DOS Days

ATI 3D Rage Pro

The 3D Rage Pro series were the first cards to use the new Rage 3 chipset, and arrived in 1997. It supported Direct X 5.0 and OpenGL 1.1.

Released Early 1997
Bus AGP (1x or 2x) or PCI
Chipset ATi Rage3
Standards VGA and SVGA
Memory 2 MB or 4 MB SDR (64-bit bus)
Ports 15-pin DSUB (RGB analogue)
Part # 109-38800-00 (ATI 3D Charger)
109-40200-XX
109-41500-00 (ATI All-in-Wonder Pro)
109-41900-XX (ATI Xpert@Play or ATI Xpert@Work)
109-46200-XX (ATI Xpert XL)
109-49800-XX
FCC ID  
Price $220-$290 (street price, late 1997)
See Also 3D Rage Pro Turbo, 3D Rage XL/XC

This being the third generation in the Rage architecture, Rage 3 improved upon the Rage II with the addition of motion compensation and a new 3D pipeline. Cards based on the ATI 3D Rage Pro were available for the PCI, AGP 1x and AGP 2x bus.

Unlike Rage II that sat on the AGP bus but never really pushed its benefits, Rage 3 now fully supported the AGP v1.0 standard with 133 MHz pipelining (on 3D Rage Pro AGP 2x cards) when executing from system memory. The chipset featured new triangle creation which took the strain of doing this task off the CPU, perspective errors of the Rage II were gone, and its texturing engine now had 4 KB of cache.

The cards typically ran with a core clock speed of 75 MHz with memory at the same speed, offering bandwidth of up to 600 MB/sec. Later versions of the card increased the memory clock to 100 MHz (800 MB/sec bandwidth).

3D Rage Pro Register Reference Guide

 

Board Revisions

Lots of cards came with the ATI 3D Rage Pro chip, so it can be confusing what exactly a particular card is. The BIOS chip will also cause confusion as these cards share the same BIOS code (or are directly interchangeable).

Broadly-speaking, they can be divided into groups of cards based on the supported bus type:

  • 3D Rage Pro PCI - Includes all the enhancements the Rage III chipset provides, but runs on the slower 33 MHz PCI v2.1 bus. The Rage III chip on these cards is either in a 208-pin PQFP that is pin-compatible with the older 3D Rage II/II+ and has a chip ID of 'GP', or is in a 256-pin BGA package with chip ID of 'GI'. These are stamped '3D RAGE PRO PCI'. Known ATI part numbers include:
    • 109-49800-XX - no memory expansion slot.
    • 109-41900-XX - with memory expansion slot. Marketed as the ATI Xpert@Play and ATI Xpert@Work, mostly for the OEM market.
    • 109-41500-00 - with TV out module and memory expansion slot.
    • 109-38800-00 - ATI 3D Charger
  • 3D Rage Pro AGP 1x - Only supports the 66 MHz bus speed of AGP 1x. RAMDAC runs at 200 MHz. The Rage III chip on these comes in a 256-pin BGA package, and has a chip ID of 'GD' - this chip has '3D RAGE PRO AGP' stamped on it. Known ATI part numbers include:
    • 109-40200-XX - with memory expansion slot.
    • 109-49800-XX - no memory expansion slot.
  • 3D Rage Pro AGP 2x - Supports the faster 133 MHz bus speed of AGP 2x (in addition to backward compatibility in AGP 1x slots). RAMDAC runs at 230 MHz. The Rage III chip on these comes in a 256-pin BGA package, and has a chip ID of 'GB' - this chip has '3D RAGE PRO AGP 2X' stamped on it. Known part numbers include:
    • 109-40200-XX - with memory expansion slot.
    • 109-41500-XX - ATI All-in-Wonder Pro with TV out module and memory expansion slot.
    • 109-46200-XX - ATI Xpert XL - no memory expansion slot.
    • 109-49800-XX - no memory expansion slot.

 

Competition

The Rage III chip arrived too late to make a solid impact, especially given the 3D market was ruled by the 3dfx Voodoo Graphics. In addition, the card competed directly with nVidia RIVA 128 cards, 3D Labs Permedia 2, Number Nine Revolution 3D, and Matrox Millennium II.

All these cards typically came with 4 MB or 8 MB of video memory, though the memory type was used as a differentiator around this time, with traditional EDO DRAM up against WRAM ("Window" RAM), MDRAM and SGRAM. Some could display 2D resolutions up to 1920 x 1200 (at around 60 Hz refresh rate), though [like the 3D Rage Pro cards] more commonly they maxed out at 1600 x 1200 at an 85 Hz vertical refresh rate.

 

In the Media

 

Setting it Up

There is no hardware configuration required for 3D Rage Pro cards - they are fully Plug & Play.


Downloads

3D Rage Pro-based cards could work in Windows 3.1, but in Windows 3.11 they suffered from major font problems with the ATi card driver.

Operation Manual
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Original Utility Disk
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VGA BIOS ROM
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More Pictures