looked off. 16 bit looked a bit grainy, but in motion it's hard to tell to be honest.

leileilol wrote:

IIRC for the Rage128, the paletted texture option is emulation and isn't real paletted texturing.

(and remember, do not forget r_primitves 2 in Q3, and "use opengl display lists" in the latest MDK2 version for that boost)

I see, is there a way to visualize this emulation?

I find the post a great one since I was under the impression that rage 128 cards are rubbish, I just gave them away without thinking twice. Thanks for the info Phil !

clueless1 wrote:

Nice write up, Phil! How did the 32-bit image quality compare to the TNT2 and Voodoo3? I know you said it was a little weak in 16-bit.

Voodoo cards prior to the Voodoo 4/5 cannot do 32bit color in 3D.

I will also be looking at these cards a bit more closely myself. I have a few and tended to not use them.

FGB wrote:

The Rage128 has always been a competitor to the RivaTNT2 and does compete well, at least regarding speed and image quality, let's not discuss the inferior and more restrictive drivers.

And this is exactly what I kept reading in forums!

So I was positively surprised and excited that I didn't have any issues. I did expect a lot worse. But like I said, I only tried a few games, your results may vary.

Do discuss the drivers please, always good to share experiences!

that card looks like a stripped down All-in-Wonder 128. No TV tuner and only composite input, weird. The normal AIW has a breakout box for the video input with both S-Video and Composite. Video output uses a short breakout cable.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

Nice write up, Phil! How did the 32-bit image quality compare to the TNT2 and Voodoo3? I know you said it was a little weak in 16-bit.

Voodoo cards prior to the Voodoo 4/5 cannot do 32bit color in 3D.

I will also be looking at these cards a bit more closely myself. I have a few and tended to not use them.

also the voodoo 4 4500 is not a lot faster than the 3000 in 16bit, and it loses a lot of performance in 32bit, it would be interesting to see the 4500 in the mix competing in 32bits.

but nice job, the test was interesting, I didn't expect it to be so close to the TnT2s (the decent ones, not the m64 obviously!)

also the Rage Theater chip capturing was interesting, I think my 8500LE had the same chip (at least it looked very similar),

I have 2 Rage cards but they are more basic and cut down models (and both are defective), and that's the problem over here, 99% of the TNT2s are M64, 99% of the Rage cards are the worst possible models

I have a question for the people experienced with these cards, the game Lost Vikings on my Radeon 9500PRO on DOS have a problem with the scrolling it's not smooth, while my other cards like Voodoo 4 and older 2D PCI cards perform nicely with it (on DOS, on windows 98 all cards have problem with it), I'm wondering if the older ATI cards also have this problem with scrolling on this game not being totally smooth,

This is a great resource for DOS compatibility: http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

The ATI cards have a lot of red. Mostly scrolling games.

EDIT: Good point about the difficulties on getting the "proper" cards. 3dfx is good here, you know exactly what you're getting. Also going for the All In Wonder version, that should make it easier.

I got my 8500 that way, it made it easy as there are only 2 or 3 set versions of the AIW, but the non AIW ones are much harder to identify.