Ah, my first 3D... decelerator. :-) I hated this card so much back in the day, that I never even considered purchasing another ATI card, not even during the Radeon 9700/9800 Pro era. Of course, that has since changed, and I now have a big retro ATI collection and some of them are actually my favorite graphics cards from my entire collection. :)
Most non-3dfx cards back then were decelerators. You got them so you could get prettier graphics, not faster frame rates. Same was true of my first card, the Rendition v1000.
@@philscomputerlab Can't believe it runs these games so slow. Had a Powerbook G3 with only 2MB VRAM and it ran Klingon Honour Guard quite well at like 320x200 (Quake 2 Engine).
I like the Rage IIC mainly as a historical piece, showing where ATI started from, rather than something I'd actually consider using. In 96/97, having an all-in-one 2D/3D solution was still fairly novel, and some people (particularly OEM system builders) were happy to compromise performance for that added convenience. But the Rage Pro was a huge step up and the first truly usable card in 3D games from ATI. Good overview though and I like that you didn't take the easy way out of dumping on this card the whole time, but rather found some good in it.
I remember the Rage IIC very well. It was my first AGP card, bought as I have switched to a Super Socket 7 mainboard (a DFI K6BV3+ coupled with a K6-2/350). First AGP, first ATI card (ATI had a very good reputation back in the 90s). I remember it was the only AGP card I could afford on my budget, but I banked on my Voodoo to run games.
Apple used the Rage IIc in their iMac G3 models and Bugdom and that dinosaur game ran very smoothly with it with nice graphics quality and some cool light effects. These were very simple 3D games but the IIc did accelerate them and gave this nice polished 3D look.
It's a good thing you tested the Rage IIC "SDR" variant and not the EDO version. The 8MB EDO version is horrific, anyone who bought that back in the day was basically scammed. EDO version got 25% of the performance of the SDR card. 112 points in 3dmark 99 vs 400+ for the SDR 4MB card. The 8MB SDR card can go a little bit faster still. I've managed up to 570 points in 3dm99 using some tweaks and overclocks. Though Fwiw it does run X-Tension quite well. Also has a fun benchmark.
12fps was *amazing* in 1996. A 3D card was the difference between seconds per frame and frames per second. I got an E-Machines Celeron 233 Win'98 system for my Mom that had the Rage IIC as the on-board graphics. It accelerated Descent 3 and Tomb Raider to a playable level at 640x40 with 16-bit colour. It didn't accelerate Quake 3 at all. It did accelerate DirectX games that used shaded polygons very well, like Red's Racing. Anything with much in the way of textures bogged down, which I figured was due to the small AGP aperture which severely limited the amount of system memory the GPU could directly address. Bear in mind that in 1996 when that card launched, people were using 320x200 if they wanted high FPS!
my first 3d card was a 4mg rage pro. once i had one, i never went back to console. Seeing Jedi Knight (first 3d accelerated game I bought) at 800x600 was mind blowing.
Excited you'll look at Rage 3! Been playing around with 8mb Rage Pro PCI and I was so surprised at how good it was for a 97 card (with the final driver of course)
Aesthetically speaking, those slot-1 Pentium II boards with ISA slots and an AGP slot are my absolute favorite-looking motherboard. And I don't know if that particular board supports it or not, but my P2 board has dip switches that can get my P2 CPU to as low of a clock speed as 166 MHZ which is quite interesting for some of the speed-sensitive games.
@@philscomputerlabYes, I imagined that. have those 2 cards laying around for years now but I never really tested them. The Rage Pro Turbo is paired with a Voodoo 2 in one inf my retro builds doing nothing but 2D... I Want to discover their ancient worlds 😁
This video card belongs to an especific era of pc gaming... 3d was just beginning and, although win95 was around most games lauched in 96/97 were still running in DOS
Nice throw back to a common card showing it's few benefits. I know you aren't an overclocker Phil but I was secretly hoping for you to slap a heatsink and fan on it and do some overclocking.
I still have one of these in a box somewhere. I also have a PCI variant as well, Next to a what i think is a Matrox G200, Millennium II (PCI) and possibly a G400... Basically. My dad worked for a bank in the 80s and 90s. The bank was upgrading their machines and giving away the old ones to staff for free. My dad managed to get three of them because not that many people wanted them as they were pretty old computers that were running windows NT. These cards were all pulled from those machines. My dad was also friends with the IT guy so we also got tonnes of EDO ram as well but I think only one of the machines we got was old enough to run it. The other cards we didnt get with the free machines, The IT tech either gave it to my dad or he just started opening a few of the faulty machines up and pulling some of the cards and RAM from the computers that were left outside his office one day as the staff there used to leave them in the corridor/hallway for IT to collect and repair -- Dont ask me why they did this. I have no idea but they just did. These machines were so old and so slow but that didnt matter as they were rarely restarted and werent used for much apart from just being a used as an VDU to monitor tasks and other processes they were supposed to be doing, occasionally they'd have microsoft outlook for emails open on one of them.
Its great to see these cards still around. I wish I kept all my old cards :/ Just never thought I'd want to use a riva tnt2, 9000PRO, 9800SE, or 1600xt. But most of all I wish I still have my Diamond Monster 3dfx Voodoo 4MB.
I`m the same, the cards I wish I keep were a PCI 3dfx voodoo 2, then a AGP Voodoo 3, then an ATI 9500. Having said that selling the cards helped me to fund the upgrades so keeping them all in my younger days was not really an option.
I cant believe I was looking at this card today (I have it right now in front of me) and never tested yet and you did this video few hours later! As usual, great video Phil! Greetings from a huge fan of yours from Italy :)
Ati Rage Pro, from the same family (came right after Rage IIc), is a night and day difference in performance. I´ve got a PCI one and gives me 30FPS on Tomb Rider 640x480, for instance. Quake also runs very fluently too. This is with a MMX 233mhz Pentium 1.
Memories... My first card was a Rage-II based "3D Xpression PC2TV+”. I chose this over every other card because it supported TV output via Composite and I wanted to capture my screen to VHS... I had so many issues with the card though, and was so much happier with the TNT2 that eventually replaced it. The highlight for me for this ATI card was Mech Warrior 2. The speed and graphical quality was night and day compared to software rendering. Thank you for this look into that card Phil!
Well, I don't know if I'm a sucker for nostalgia or pain, but I just picked up an ATI Rage II+ based card off eBay for my Win95 retro build. I didn't really need it, but the price was right and your video brought back the better memories.
@@T3hBeowulf Hopefully you ordered one equipped with SDRAM instead of EDO since as someone mentioned here in the comments the EDO variants only achieved 25% percent speed.
@@armorgeddon Yes, excellent point. It had been on my watch list for a long time and I confirmed it was the version with SGRAM before I finally made an offer. I'll have to keep an eye out for the 4MB upgrade module though... 4MB is already onboard but I like the delightfully silly idea of having a PCI equipped 486 running 1280x1024@32bit colors in Win3.11.
When i snagged some old pc hardware salvaged from ancient pre builts at my high school. The card stack was pci and agp cards. Mostly pci, 1 agp fx 5200, 1 pci voodoo 3 3000 (i took that one), and loads of pci or agp rage IIc's and rage 128's. Seems they were a very common low end upgrade or add on option on prebuilts of the day.
Forsaken runs fine on mine 8MB Rage II, paired with K62/400, it gets 30FPS in 512x384 I also played a lot of Mechwarrior II on it, using the ATI CIF API
Ah, I remember buying this card from a small computer shop, back at winter of 2002. Someone from college gave away a Pentium 166 PC tower, but it was missing a soundcard and a videocard. When I got the videocard, I was able to install Windows and install some games. The DOS games I ran with it did run pretty well. But when I tried the simplest 3D accelerator games, like the first Quake game, the framerate was a damn slideshow. I assumed that it was because I did not have a fast enough processor. But after watching this video, I think the processor was not quite the problem.
I have tested this card in the past on a P4 2.4GHz test-bench. Forsaken runs ok-ish at 640x480 with over 30fps. Haven't tested though games that support 3d CIF!
Wipeout is the Highlight of the ati 3dcif! Great video,im glad you return to retro Reviews,rage 2c was a nice card for that era sure not fast as voodoo but competitor with other chipsets
I had that video card back in 97. I had this Christmas globe screensaver that ran in d3d/DirectX. It was incredibly laggy. I wish I could find it again. I think I downloaded it on 3dfiles at the time.
My very first GPU, wish I still had it. I ran it with a Cyrix MII and Windows 3.11, some real hand-me-down crap at the time. It got me interested enough in computing to blow a bunch of money on some proper kit, Athlon X2 and a mid range Geforce card of that era, forgot exactly which one.
Although the texture rendering on ATI Rage cards can be a bit odd sometimes I always thought the picture quality was very good - nice and sharp with good contrast. But I never liked playing games at 5fps so the Voodoo 2 was my preferred choice
I remember these ATI Rage cards and the S3 ViRGE being quite the prolific 3D "decelerators" since their 3D pixel fill rates were in the area of 5-10 million pixels per second when the original 3dfx Voodoo cards were pushing 45-50 million pixels. However, cards with both chips had great 2D Windows performance and great non-3D Dos performance. And they tended to be cheap for OEMs to include which was why the became so common in a lot of people's first PC in the mid to late 90s. One of those cases were the cards could do 3D, just not at all well. Unfortunately, it's not that far off from both OEM's and individuals with less than stellar scruples online selling "gaming PCs" with low end Nvidia or AMD cards these days.
I went from a 1 megabyte ati pci card probably a mach 64 card as agp wasn't out quite yet. This is 1997. To a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo Banshee 16 MB AGP card on Asus P5A SS7 with an AMD K6 @350 Mhz. And either 64 or 128 megs of ram. Which would have been by 1998. Then from that I went to my first Athlon Thunderbird cpu @ 1.0 Ghz. But I'll say before the 1 meg ati card I had an ISA card that didn't do much. The ATI onto a pci bus was major. To go from 8 bit color depth to 16 with like 16 million colors. I was in 7th heaven. And of course moving up to the banshee was huge too. I just recently got an ATI Rage LT Pro 8 MB. But it only has 4 MB. I need the 4 MB upgrade module. Anyone know where I can get one could ya let me know. Haven't seen one on ebay. Just recently slapped it in my Asus P5A board. Didn't fair well. Also I need a low profile bracket for an S3 Savage 4 I just recently got on ebay.
Diamond Monster Fusion that card was called. Cool name, that's just why I'm mentioning it. Regarding the RAM upgrade on that ATI card, is that really a proprietary slot or is it maybe the form factor from laptop RAM modules of the time?
That is my identical system back in the day. AOPEN BX440 with a Rage 3D card. I liked it, and had no issues for the longest time. Bought a Voodoo2 later on, and loved the combination of 2D / 3D performance. Soon after I bought an STB TNT2 (hated it, choppy, buggy on many games), and then the Matrox G400 (awesome video card, just ran smooth).
I got sent one of these PCI cards from a nice person on VOGONS for my Windows 95 retro build. Yeah, 3D performance was lacking, but I was going to put in a Voodoo1 card anyway, and the two paired together made the system a pretty good gaming PC for 1997. I also have an IBM PC that had this chip on the motherboard itself for built-in video support. Also threw in a Voodoo2 card on that system. Good pairings.
Can this card run games in 320x240, 400x300 or 512x384? Keep in mind that games on Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64 were mostly using 320x240 resolution. Consoles first introduced high color depth, then increased resolution. PCs on the other hand first go to 640x480 with 256 colors, then added 16-bit color with 3D acceleration. For some reason everyone expected that 3D acceleration would start with 640x480, while 320x240 with 16-bit color looks much better than 640x480 with 256 colors and color banding. In my opinion early 3D games look way better in lower resolutions. Pixelation hides low triangle count. For example I prefer playing Quake 1 in 320x400 software rendering than 4K 120 Hz on modern hardware. 320x400 looks especially well on CRT monitors with scaliness.
Pretty sure I have one of these cards laying around, was a standard office card back then. Good enough to show a picture on a monitor, but not for much more.
Ah... The ISA slot. It makes me remember what even (even these days) is a mystery to me. It had a Diamond audio card shaped like a triangle. With a jumper selector, I mistakenly changed the stereo output to Mono, but switched to boosting the output so that I could put a 25-watt speaker cabinet right out of the box. Then (this is what I did not verify) they tell me that if I have another card, I can make the jumper amplify the other channel by passing the 2 cards to function as if they were 1, each with its respective power. Who can do this experiment please tell me if it is true.
Phil, your videos really have helped me go back to win98 gaming. Gotta say though, I thought I'd remember how to use win98 a lot better than I actually do. A basic how to use win98 and maybe some recommend programs to use with win98 would make for a great video.
The ATI Rage Pro Turbo - which I think may be the fastest ATICIF compatible card - is my favorite card for Tomb Raider. It runs 800x600 30 FPS and without the rolling textures of the 3dfx version.
Just be sure to get the right driver version - later drivers that are more compatible with newer Direct3D and OpenGL games have pretty broken CIF support.
I had a Rage IIc card. It was the All-in-Wonder version. The only 3d game it could play was the version of MechWarrior2 that came with the bundle. Everything else was either unplayable or couldn't even render. Finally got a Voodoo1 in order to game.
My first Card i played many games even HL and Tomb Raider Chronicles, the 1st 2yrs was bad but with the last drivers it improved alot! It plays fine at 640x480 16bit You need to check different drivers
@ Phil What made this series of cards from ATI great was the 2D performance, it was just excellent! Then you pair this card with a VooDoo or VooDoo2, that combination took your over-all gaming experience to the next level. A lot of people BITD did this combination because it was very affordable and gave excellent results. Actually, that's a good idea for a video!
I had an ATI Rage Pro which is very close to this. That card worked quite well in Windows 95 / 98 until I could afford something better (which in my case was quite a jump as I went straight for an ATI HD3870 which lasted me a good few years).
Was watching a video of CTU Marine Sharpshooter I use to plan on my old Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop. Good ole ati rage gpu. I was just a little kid when I had that laptop. I still have it somewhere too. I remember the opening scene lagging. Then playing alright until I got a spot to look down at a convoy, the it would either lag like crazy or crash haha.
Thank you so much for giving me THE ABILITY TO SAY "pah Bro I don't think your card can run that, check out the ATI rage IIC, it should be a little better than what you currently have"
Great video. I had a Packard Bell with a integrated Rage Pro that ran games It seemed to have no business being able to run. I really liked it and it was awhile till I upgraded to a Nvidia Riva TNT 2 later on.
Can definitely say I'm glad I missed this era of ATI cards. I think I would have thought even worse of them if I had spent as much for a new system to get performance that bad.
My first AGP card! I bought it in late 1997 or early 1998 for a Super Socket 7 board that had AGP. Paired with an AMD K6-233 it was a decent little setup, but mine was horrendously slow playing everything new. It taught me not to skimp on the video card.
The drivers from AMD are indeed bugged for these older video cards. I had to use a CD-ROM driver disk for Mach64-based chips to install drivers for Win311/Win9x/OS2. I'll see if I can make an ISO out of it and upload it somewhere.
I found a Rage II+DVD on the street for free, look to be in great shape but you never know. Honestly, even if I don't end up using it they're just nice to have as a piece of history. A PCI card that was absolutely terrible when it came to performance, but that also played a role with where ATI (AMD) is at now. The tech world was such a different place back then.
Technically my first graphics card, although it was just a Rage IIC chip built into the motherboard. I remember 'trying' to play Tomb Raider on it. Went about as well as it did here.
I recently tested a Diamond Viper V330(Riva128) PCI using 3d mark 99max on a 150mhz socket 7 board running Windows 95 OSR2. I was surprised it could handle it. Because I never knew benchmarks like it existed back in the day , or I didn't want to buy them. Like Performance Test that would install a nasty file which stopped you from reusing the trial version. I do have a Ati Rage Pro PCI. I found it to be OK in performance and quality I liked it because it has TV out and a memory card expansion I never filled. I tried it on Windows 7 and it could only display XGA graphics because of limited driver support. I did find XP had built in drivers. I liked to use it for playing Diablo2 on a big screen TV., or display streamed video to it with dual monitor set up.
Nice video, Phil! I hope you'll consider looking at one of the later Rage 128 cards compared against the contemporary TNT2, Voodoo2, and/or the later GeForce256/2MX and Radeon 7000, so people who have trouble finding/affording a real Voodoo or early GeForce can see what performance can be had for cheaper. Growing up, I had an HP Pavilion mini tower with a Celeron 433MHz, 96MB SDRAM, some form of ATI Rage w/ 8MB RAM (I believe the graphics were on the motherboard, not an external card), and SB Live. It worked well enough for everything I threw at it, but back then the only 3D games I had were X-Wing and TIE Fighter.
I believe we did look at the Rage 128 Pro at some point. But happy to revisit, maybe do a roundup of a few cards to see the improvements in performance.
In ATi's defense-- it was going up against the S3 Virge cards in its class that had trouble showing (uncorrupted) frames, let alone per second 🤣 most gaming people added voodoo-cards within a couple months. The GUI, DOS and MPEG acceleration was nice though 🥰
I believe there was a version of MechWarrior 2 that ran on this card. It ran at 512 x 384 but the improved graphics were a dramatic change compared to the vanilla non-accelerated version. It’s still outclassed by the 3dfx version, though. Something you might want to check out if you can.
I miss the days when he used to build the retro computers while explaining the specs. I always feel sad when they're coming apart. It just doesn't hit the same way.
The Rage II was originally released in mid 1996. It is a vastly superior upgrade to the original 3D Rage (early 1996) but leaves a lot to be desired. Since the GPU contains a 2nd generation 3D core, it is lacking in texture-throughput. I measured up to 6 MTexel/s for the Rage II+DVD in MacOS with the RAVE API and textures compared to 17 MPixel/s without textures. The Rage II core supports texture compression under MacOS RAVE which allows a 4Mb card to easily store around 8Mb of textures. Compression increases texture throughput a bit (less than 10%). The Rage Pro from early 1997 had 3-4 times the real world performance with 24 MTexels/s and 40 MPixel/s (tested on the Mac with RAVE). The Direct 3D implementation for the early Rage series leaves a lot to be desired and i really am baffled why ATI did such a bad job there. Maybe the architecture was too different? QuickDraw 3D Rave on the Mac on the other hand is very well supported on the Rage II and Rage Pro with most features. Most RAVE games on the Mac seem to have been especially programmed with an ATI card in mind. The reason might be the integration of ATI chips as onboard graphics by Apple from mid 1997 onwards. The Rage Pro gets a bit warmer than the Rage II but it can still be touched under load without a heatsink. Maybe this is another reason why the Rage series was so much loved by OEMs. Prices may play the big role, though. A retail ATI XClaim VR for Mac (Rage Pro 8Mb) had a cost of around $250 in 12/1997 which was more or less the same as a Voodoo 1 at that time. On MacOS the Rage II and Rage Pro really shine with a seamless 3D integration into the 2D desktop environment. 3D objects can be rendered anywhere on the screen in any application or game. Maybe ATI was not really committed to Direct 3D at the beginning?
Thanks for sharing, very good information! I always saw ATI as an OEM supplier, ticking as many boxes as possible, with some not that well, but still having a lot of features. I think it was not easy for graphics companies to switch from 2D to 3D and many didn't make the move like Tseng, Trident and others just fading away.
@@philscomputerlab ATI marketed its chips quite aggressively to OEMs with great success. Most likely cutting prices _a lot_. I heard that a $100 retail chip would cost as little as $10 for the OEM. In addition, they went as far as releasing the OEM of their chips first and after a few moths later the retail. I think ATI found a perfect balance of features, performance and price that was looked for by OEMs. This changed a bit with the Radeon. S3 tried the same OEM-approach with much less success. Cirrus Logic was (for a while) very successful with their 2D chips in that market but it lost its footing with 3D. Nvidia had seemingly less interest in this after the total failure of that concept with the NV1 and successfully aimed for the performance market on their own terms. 3Dfx tried both with a focus on there performance market (since the OEM-path with Sega was a failure) but failed at both in the end. ATI and Nvidia had exceptional architectures that were very expandable (take look at the patents). S3 had a quite capable core but maybe lacked the resources? The 3D core of 3Dfx was seemingly very inflexible but feature rich. The VSA-100 was (as far as i know) a complete redesign and came too late for that reason. They came and went like a firework. The early 3D-market is very interesting and Nvidia was absolutely the king of start-ups with a all-or-nothing approach. ATI used a slow-and-steady approach with comparable results. I would really like to see a good documentary on that period with complete coverage... i can dream :-) My personal comparison: Nvidia and 3Dfx competed to make the best layered cake while ATI made muffins.
I got this exact model ATI card as part of a Compaq Deskpro EN (I believe). It was an Intel Slot 1 system that came with a Celeron 333Mhz. I think it also came with an optional Pentium 3. I saw the ATI markings on it and was thrilled, thinking it was capable of great things... LOL.
@philscomputerlab Hey Phil! I love your content, my man! It's amazing what older components are still capable of, and the way you present these projects makes it easy to watch and follow. Keep doing what your doing. Much love from South Alabama, US.
I had an ibm p233 mmx system that had the igp version of this, had hardware dvd decoding and 2mb mem, though may have been 4mb. on the motherboard near the chip, did better than my sis530 system running a k6-2 500
I used it as a 2D card with my Voodoo2 SLI cards back in 1999.
The only good use for it
Ah, my first 3D... decelerator. :-) I hated this card so much back in the day, that I never even considered purchasing another ATI card, not even during the Radeon 9700/9800 Pro era. Of course, that has since changed, and I now have a big retro ATI collection and some of them are actually my favorite graphics cards from my entire collection. :)
😂
Most non-3dfx cards back then were decelerators. You got them so you could get prettier graphics, not faster frame rates. Same was true of my first card, the Rendition v1000.
@@philscomputerlab Can't believe it runs these games so slow. Had a Powerbook G3 with only 2MB VRAM and it ran Klingon Honour Guard quite well at like 320x200 (Quake 2 Engine).
@@mortrek Rumor has it John Carmack's ghost will haunt you if you say bad things about Rendition.
@@dycedargselderbrother5353 I loved my v1000 and later my v2200. Was crushed when Rredline was cancelled.
As a child I played many games in the sub 10 FPS range and was perfectly happy. That was of course until I saw better.
I like the Rage IIC mainly as a historical piece, showing where ATI started from, rather than something I'd actually consider using. In 96/97, having an all-in-one 2D/3D solution was still fairly novel, and some people (particularly OEM system builders) were happy to compromise performance for that added convenience. But the Rage Pro was a huge step up and the first truly usable card in 3D games from ATI.
Good overview though and I like that you didn't take the easy way out of dumping on this card the whole time, but rather found some good in it.
I remember the Rage IIC very well. It was my first AGP card, bought as I have switched to a Super Socket 7 mainboard (a DFI K6BV3+ coupled with a K6-2/350). First AGP, first ATI card (ATI had a very good reputation back in the 90s). I remember it was the only AGP card I could afford on my budget, but I banked on my Voodoo to run games.
Apple used the Rage IIc in their iMac G3 models and Bugdom and that dinosaur game ran very smoothly with it with nice graphics quality and some cool light effects. These were very simple 3D games but the IIc did accelerate them and gave this nice polished 3D look.
It's a good thing you tested the Rage IIC "SDR" variant and not the EDO version.
The 8MB EDO version is horrific, anyone who bought that back in the day was basically scammed.
EDO version got 25% of the performance of the SDR card.
112 points in 3dmark 99 vs 400+ for the SDR 4MB card.
The 8MB SDR card can go a little bit faster still.
I've managed up to 570 points in 3dm99 using some tweaks and overclocks.
Though Fwiw it does run X-Tension quite well. Also has a fun benchmark.
Correction: I mean X: Beyond the Frontier
X: Tension was the expansion to that and runs like a turtle in mud.
That is very interesting, I didn't know that. I thought they all used SDRAM in this series. thx!
I guess scammy graphics cards sharing a name with a better version has always been a thing then.
How did 3dfx put edo ram on the voodoo 1/2 and make those cards so good?
How did 3dfx put edo ram on the voodoo 1/2 and make those cards so good?
Every retro PC collector has several of these cards without ever buying one.
Hehe
12fps was *amazing* in 1996. A 3D card was the difference between seconds per frame and frames per second. I got an E-Machines Celeron 233 Win'98 system for my Mom that had the Rage IIC as the on-board graphics. It accelerated Descent 3 and Tomb Raider to a playable level at 640x40 with 16-bit colour. It didn't accelerate Quake 3 at all. It did accelerate DirectX games that used shaded polygons very well, like Red's Racing. Anything with much in the way of textures bogged down, which I figured was due to the small AGP aperture which severely limited the amount of system memory the GPU could directly address. Bear in mind that in 1996 when that card launched, people were using 320x200 if they wanted high FPS!
my first 3d card was a 4mg rage pro. once i had one, i never went back to console. Seeing Jedi Knight (first 3d accelerated game I bought) at 800x600 was mind blowing.
Excited you'll look at Rage 3! Been playing around with 8mb Rage Pro PCI and I was so surprised at how good it was for a 97 card (with the final driver of course)
Aesthetically speaking, those slot-1 Pentium II boards with ISA slots and an AGP slot are my absolute favorite-looking motherboard. And I don't know if that particular board supports it or not, but my P2 board has dip switches that can get my P2 CPU to as low of a clock speed as 166 MHZ which is quite interesting for some of the speed-sensitive games.
Well done as usual. I have one of these Rage IIC 4MB and a Rage Pro Turbo 8MB, u gave me the input to check differences!
Well the Rage Pro Turbo is much better, it is the Rage 3 basically.
@@philscomputerlabYes, I imagined that. have those 2 cards laying around for years now but I never really tested them. The Rage Pro Turbo is paired with a Voodoo 2 in one inf my retro builds doing nothing but 2D... I Want to discover their ancient worlds 😁
Also have the Rage Pro Turbo 8mb Pci.
This video card belongs to an especific era of pc gaming... 3d was just beginning and, although win95 was around most games lauched in 96/97 were still running in DOS
Nice throw back to a common card showing it's few benefits.
I know you aren't an overclocker Phil but I was secretly hoping for you to slap a heatsink and fan on it and do some overclocking.
I still have one of these in a box somewhere. I also have a PCI variant as well, Next to a what i think is a Matrox G200, Millennium II (PCI) and possibly a G400...
Basically. My dad worked for a bank in the 80s and 90s. The bank was upgrading their machines and giving away the old ones to staff for free. My dad managed to get three of them because not that many people wanted them as they were pretty old computers that were running windows NT. These cards were all pulled from those machines. My dad was also friends with the IT guy so we also got tonnes of EDO ram as well but I think only one of the machines we got was old enough to run it. The other cards we didnt get with the free machines, The IT tech either gave it to my dad or he just started opening a few of the faulty machines up and pulling some of the cards and RAM from the computers that were left outside his office one day as the staff there used to leave them in the corridor/hallway for IT to collect and repair -- Dont ask me why they did this. I have no idea but they just did.
These machines were so old and so slow but that didnt matter as they were rarely restarted and werent used for much apart from just being a used as an VDU to monitor tasks and other processes they were supposed to be doing, occasionally they'd have microsoft outlook for emails open on one of them.
Its great to see these cards still around. I wish I kept all my old cards :/ Just never thought I'd want to use a riva tnt2, 9000PRO, 9800SE, or 1600xt. But most of all I wish I still have my Diamond Monster 3dfx Voodoo 4MB.
I`m the same, the cards I wish I keep were a PCI 3dfx voodoo 2, then a AGP Voodoo 3, then an ATI 9500. Having said that selling the cards helped me to fund the upgrades so keeping them all in my younger days was not really an option.
Time to wake up and watch PCL!
I was rolling on an SIS chipset mobo, with an IGPU at the time this Rage IIC came out. Terrible performance, but I didn't care.
I cant believe I was looking at this card today (I have it right now in front of me) and never tested yet and you did this video few hours later! As usual, great video Phil! Greetings from a huge fan of yours from Italy :)
They made a custom version of mechwarior 2 for that card. It was in windows 95
That motherboard brings back memories... life was much simpler back then ;)
Ati Rage Pro, from the same family (came right after Rage IIc), is a night and day difference in performance. I´ve got a PCI one and gives me 30FPS on Tomb Rider 640x480, for instance. Quake also runs very fluently too. This is with a MMX 233mhz Pentium 1.
We will check out Rage 3 soon.
Rage stands for rage quitting
What a nice finding!
I was also intrigued about that hidden Fdisk parameter that was mentioned as a small sidenote.
Thank you!
For me, this is best HW content on YT. Miss those times so much :( Keep it up man please, this is food for my soul
Glad you enjoy it!
I always enjoy your retro builds. We can now build the dream machine we couldn’t afford in 1985
Had one way back in the day. Worked great for its time. Man has time changed things.
You can use rage2-tweaker, maybe it helps for Rage2C, i love more Rage Pro based cards and i have RageXL AGP with Voodoo2 and PowerVR PCX2.
I just moved, but want to get into making videos soon again and cover more Rage cards!
Memories... My first card was a Rage-II based "3D Xpression PC2TV+”. I chose this over every other card because it supported TV output via Composite and I wanted to capture my screen to VHS... I had so many issues with the card though, and was so much happier with the TNT2 that eventually replaced it.
The highlight for me for this ATI card was Mech Warrior 2. The speed and graphical quality was night and day compared to software rendering. Thank you for this look into that card Phil!
Well, I don't know if I'm a sucker for nostalgia or pain, but I just picked up an ATI Rage II+ based card off eBay for my Win95 retro build. I didn't really need it, but the price was right and your video brought back the better memories.
@@T3hBeowulf Hopefully you ordered one equipped with SDRAM instead of EDO since as someone mentioned here in the comments the EDO variants only achieved 25% percent speed.
@@armorgeddon Yes, excellent point. It had been on my watch list for a long time and I confirmed it was the version with SGRAM before I finally made an offer.
I'll have to keep an eye out for the 4MB upgrade module though... 4MB is already onboard but I like the delightfully silly idea of having a PCI equipped 486 running 1280x1024@32bit colors in Win3.11.
Very cool! The solid DOS compatibility seems to make this a solid choice for an older straight up DOS (no Windows) rig.
Yea for DOS and Windows 3.11 it works great :) Good VGA signal quality as well.
When i snagged some old pc hardware salvaged from ancient pre builts at my high school. The card stack was pci and agp cards. Mostly pci, 1 agp fx 5200, 1 pci voodoo 3 3000 (i took that one), and loads of pci or agp rage IIc's and rage 128's. Seems they were a very common low end upgrade or add on option on prebuilts of the day.
Forsaken runs fine on mine 8MB Rage II, paired with K62/400, it gets 30FPS in 512x384
I also played a lot of Mechwarrior II on it, using the ATI CIF API
Glad to see you back on the retro!
Thanks for the video.. My favorite pc time was the 440bx days..
Ah, I remember buying this card from a small computer shop, back at winter of 2002. Someone from college gave away a Pentium 166 PC tower, but it was missing a soundcard and a videocard. When I got the videocard, I was able to install Windows and install some games. The DOS games I ran with it did run pretty well. But when I tried the simplest 3D accelerator games, like the first Quake game, the framerate was a damn slideshow. I assumed that it was because I did not have a fast enough processor. But after watching this video, I think the processor was not quite the problem.
I have tested this card in the past on a P4 2.4GHz test-bench. Forsaken runs ok-ish at 640x480 with over 30fps. Haven't tested though games that support 3d CIF!
Wipeout is the Highlight of the ati 3dcif! Great video,im glad you return to retro Reviews,rage 2c was a nice card for that era sure not fast as voodoo but competitor with other chipsets
Think I skipped this and went with the Rage Pro Xpert@Play PCI and AGP after my S3 days, still have them somewhere.
I had that video card back in 97. I had this Christmas globe screensaver that ran in d3d/DirectX. It was incredibly laggy. I wish I could find it again. I think I downloaded it on 3dfiles at the time.
And people said the S3 Virge was slow...
My very first GPU, wish I still had it. I ran it with a Cyrix MII and Windows 3.11, some real hand-me-down crap at the time. It got me interested enough in computing to blow a bunch of money on some proper kit, Athlon X2 and a mid range Geforce card of that era, forgot exactly which one.
Although the texture rendering on ATI Rage cards can be a bit odd sometimes I always thought the picture quality was very good - nice and sharp with good contrast. But I never liked playing games at 5fps so the Voodoo 2 was my preferred choice
Video idea: Demo the Retro-Printer module for using modern printers on retro computers. I have not found a single video about the Retro-Printer.
Good old ati rage IIc
Had no idea you lived in WA! Albany here and have been testing old cards and repairing others. I did once get a IIc to overclock on my Dell server
Awesome! Is there a Retro Community in Albany? I live remote at the moment and there is nothing LOL
I remember these ATI Rage cards and the S3 ViRGE being quite the prolific 3D "decelerators" since their 3D pixel fill rates were in the area of 5-10 million pixels per second when the original 3dfx Voodoo cards were pushing 45-50 million pixels.
However, cards with both chips had great 2D Windows performance and great non-3D Dos performance. And they tended to be cheap for OEMs to include which was why the became so common in a lot of people's first PC in the mid to late 90s.
One of those cases were the cards could do 3D, just not at all well. Unfortunately, it's not that far off from both OEM's and individuals with less than stellar scruples online selling "gaming PCs" with low end Nvidia or AMD cards these days.
I went from a 1 megabyte ati pci card probably a mach 64 card as agp wasn't out quite yet. This is 1997. To a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo Banshee 16 MB AGP card on Asus P5A SS7 with an AMD K6 @350 Mhz. And either 64 or 128 megs of ram. Which would have been by 1998. Then from that I went to my first Athlon Thunderbird cpu @ 1.0 Ghz. But I'll say before the 1 meg ati card I had an ISA card that didn't do much. The ATI onto a pci bus was major. To go from 8 bit color depth to 16 with like 16 million colors. I was in 7th heaven. And of course moving up to the banshee was huge too. I just recently got an ATI Rage LT Pro 8 MB. But it only has 4 MB. I need the 4 MB upgrade module. Anyone know where I can get one could ya let me know. Haven't seen one on ebay. Just recently slapped it in my Asus P5A board. Didn't fair well. Also I need a low profile bracket for an S3 Savage 4 I just recently got on ebay.
Diamond Monster Fusion that card was called. Cool name, that's just why I'm mentioning it. Regarding the RAM upgrade on that ATI card, is that really a proprietary slot or is it maybe the form factor from laptop RAM modules of the time?
Can't wait for the Ati Rage Pro (3). That was my first 3D Card... when younger me had wished for a Diamond Monster for Christmas :-)
That is my identical system back in the day. AOPEN BX440 with a Rage 3D card. I liked it, and had no issues for the longest time. Bought a Voodoo2 later on, and loved the combination of 2D / 3D performance. Soon after I bought an STB TNT2 (hated it, choppy, buggy on many games), and then the Matrox G400 (awesome video card, just ran smooth).
I got sent one of these PCI cards from a nice person on VOGONS for my Windows 95 retro build. Yeah, 3D performance was lacking, but I was going to put in a Voodoo1 card anyway, and the two paired together made the system a pretty good gaming PC for 1997. I also have an IBM PC that had this chip on the motherboard itself for built-in video support. Also threw in a Voodoo2 card on that system. Good pairings.
You have to keep in mind that 20 fps was almost a dream with those early 3d cards.
I use pci based tnt2 Riva for my windows 3.11 machine. Anyone having trouble installing drivers, you must set them up in windows 3.11 setup
Can this card run games in 320x240, 400x300 or 512x384? Keep in mind that games on Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64 were mostly using 320x240 resolution. Consoles first introduced high color depth, then increased resolution. PCs on the other hand first go to 640x480 with 256 colors, then added 16-bit color with 3D acceleration. For some reason everyone expected that 3D acceleration would start with 640x480, while 320x240 with 16-bit color looks much better than 640x480 with 256 colors and color banding.
In my opinion early 3D games look way better in lower resolutions. Pixelation hides low triangle count. For example I prefer playing Quake 1 in 320x400 software rendering than 4K 120 Hz on modern hardware. 320x400 looks especially well on CRT monitors with scaliness.
Yes it can!
Pretty sure I have one of these cards laying around, was a standard office card back then.
Good enough to show a picture on a monitor, but not for much more.
i still love programming on DOS all day...
Ah... The ISA slot. It makes me remember what even (even these days) is a mystery to me. It had a Diamond audio card shaped like a triangle. With a jumper selector, I mistakenly changed the stereo output to Mono, but switched to boosting the output so that I could put a 25-watt speaker cabinet right out of the box. Then (this is what I did not verify) they tell me that if I have another card, I can make the jumper amplify the other channel by passing the 2 cards to function as if they were 1, each with its respective power. Who can do this experiment please tell me if it is true.
That 600 Mhz Pentium 3 would probably run those games as fast if not faster than the ATI Rage IIC
Phil, your videos really have helped me go back to win98 gaming. Gotta say though, I thought I'd remember how to use win98 a lot better than I actually do. A basic how to use win98 and maybe some recommend programs to use with win98 would make for a great video.
My very first GPU as a child, played so much Command & Conquer Red Alert 1! Good times very fond of it, still have the PC sitting around.
I feel like somebody traveled here from the past to upload this.
The ATI Rage Pro Turbo - which I think may be the fastest ATICIF compatible card - is my favorite card for Tomb Raider. It runs 800x600 30 FPS and without the rolling textures of the 3dfx version.
Looking forward to seeing that Game in action 😀
Just be sure to get the right driver version - later drivers that are more compatible with newer Direct3D and OpenGL games have pretty broken CIF support.
My official first gpu aas a 2d trident pci. My first official 3d gpu was a asus TNT 2 VANTA 64mb
Retro FTW 😁
I had a Rage IIc card. It was the All-in-Wonder version. The only 3d game it could play was the version of MechWarrior2 that came with the bundle. Everything else was either unplayable or couldn't even render. Finally got a Voodoo1 in order to game.
ITS LIVE! ;-)
My first Card i played many games even HL and Tomb Raider Chronicles, the 1st 2yrs was bad but with the last drivers it improved alot! It plays fine at 640x480 16bit You need to check different drivers
This is beautiful 🤩
Hi youtube
and Happy Philday
@ Phil
What made this series of cards from ATI great was the 2D performance, it was just excellent! Then you pair this card with a VooDoo or VooDoo2, that combination took your over-all gaming experience to the next level. A lot of people BITD did this combination because it was very affordable and gave excellent results. Actually, that's a good idea for a video!
I had an ATI Rage Pro which is very close to this. That card worked quite well in Windows 95 / 98 until I could afford something better (which in my case was quite a jump as I went straight for an ATI HD3870 which lasted me a good few years).
Rage Pro is actually quite a bit faster, double the speed I think and more features! OpenGL support for example.
Was watching a video of CTU Marine Sharpshooter I use to plan on my old Dell Inspiron 7500 laptop. Good ole ati rage gpu. I was just a little kid when I had that laptop. I still have it somewhere too. I remember the opening scene lagging. Then playing alright until I got a spot to look down at a convoy, the it would either lag like crazy or crash haha.
I have 3 or 4 of them. As a PCI and AGP. I think it is an equivilant of the Nvidia210.
Thank you so much for giving me THE ABILITY TO SAY "pah Bro I don't think your card can run that, check out the ATI rage IIC, it should be a little better than what you currently have"
So far two people have taken the bait and been like "Bro that card is from 1996 you are dumb" 🤣😭😭😭
Great video. I had a Packard Bell with a integrated Rage Pro that ran games It seemed to have no business being able to run. I really liked it and it was awhile till I upgraded to a Nvidia Riva TNT 2 later on.
Can definitely say I'm glad I missed this era of ATI cards. I think I would have thought even worse of them if I had spent as much for a new system to get performance that bad.
My first AGP card! I bought it in late 1997 or early 1998 for a Super Socket 7 board that had AGP. Paired with an AMD K6-233 it was a decent little setup, but mine was horrendously slow playing everything new. It taught me not to skimp on the video card.
The drivers from AMD are indeed bugged for these older video cards. I had to use a CD-ROM driver disk for Mach64-based chips to install drivers for Win311/Win9x/OS2. I'll see if I can make an ISO out of it and upload it somewhere.
I found a Rage II+DVD on the street for free, look to be in great shape but you never know. Honestly, even if I don't end up using it they're just nice to have as a piece of history. A PCI card that was absolutely terrible when it came to performance, but that also played a role with where ATI (AMD) is at now. The tech world was such a different place back then.
I have one of these I bought for about ~$10 shipped. Haven't tried it yet, might be a good pick for a windows 3.11 or Windows 95 PC.
Please, could you check also office, media and internet?
And what's the best way to contact with you?
Damn, i have like 4 of these in my Tech Drawer at Home 😂
Technically my first graphics card, although it was just a Rage IIC chip built into the motherboard. I remember 'trying' to play Tomb Raider on it. Went about as well as it did here.
That's what I god in my retro dos pc. works well in the rage II version of MechWarrior II
If it runs P.O.D. Its good enuf for mee
This card do for resolution that 320x240 not good for 640x480 but it classic vga graphic card and rare
I recently tested a Diamond Viper V330(Riva128) PCI using 3d mark 99max on a 150mhz socket 7 board running Windows 95 OSR2. I was surprised it could handle it. Because I never knew benchmarks like it existed back in the day , or I didn't want to buy them. Like Performance Test that would install a nasty file which stopped you from reusing the trial version. I do have a Ati Rage Pro PCI. I found it to be OK in performance and quality I liked it because it has TV out and a memory card expansion I never filled. I tried it on Windows 7 and it could only display XGA graphics because of limited driver support. I did find XP had built in drivers. I liked to use it for playing Diablo2 on a big screen TV., or display streamed video to it with dual monitor set up.
Nice video, Phil! I hope you'll consider looking at one of the later Rage 128 cards compared against the contemporary TNT2, Voodoo2, and/or the later GeForce256/2MX and Radeon 7000, so people who have trouble finding/affording a real Voodoo or early GeForce can see what performance can be had for cheaper.
Growing up, I had an HP Pavilion mini tower with a Celeron 433MHz, 96MB SDRAM, some form of ATI Rage w/ 8MB RAM (I believe the graphics were on the motherboard, not an external card), and SB Live. It worked well enough for everything I threw at it, but back then the only 3D games I had were X-Wing and TIE Fighter.
I believe we did look at the Rage 128 Pro at some point. But happy to revisit, maybe do a roundup of a few cards to see the improvements in performance.
windows 3.11 is like windows 95 except without 32 bit app support.
In ATi's defense-- it was going up against the S3 Virge cards in its class that had trouble showing (uncorrupted) frames, let alone per second 🤣 most gaming people added voodoo-cards within a couple months. The GUI, DOS and MPEG acceleration was nice though 🥰
I have a Pentium 3 450Mhz Slot 1 on A Open AX6BC mobo with S3Savage 3D 8MB VRAM, Can this chip overclock to 600Mhz or what is the max oc?
I believe there was a version of MechWarrior 2 that ran on this card. It ran at 512 x 384 but the improved graphics were a dramatic change compared to the vanilla non-accelerated version. It’s still outclassed by the 3dfx version, though. Something you might want to check out if you can.
I miss the days when he used to build the retro computers while explaining the specs. I always feel sad when they're coming apart. It just doesn't hit the same way.
nice! I still have a Rage 11c, its mainly for a collection stand point
The Rage II was originally released in mid 1996. It is a vastly superior upgrade to the original 3D Rage (early 1996) but leaves a lot to be desired. Since the GPU contains a 2nd generation 3D core, it is lacking in texture-throughput. I measured up to 6 MTexel/s for the Rage II+DVD in MacOS with the RAVE API and textures compared to 17 MPixel/s without textures. The Rage II core supports texture compression under MacOS RAVE which allows a 4Mb card to easily store around 8Mb of textures. Compression increases texture throughput a bit (less than 10%). The Rage Pro from early 1997 had 3-4 times the real world performance with 24 MTexels/s and 40 MPixel/s (tested on the Mac with RAVE). The Direct 3D implementation for the early Rage series leaves a lot to be desired and i really am baffled why ATI did such a bad job there. Maybe the architecture was too different? QuickDraw 3D Rave on the Mac on the other hand is very well supported on the Rage II and Rage Pro with most features. Most RAVE games on the Mac seem to have been especially programmed with an ATI card in mind. The reason might be the integration of ATI chips as onboard graphics by Apple from mid 1997 onwards. The Rage Pro gets a bit warmer than the Rage II but it can still be touched under load without a heatsink. Maybe this is another reason why the Rage series was so much loved by OEMs. Prices may play the big role, though. A retail ATI XClaim VR for Mac (Rage Pro 8Mb) had a cost of around $250 in 12/1997 which was more or less the same as a Voodoo 1 at that time. On MacOS the Rage II and Rage Pro really shine with a seamless 3D integration into the 2D desktop environment. 3D objects can be rendered anywhere on the screen in any application or game. Maybe ATI was not really committed to Direct 3D at the beginning?
Thanks for sharing, very good information! I always saw ATI as an OEM supplier, ticking as many boxes as possible, with some not that well, but still having a lot of features. I think it was not easy for graphics companies to switch from 2D to 3D and many didn't make the move like Tseng, Trident and others just fading away.
@@philscomputerlab ATI marketed its chips quite aggressively to OEMs with great success. Most likely cutting prices _a lot_. I heard that a $100 retail chip would cost as little as $10 for the OEM. In addition, they went as far as releasing the OEM of their chips first and after a few moths later the retail. I think ATI found a perfect balance of features, performance and price that was looked for by OEMs. This changed a bit with the Radeon. S3 tried the same OEM-approach with much less success. Cirrus Logic was (for a while) very successful with their 2D chips in that market but it lost its footing with 3D. Nvidia had seemingly less interest in this after the total failure of that concept with the NV1 and successfully aimed for the performance market on their own terms. 3Dfx tried both with a focus on there performance market (since the OEM-path with Sega was a failure) but failed at both in the end. ATI and Nvidia had exceptional architectures that were very expandable (take look at the patents). S3 had a quite capable core but maybe lacked the resources? The 3D core of 3Dfx was seemingly very inflexible but feature rich. The VSA-100 was (as far as i know) a complete redesign and came too late for that reason. They came and went like a firework.
The early 3D-market is very interesting and Nvidia was absolutely the king of start-ups with a all-or-nothing approach. ATI used a slow-and-steady approach with comparable results.
I would really like to see a good documentary on that period with complete coverage... i can dream :-)
My personal comparison:
Nvidia and 3Dfx competed to make the best layered cake while ATI made muffins.
I got this exact model ATI card as part of a Compaq Deskpro EN (I believe). It was an Intel Slot 1 system that came with a Celeron 333Mhz. I think it also came with an optional Pentium 3. I saw the ATI markings on it and was thrilled, thinking it was capable of great things... LOL.
😜
@philscomputerlab Hey Phil! I love your content, my man! It's amazing what older components are still capable of, and the way you present these projects makes it easy to watch and follow. Keep doing what your doing. Much love from South Alabama, US.
Can it handle some Emulators???
I had an ibm p233 mmx system that had the igp version of this, had hardware dvd decoding and 2mb mem, though may have been 4mb. on the motherboard near the chip, did better than my sis530 system running a k6-2 500
No complaining with your GT 210 😜
Ah yes, the slideshow enhancer 😂