ATI Rage Fury / 128 Pro...was it that bad? 

I see a Midnight Geek video, I click play, I click Like, I enjoy.

GPU accelerated texture compression was first introduced by S3 Savage and was indeed used to bring crispier textures for certain games but when it was finally standardized in DirectX 6 devs first used it to lower the VRAM load of their regular textures rather than offering bigger ones so more like a free optimization token. That same technology is still used today in a refined revision but Nvidia is working on an other method that might replace it by the end of the decade.

Yeah, the Rage 128 Pro (Rage Fury Pro) is easily my favorite underdog card of the late 90's. I've got one paired up with my P3 1GHz for that specific reason.

Excellent video and benchmarks. The ATI Rage Fury was a very interesting card with a very nice performance in 32-bit.

Rage 128 Pro is a really nice GPU 😊

Now I want to play around with my Rage 128. I think that I have one of the fastest Rage 128 ever made. A while back I did some comparisons in benchmarks and I saved some of the results, of which I will show you those with a P3 600MHz on an Acorp MB with 440BX chipset. 3DMark 99: P3-600-Acorp | ATI Rage128Pro 128bit | AGP | 800x600x16 | GPU 5501/CPU 9328 | Windows 98 | Driver Date: 1-23-2002 3DMark 2K : P3-600-Acorp | ATI Rage128Pro 128bit | AGP | 1024x768x16 | GPU 2487/CPU 187 | Windows 98 | Driver Date: 1-23-2002 3DMark 2K1: P3-600-Acorp | ATI Rage128Pro 128bit | AGP | 1024x768x32 | 1061 | Windows 98 Driver Date: 1-23-2002 GL_Quake: P3-600-Acorp | ATI Rage128Pro 128bit | AGP | 640x480x32 | 145.0 FPS | demo1 Quake 2 OGL max settings: P3-600-Acorp | ATI Rage128Pro 128bit | AGP | 1024x768x32 | 61.1 FPS | demo1.dm2 Quake 3 Arena 1.3 OGL max settings: P3-600-Acorp | ATI Rage128Pro 128bit | AGP | 1024x768x32 | 34.5 FPS | (the default demo, forgot the name) Unreal 224 D3D max settings: P3-600-Acorp | ATI Rage128Pro 128bit | AGP | 1024x768x32 | 42.30 FPS | unreal (default castle demo)

I actually had one of these in 1999 :-) a friend sold me his for cheap cheap. So I was like I'll take it, wasn't as good as friends TNT2 and a friends SLI Voodoo 2. But it did allow us to play AvP at the LAN and even had it right up to about mid 2000 when I picked up a Voodoo 3 3500 for also a decent price.

Love all videos :3

Great video, many thanks. I have a ATI rage 128 pro ultra, it's a OEM card that cost £9. It's great for the money but getting drivers was a bit of a mare

Great review, thanks👍 The Rage 128 pro was a solid card. It just was not enough to compete with Nvidias and 3DFX flagships back in the days. (That came with the Radeon 9xxx series then)

Back then we were students, sharing a flat. I had PIII 800/TNT2 16 mb combo, friend had Duron 600/ATI Rage with same amount of VRAM. We played some games together over LAN. For some reason, overall smoothness and FPS were always better on his system, which did cost maybe half of mine.

AFAIK, Texture compression is helpful with low vRam; because it's faster than constantly swapping textures from the system Ram. It also may depend on the game, on how it's used. Because if you have enough vRam to do what the game needs (32MB in this case) ; then, the textures might not need to be compressed..... unless it's a tech demo, and then all bets are off. Also, ther's more than one type of texture compression. AFAIK, S3 Texture Compression was the first, and then DirectX incorporated that as a standard, but also introduced a few more. So again, depending on the time periods; the game and the cards *might* not support the same type of Texture Compression... although I think this would be a rare and extreme case.

The Rage 128 was fine, but the true king was the Rage Fury MAXX, with two Rage 4 chips. And why I wouldn't want to play NFS at 1600x1200 on the card, but 800x600 runs pretty great. And with CRTs resolution change is no issue. There is no native resolution. If the game doesn't run smooth, just drop the resolution and enjoy the improved experience. Dark Forces II shows how much the extra pipeline does. Colin McRae probably has a 35 fps limit, either in the config, or in the engine. Better left like that. (see the GTA2 situation for why) Viper Racing on the Pentium 2 is a clear CPU limit. Looks like a perfect partner for the 128 at 512x384 and for the Fury at 800x600 The Fury is also nice for Q3A, fine performance. So yes,the 128 Pro was a fine card, keeping up against the TNT2, Voodoo 3 200 and G400, but not quite on par with the higher clocked competition. And yes, people nowadays really underestimate how much of a difference having a GPU made. Quadruple your resolution, go from low to high settings, and you still get tripe the framerate!

This was my first 3d accelerator (thats what we called them back then). I couldn't upgrade to geforce fast enough

That was great. Thanks for putting in so much work. How does the Rage Fury MAXX compare?

A game that came out 2 years after cannot be played while today you can play most games on a 7 year old GPU with no issues. It’s good cards were cheaper back then because they got obsolete so quickly.

OK, it is time for new video :D we miss new content!

I really love my Elsa Gladiac Geforce 2mx with 64mb 128b. 😅😊 One of my favourite retro video card. 😊

Yeah i remember that 1999-2001 era and those "compressed textures", i too didn't understand that was there "compressed" and what changed. It was zero difference to me too.

Amaying work as always geek, greetings from a Mexican fan living in Germany

I have that exact MSI MS 6340 VIA KT133 and the ATi Rage Pro Turbo AGP2X card. With a Duron 800 and 384MB RAM. my board has a bad capacitor near the northbridge and needs to be replaced. I ran an XP Palomino 1700+ on it @100FSB (Athlon 1100) and also increased FSB to 110 (Athlon 1210). This was before I got a proper nForce 2 Ultra board :)

This was an interesting video to watch. Back in the day we were often pairing these cards with AMD K6-2 processors and it was a horrible experience. But then... is my memory at fault? Did we not actually use the Rage Fury Pro and use the Rage Pro or Rage 128 instead? Back then we thought that the drivers were horrible - but we were almost always using the ones on the CD as frankly internet access was sporadic. In other words, I have horrible memories of these cards, but a) used awful drivers and b) probably treated all of them as rubbish forevermore.

I would be interested how the PCI Rage XL compares to these. I have been seeing that card a lot on AliExpress.

I played GTA 3 on a Radeon 32DDR which was a great card I bought to replace the Voodoo2 SLI.

I had one when I was younger. So, yes - yes it was that bad, I hated that card with my entire being. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk

The very, very last was the Rage 6, so tired of being enraged, it called itself Radeon. I have a Radeon SDR PCI around here somewhere...

how do you transfer games and such over network to your old pcs?

I have several Rage 128 including the Rage Fury (1998) and Rage Fury Pro (1999) and they're both interesting cards in their own time. The Rage Fury is by a margin the fastest single card from 1998 and also has very little penalty when running 32 bit color in my testing

nice ;)

Do you have a guide how to transfer data using a network card from new to old/retro computer?

it's all the rage, so to speak :-D

I'm currently struggling with an Athlon Thunderbird C 1400 with 133 FSB on KT133. It doesn't work that well. It often crashes and freezes with 133 MHz FSB.

the playstation version of colin mcrae rally is almost identical to the pc version , Colin mcrae 2.0 was when the pc version was in a league of its own

hah I have the same card and now I really want to test it against TNT2 and Voodoo3. I thought it wasn't as good as TNT2!

Double your CPU speed and I guarantee GTA III will be smoother. The ATi has alot more to give here. Also, these were really good cards in macs. Great driver support out of the box in classic Mac OS and you can play most of the shooters from the time with great performance. The Windows drivers sucked, unless you used the really late drivers.

Do yourself a favor and attach a fan on that fury. All flagship cards shou've have had fans back then, but they don't and they get really hot. It seems that only TNT2 vendors had the sense to ship their cards with fans

Oh my god, that exposed-die AMD cpu. Those were the days. When the games were cookin' and the HDD's be chirpin' !

No! in q3 you have to use kai's texture fix and you will see the difference!

Nah the 128 pro was competitive! Bit slower than the competition but not that much

Dusts off my xpert 2000 card.

1ghz? TOO MODERN!!!!1111