DOS Days

ATI Rage 128

The Rage 128 chipset arrived in early 1999, and was seen on four different ATI cards.

Released August 1999
Bus AGP 4x
Chipset Rage 128
Standards VGA and SVGA
Memory 32 MB SDR (64-bit bus)
Ports 15-pin DSUB (RGB analogue)
Part # -
FCC ID -
Price -
See Also 3D Rage Pro, 3D Rage XL/XC

The Rage 128 series includes two entry-level cards: Expert 128 with 16 MB of video memory, and the OEM-designed Rage Magnum with 32 MB. At the high-end, the two cards are: Rage Fury (32 MB with video in/out ports) and All-in-Wonder 128 (16 MB or 32 MB with TV tuner and video in/out ports).

 

All Rage 128-based cards are compatible with DirectX 6.0 and OpenGL 1.2.

 

Board Revisions

 

Competition

 

In the Media

"When it was introduced earlier this year, the Rage 128 brightened the 3D landscape with excellent true-color performance. Built around a 128-bit dual-graphics pipeline, the Rage 128 was the new kid on the block with the shiniest duds - namely, a beefy triangle setup engine and ATI's new-fangled Dual Cache Architecture, featuring 8K pixel and 8K texture caches for keeping data closer to the graphics processor.

Add in a 128-bit memory interface and a 32-bit z-buffer with an 8-bit stencil buffer, and you have a chipset built with 32-bit color rendering in mind.

Unfortunately, the Rage 128 has been dogged with glaring visual deficiencies, particularly when it comes to rendering at 16-bit color depths.

Since its introduction, the Rage 128 has been slow to mature into the rendering powerhouse it was designed to be. Sure it does single-pass bump-mapping (embossing), single-cycle trilinear filtering, full-scene anti-aliasing (albeit with a big performance hit), and per-pixel perspective-correct mip-mapping, but the Rage 128 doesn't pull the fill rates it takes to be king of the hill. While ATI stumbled, the other 3D superpowers caught up to the Rage 128's high-color image quality and surpassed it in performance. But where other chipsets - such as TNT2 - sacrifice 2D features to focus on 3D rendering performance, ATI relishes its role as the top dog of 2D video playback.

The Rage 128's excellent hardware support allows you to get funky with DVD playback without having to resort to a dedicated MPEG-2 decoder. While most 3D chipsets offer MPEG-2 motion compensation acceleration, ATI does them one better with built-in iDCT (inverse Discrete Cosine Transform) for ultra-low CPU utilization and high-resolution decoding.

ATI serves the Rage 128 on four different boards. The entry-level Expert 128 and OEM-designed Rage Magnum are stocked with 16MB and 32MB SDRAM, respectively. The high-end Rage Fury comes equipped with 32MB and both S-Video and composite-out. The All-in-Wonder 128 comes in both 16MB and 32 MB versions, and features a TV tuner and all the video in and out I/Os you can pack onto one PCB."     
Online Today, June 1989

 

Setting it Up

There is no hardware configuration required for Rage 128 cards.


Downloads

Operation Manual
(missing)

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Original Utility Disk
(missing)

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VGA BIOS ROM
(missing)

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Rage 128 VESA Driver
Version 2.21

ATI-provided 64vbe - similar to UniVBE- to provide VESA VBE compliance for some legacy cards like Mach 64 and Rage 128. This is the latest version v2.21.

Rage 128 Windows 2000 Driver

Windows 2000 driver for the ATI Rage 128 32MB SDR card

Rage 128 Windows XP Driver

Windows XP driver for the Rage 128 Ultra 32 MB A08 card. From the Dell support website.

Released Sep 3 2003

 

More Pictures


An ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra (1999)