ATi Rage Pro Drivers... which give best performance / stability

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dickk8044

New member
hi there,

I'm new to this forum, and it seems as if I finally found some guys who know what they're talking about. I recently got hold of an ATi Xpert98 card and plugged it into the AGP slot of my S7AX ALi Aladdin 5, bios revision 3 (newest), trying to make the system run a little faster. The CPU is an AMD K6-2 450 overclocked to 500MHz without ANY problems.

Now, I tried to run several games and had the same problems, all D3D, but I will refer to Need For Speed Porsche Unleashed, which was the reason for me to put the card into my stable system. Using the recommended official drivers supplied on the ATi website, I had some problems with the menus, which were invisible or didn't pop up correctly. In-Game performance and graphics were superb though.

Then I tried the official but not recommended drivers from the ATi website. The menus were fine, but the game locked up every time I played it, both in menu or when driving a car. Performance was quite ugly, because i was able to count the frames. Frames per minute!!! So I tried to alter some AGP settings, and setting the AGP card into safe mode (1x AGP, no Frame Buffer etc.) via the ALi AGP Utility kept the game from crashing. Performance now was a real problem, though.

So I contacted ATi Tech Support, and got some hints and three new driver sets. The two beta drivers i tested were slightly faster, but had the same stability problems when running AGP 2x mode. The other driver was the newest driver on the ATi website, although it couldn't be found when searching for a driver. This one has a normal performance, but the in-game graphics are flickering, and some triangles are white or rainbow coloured... These problems occured both in AGP Turbo and Safe Mode.

Now I found some more drivers. The Fujits-Siemens driver set (in what way is F-S related to ATi???), and the rageltman's driver set. Now which one do you recommend? I'm tired of trying all these drivers, so is there anybode who experienced the same problems and fixed them by using one of these drivers? Other hints, tips, tricks, ideas?

Any help will be apreciated. Thanks foer reading.

Regards,

Börner
 
Im a bit biased when it comes to driver recommendations.
I would try the Fujitsu siemens 4.13.1.2654 (J5.25.0) or M6.12.12 (4.13.3007).
You can obtain links at my site.
 
I tried the Fuhitsu-Siemens drivers and they are faaaaaaaaaaaaaast. Thank you, even though I still can't use the card in AGP 2x mode, performance now is satisfactory even in AGP 1x mode. These drivers are incredible, it's quite a shame that ATi doesn't provide them on their web pages...

Another question. I'm used to squeez out every drop of performance out of my system, so I had a look at Rage Pro Tweaker. I'm wondering what values for mem and engine speed are "safe". Anybody ever reached a maximum??? Long time ago (486 generation methinks) 20% of the labeled speed were supposed to be the maximum. Does this still apply to this card?

Regards,

Börner
 
new driver ragepro driver??

new driver ragepro driver??

Hi, I´d like to test this "faaaaast" driver also, but the link on BigZ´s site doesn´t work!!!
Please tell me, where can i get this new fujitsu-siemens driverset??
 
Same as here. The link went dead. Going to search for it in a moment. Going to e-mail BigZ about this if he hasn't already caught on about this.
 
I couldn't download it either -- got a small piece of it this morning, then it went dead.

What version are the ati3drab.dll and ati2drab.drv files in it? Thanks.
 
If the site doesnt come back up, I will mod the inf and post the driver on me site.
In case you were wondering, I saw no improvement in quality or performance with this driver, and attempts of a modified set were very disappointing.
 
Things look bad.
Should have it posted on Sunday.
It will be modified for all Rage cards, and contain most resolutions.
Most appreciated if you give me a list of required resolutions to work with.
 
I only use 1024x768x16 or 32. Laptop won't go much higher than this without looking like crap. I don't use lower, because it'll look crap as well, unless I hook my laptop up to a TV screen, then I use 640x480x32.
 
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