ATI Rage - 3D Rage Pro

3D Rage Pro

ATI made a number of changes over the 3D RAGE II: a new triangle setup engine, perspective correction improvements, fog support and transparency implementations, specular lighting support, and enhanced video playback and DVD support. The 3D Rage Pro chip was designed for Intel's Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP), taking advantage of execute-mode texturing, command pipelining, sideband addressing, and full 2×-mode protocols. Initial versions relied on standard graphics memory configurations: up to 8 MiB of SGRAM or 16 MB of WRAM, depending on the model.

RAGE Pro offered performance in the range of Nvidia's RIVA 128 and 3dfx's Voodoo accelerator, but generally failed to match or exceed its competitors. This, in addition to its (early) lack of OpenGL support, hurt sales for what was touted to be a solid gaming solution. In February 1998, ATI introduced the 2x AGP version of the Rage Pro to the OEM market and attempted to reinvent the Rage Pro for the retail market, by simultaneously renaming the chip to Rage Pro Turbo, and releasing a new Rage Pro Turbo driver-set (4.10.2312) that supposedly increased performance by 40%. In reality, early versions of the new driver only delivered increased performance in benchmarks such as Ziff-Davis' 3D Winbench 98 and Final Reality. In games, performance actually suffered. Despite the poor introduction, the name Rage Pro Turbo stuck, and eventually ATI was able to release updated versions of the driver which granted a visible performance increase in games, however this was still not enough to garner much interest from PC enthusiasts.

The 3D Rage Pro was mainly sold in the retail market as the Xpert@Work or the Xpert@Play, with the only difference being a TV-out port on the Xpert@Play version. It was also the built-in graphic chipset in the Sun Ultra 5/10 workstations, their first computer model to offer commodity PC hardware components.

• General Specifications for the 3D Rage Pro:
  • 75 MHz core
  • 4, 8, and 16 MB 100 MHz SGRAM/WRAM memory
  • 800 MB/s memory bandwidth
  • DirectX 6.0