Bigeye #11: ATI Rage 128

Created on May 30, 2020
Indexed on August 31, 2022 at 12:11 PM

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The ATI Rage 128 is a pretty good 3D card, but doesn't it seem like it should be a little less choppy? There's a number of things holding it back here.

The first thing to blame is the chipset being used. Intel never made any Socket 7 chipset with AGP, leaving other manufacturers to pick up where they left off. Non-Intel chipsets generally had unreliable AGP implementations, and may have had to operate at AGP 1x just to attain stability.

The second culprit could just be the AMD K6-2 CPU being used. It has a much higher clock than the fastest Pentium MMX, but AMD was not quite at the point where they could put out a powerful FPU.

To compensate, the K6-2 comes with not only the MMX instruction set, but also their own technology called 3DNow. 3DNow was AMD's answer to Intel's upcoming SSE technology, and software optimized for 3DNow allowed the K6-2 to really pull through in 3D games.

This CPU is actually overclocked a bit from its normal 450MHz speed; I'm really trying to squeeze a little extra juice from this thing. I wonder if that's why this game crashed once while I was trying to record this map.

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