ATI Rage 128 Mac Edition

Physical Specs and Compatibility

The ATI Rage 128 is a PCI video card that works in a standard 33 MHz or Apple's accelerated 66 MHz PCI slot. It was the standard video card on the Blue & White Power Mac G3 and the Yikes! Power Mac G4, where it sat in the lone 66 MHz PCI slot. According to Accelerate Your Mac, the card only sees about a 10% performance gain on the faster bus.

The Blue & White G3 was Apple's third PCI Power Mac without motherboard video; the first two were the Power Mac 9500 and 9600, which usually shipped with the ixMicro Twin Turbo video card. This was the first time Apple used a VGA connector on a desktop Mac.

The Rage 128 card has a connector for a DVD decoder card. Many articles mention poor 16-bit image quality, and 32-bit operation is nearly as fast.

ATI shipped several Mac compatible cards based on the Rage 128 chipset. These include the Orion, Nexus, and VR cards.

Details

GPU: Rage 128
GPU speed: 166 MHz
PCI bus speed/width: 33/66 MHz, 32 bits
Video memory: 32 MB
Memory speed: 166 MHz
Memory bus: 256 bits
Resolutions: 640 x 480 to 1920 x 1440
Ports: DVI-I and VGA
Dual monitor support: no
Cooling fan: yes
Minimum OS: Mac OS 8.0

Online Resources

Drivers & Software, ATI
Mac Rage128 Graphics Card Status, Accelerate Your Mac, 1999.08.24
ATI Rage128 Orion vs IXMicro Game Rocket, Accelerate Your Mac, 1999.07.13

Benchmarks

Radeon AGP vs Rage128 Pro AGP, Mike Breeden, Accelerate Your Mac, 2000.10.05
Rage 128 vs. Radeon AGP, Bare Feats, 2001.02.23. "Is AGP that much faster?" It depends....
Mac 3D Graphics Card Performance Summary, Accelerate Your Mac, 1999.11.03. VT MP960 Compared to Voodoo3 3000/2000 PCI, ATI's Rage128 Orion, and Formac's Proformance 3.

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