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ATI Rage series

Release date	1996; 29 years ago (1996)
Discontinued	Yes (official support)[1]
Codename	Rage
Architecture	Rage
Cards
Entry-level	3D Rage, 3D Rage II, XL, Pro
Mid-range	128 VR, 128 GL
High-end	128 Pro
Enthusiast	Fury MAXX
API support
OpenGL	OpenGL 1.0
History
Predecessor	Mach series
Successor	Radeon 7000 series
Support status
Unsupported

TheATI Rage (stylized asRAGE orrage) is a series ofgraphics chipsets developed byATI Technologies offeringgraphical user interface (GUI)2D acceleration,video acceleration, and3D acceleration developed byATI Technologies. It is the successor to theATI Mach series of 2D accelerators.

The original 3D RAGE (also known as Mach64 GT) chip was based upon a Mach64 2D core with new 3D functionality andMPEG-1 acceleration. The 3D RAGE was released in April 1996.^[2] The 3D RAGE was used in ATI's3D Xpression video board. Additionally, this chip was found integrated into the IBM Aptiva 2176 line with the Stealth case, and came with a Free Copy ofMechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat that only worked with this graphics chip to showcase its abilities. The memory configuration on this integrated chip was 2 Megabytes.

The second generation Rage (aka Mach64 GT-B) offered roughly two times greater 3D performance. Its graphics processor was based again on a re-engineered Mach64 GUI engine that provided optimal 2D performance with either single-cycleEDO memory or high-speedSGRAM. The 3D Rage II chip was an enhanced,pin compatible version of the 3D Rage accelerator. The second-generationPCI-bus compatible chip boosted 2D performance by 20 percent and added support forMPEG-2 (DVD) playback. The chip also had driver support forMicrosoft Direct3D andReality Lab,QuickDraw 3D Rave, CriterionRenderWare, and ArgonautBRender.OpenGL drivers are available for the professional 3D andCAD community and Heidi drivers are available forAutoCAD users. Drivers were also provided in operating systems includingWindows 95,Windows NT, theMac OS,OS/2, andLinux.^[3] ATI also shipped a TV encoder companion chip for RAGE II, theImpacTV chip.

RAGE II was integrated into several Macintosh Computers, including the first revision of theMacintosh G3 (Beige) and thePower Mac 6500. In IBM-compatible PCs, severalmotherboards and video cards used the chipset as well including: the3D Xpression+, the3D Pro Turbo, and the originalAll-in-Wonder.

The 3D Rage IIc was the last version of the Rage II core and offered optional AGP support. The Rage IIc was used in the originaliMac (Revision A) in 1998.

• Specifications for the Rage II+DVD:
  • 60 MHz core
  • up to 83 MHz SGRAM memory
  • 480 MB/s memory bandwidth
  • DirectX 5.0

ATI made a number of changes over the 3D RAGE II: a newtriangle 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 forIntel'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 ofSGRAM or 16 MB ofWRAM, depending on the model.

RAGE Pro offered performance in the range ofNvidia'sRIVA 128 and3dfx'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 2× 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 toRage Pro Turbo, and releasing a newRage 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 inbenchmarks such asZiff-Davis'3D Winbench 98 andFinal Reality. In games, however, performance actually suffered.

Despite this poor introduction, the Rage Pro Turbo name 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.

The3D Rage Pro was mainly sold in the retail market as theXpert@Work or theXpert@Play, with the only difference being aTV-out port on the Xpert@Play version. It was also the built-in graphic chipset in theSunUltra 5/10workstations, their first computer model to offer commodity PC hardware components, as well as the built-in graphic chipset of the second revision of theMacintosh G3 (Beige). It was also used in later revisions of the originaliMac, namely Revision B and C.

• GeneralSpecifications 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

Rage LT orMach64 LT was often implemented on motherboards and in mobile applications likenotebook computers. This late 1996 chip was very similar to the Rage II and supported the same application coding. It integrated alow-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) transmitter for notebookLCDs and advanced power management (block-by-block power control). The RAGE LT PRO, based on the 3D RAGE PRO, was the very first mobile GPU to use AGP.

It offeredFiltered Ratiometric Expansion, which automatically adjusted images to full-screen size. ATI's ImpacTV2+ is integrated with the RAGE LT PRO chip to support multi-screen viewing; i.e., simultaneous outputs to TV, CRT and LCD. In addition, the RAGE LT PRO can drive two displays with different images and/orrefresh rates with the use of integrated dual, independentCRT controllers.

TheRage LT Pro was often used in desktop video cards that had aVESA Digital Flat Panel port to drive some desktop LCD monitors digitally.

After ATI stopped producing the RAGE LT, ATI used the Rage 128 and Rage 128 Pro as the base chip for their newMobility Mobile Graphics.

TheRage XL was a low-cost RAGE Pro-based card. As a low-power chip with capable 2D & 3D acceleration, the Rage XL was used on many low-end graphics cards. It was also seen onIntel motherboards as recently as 2004, and was still used in 2006 for server motherboards. TheRage XL has been succeeded by theATI ES1000 for server use.

The chip was basically a die-shrunk Rage Pro, optimized to be very inexpensive for applications where only basic graphics output was necessary.

Rage XL has improved bilinear filtering on transparent textures compared to the Rage Pro.^[4]

In the continuing struggle to create the fastest and most advanced 3D accelerator, ATI came up with theRAGE 128. The chip was announced in two flavors, the RAGE 128 GL and the RAGE 128 VR. Aside from the VR chip's lower price, the main difference was that the former was a full 128-bit design, while the VR, still a128-bit processor internally, used a64-bit external memory interface.

• Magnum - Aworkstation board for OEMs with 32 MB SDRAM.
• Rage Fury - 32 MB SDRAM memory and same performance as the Magnum, this add-in card was marketed for PC games.
• Xpert 128 - 16 MB SDRAM memory and, like the others, used the RAGE 128 GL chip.
• Rage Orion - RAGE 128 GL design specifically intended for Mac OS with 16 MB SDRAM memory, OpenGL andQuickDraw 3D/RAVE support,^[5] essentially a market-specific Xpert 128. This card supported more and different video resolutions than later Mac-specific RAGE 128 designs. This card was marketed for Macintosh games.
• Nexus 128 - Also a Mac-specific RAGE 128 GL design, but with 32 MB of RAM, similar to the Rage Fury. This card was targeted at graphics professionals.
• Xclaim VR 128 - Also a Mac-specific RAGE 128 GL design with 16 MB SDRAM memory, but included video capture, video out, TV tuner support andQuickTime video acceleration.^[5]
• Xpert 2000 - RAGE 128 VR design using 64-bit memory interface.

Rage 128 was compliant toDirect3D 6 andOpenGL 1.2. It supported many features from the previous RAGE chips, such as triangle setup, DVD acceleration, and a capable VGA/GUI accelerator core.

RAGE 128 addedinverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT) acceleration to the DVD repertoire. It was ATI's first dual texturing renderer, in that it could output two pixels per clock (twopixel pipelines). The processor was known for its well-performing32-bit color mode, but also its poorly dithered16-bit mode; the RAGE 128 was not much faster in 16-bit color despite the lower bandwidth requirements.

In 32-bit mode, RAGE 128 was more than a match for theRIVA TNT, and theVoodoo 3 did not support 32-bit at all. The chip was meant to compete with theNVIDIA RIVA TNT,Matrox G200 and3dfxVoodoo 2 in 1998.

ATI implemented acaching technique it calledTwin Cache Architecture (TCA) with Rage 128. The Rage 128 used an 8 kB buffer to storetexels that were used by the 3D engine. In order to improve performance even more, ATI engineers also incorporated an 8 KBpixel cache used to write pixels back to theframe buffer.

• 8 milliontransistors, 0.25micrometer fabrication
• 3D Feature Set
  • Hardware support for vertex arrays, fog and fog table support
  • Alpha blending, vertex and Z-based fog, video textures, texture lighting
  • Single clockbilinear andtrilinear texture filtering and texture compositing
  • Perspective-correctmip-mapped texturing with chroma-key support
  • Vertex and Z-based reflections, shadows, spotlights, 1.00 biasing
  • Hidden surface removal using 16, 24, or 32-bitZ-buffering
  • Gouraud andspecular shaded polygons
  • Line and edgeanti-aliasing,bump mapping, 8-bitstencil buffer
• 250 MHzRAMDAC, AGP 2×

Later, ATI developed a successor to the original Rage 128, called theRage 128 Pro. This chip carried several enhancements, including an enhanced triangle setup engine that doubled geometry throughput to eight million triangles/s, better texture filtering, DirectX 6.0 texture compression, AGP 4×, DVI support, and aRage Theater chip for composite and S-Video TV-in. This chip was used on the game-orientedRage Fury Pro boards and the business orientedXpert 2000 PRO. The Rage 128 Pro was generally an even match for the Voodoo 3 2000,RIVA TNT2 andMatrox G400, but was often hindered by its lower clock (often at 125 MHz) when competing against the high end Voodoo3 3500, TNT2 ultra and G400 MAX.

TheRage Fury MAXX board held dual Rage 128 Pro chips in analternate frame rendering (AFR) configuration to allow a near-double increase in performance. As the name says, AFR renders each frame on an independent graphics processor. This board was meant to compete with the NVIDIAGeForce 256 and later the 3dfxVoodoo 5. While it was able to somewhat match 32 MB SDR GeForce 256 boards, the GeForce 256 cards with DDR memory still easily came out on top.^[6] Though there were few games that supported hardwaretransform, clipping, and lighting (T&L) at the time, the MAXX's lack of hardware T&L would put it at a disadvantage when such titles became more widespread.

It was later discovered by ATI that Windows NT 5.x operating systems (Windows 2000, XP) did not support dual AGP GPUs in the way ATI had implemented them. NT put them both on the AGP bus and switched between them, and so the board could only operate as a single Rage 128 Pro with the performance of a Rage Fury card. The optimal OS for the Rage Fury MAXX is Windows 98/ME.^{[citation needed]} Windows 95 and Mac OS were not supported.

The Rage 128 Pro graphics accelerator was the final revision of the Rage architecture and the last use of the Rage brand name. While thenext iteration was initially code-named asRage 6, ATI decided to rename itRadeon for release. The name is still in use today byAMD after acquiring ATI in 2006 (and indeed after the ATI brand was phased out in 2010).

Rage Mobility succeeded the Rage LT and Rage LT Pro. Almost every version of Rage was used in mobile applications, but there were also some special versions of these chips which were optimized for this. They were ATI's first graphics solutions to carry theMobility naming. Such chips included:

• RAGE MobilityC / EC / L / M2, (RAGE Pro-based) (Motion Compensation)
• RAGE MobilityP /M /M1 (RAGE Pro-based) (Motion Compensation, IDCT)
• RAGE Mobility 128 /M3 /M4 (RAGE 128 Pro-based) (Motion Compensation, IDCT)

Original Reference Card # (RAGE 128 Pro) : 109-60600-10

• Entry Level
  • 3D RAGE
  • 3D RAGE II / II+DVD / IIc
  • 3D RAGE XL
  • 3D RAGE Pro / Xpert@Play / Xpert@Home
• Middle Range
  • RAGE Magnum (OEM Workstation Graphics)
  • RAGE 128 VR / Xpert 2000 Pro
  • RAGE 128 GL / Xpert 128
• High-End
  • RAGE 128 Pro
  • RAGE 128 Ultra (OEM Version of 128 Pro)
• Enthusiast
  • RAGE Fury Pro (Single Rage 128 Pro)
  • RAGE Fury MAXX (Dual Rage 128 Pro with Theater Chip)

• Xclaim VR 128
• Nexus 128
• Rage Orion

¹Pixel pipelines :Vertex shaders :Texture mapping units :Render output units
² OpenGL 1.0 (Generic 2D) is provided through software implementations.

These GPUs are either integrated into the mainboard or occupy aMobile PCI Express Module (MXM).

¹Vertex shaders :Pixel shaders :Texture mapping units :Render output units.

• 
  3D RAGE II
• 
  Rage XL
• 
  Rage PRO
• 
  Rage IIC
• 
  Rage 128 GL
• 
  Rage 128 Pro

• AMD CrossFire – Scalable Link Interface (SLI) equivalent of NVIDIA
• List of AMD graphics processing units

• "ATI RAGE Fury Pro Review" by Silvino Orozco and Thomas Pabst, Tom's Hardware, October 8, 1999, retrieved January 15, 2006
• "ATI's Rage LT Press Release" by ATI Technologies, November 11, 1996
• "ATI's Rage LT PRO Press Release" by ATI Technologies, November 10, 1997
• "ATI's 3D Rage PRO Press Release" by ATI Technologies, March 24, 1997
• "XPERT 2000 PRO" by ATI Technologies, retrieved January 15, 2006
• "3D Winbench 98 - Only a Misleading Benchmark or the Best Target for Cheating ?" by Thomas Pabst, Tom's Hardware, February 15, 1998, retrieved June 1, 2006
• "ATI 3D Rage Availability Press Release"Archived 2016-09-15 at theWayback Machine, April 1, 1996

Wikimedia Commons has media related toATI Rage series video cards.

• ATI: Discontinued Products
• techPowerUp! GPU Database

• ATI Technologies products
• Computer-related introductions in 1996
• Graphics cards
• Graphics processing units
• AMD

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