Rage Pro Tweaker II

Rage 2 Tweaker Documentation
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Contents
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1) About this program

2) Example Performance Improvements

3) Terms & Conditions of use

4) Contact Address

1) About this program
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This utility allows you to change certain settings to improve performance on the ATI Rage family of chips. This includes the Rage, Rage 2, Rage 2+ & Rage Pro Turbo. However this utility has only been tested on an ATI Rage 2. I am fairly certain that the features it uses are present in the Rage 2 and higher. The Rage chip may not work with this utility.

Restrictions

You are not permitted to distribute this software in ANY form. This includes download from web sites unless you obtain permission from the author at the address at the top of this page. If you want to have a link to it then please just link to this page rather than directly linking to the zip file. This allows me to maintain control over the software and to ensure old versions are not distributed accidentally.

The good news

Using this utility you may be able to get up to 30% more performance out of your hardware. This mainly depends on the use of features by the application. Also whether the CPU or Graphics card is the bottleneck.

The bad news

This performance gain comes at the cost of image quality. So you need to find a balance between image quality and speed. There is one option which does not affect image quality. This is page flipping. In some applications this will make the program virtually unusable, but in others like the POD Direct3D demo this does not flicker too much.

Future Plans

There are more settings that can be altered. However, I have not found any speed improvements or image quality enhancements so I have not included these. There are also the settings in atiddraw.ini which I have yet to see what they do. I will continue to find ways of using these settings to help performance. If you have any documentation on the ATI cards, chipsets, APIs etc then I would be most interested in this information. If you know anything about atiddraw.ini then this would be very useful.

Settings

Some of the settings appear to have no effect. Fast Colour Fill and no Wait after 3D ops seem to have no effect on my Rage 2. This may be that these only affect 2D applications.

Here are some suggested values for 2nd scrollbar on the 3rd page.

Default = 0 - This is what the ATI drivers use
Good = 64 - Hardly notice image loss but improved speed
Reasonable = 80 - Pretty good

Any larger values will probably have little impact on performance but will have a huge impact on image quality. So you are probably best using settings in the green area. The red area may impact image quality too much.

You can save your settings to allow you to have multiple settings stored on disk. You can also specify an application to run too. By putting the setting file as parameter 1 you can get it to automatically set the settings and execute the application.

The utility does not load the current settings when it starts. It will load as default settings. These may not be the defaults provided by ATI drivers.

There is no overclocking in this utility.

This utility has nothing to do with ATI at all. The ati logo is used on the 1st page to indicate the utility will only work on these chips. It is in no way associated with this.

It may be that the pageflipping option only gives the impression of greater speed. I cannot say if this actually has an impact other than increasing framerate counters.

It appears that when Bi-Linear Filtering is on the perspective correction changes have little or no speed enhancement. This may be just on Rage 2 chips.

2) Example Performance Improvements
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Tests performed on a P150 with 32MB of RAM and an ATI 3D Expression+ with 2MB of SGRAM

Application Before After Settings % diff
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PC Player D3D 14.1 16.8 All but Fog, sound 20%
Benchmark v1.10 stars and zbuffer
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PC Player D3D 14.1 15.1 As Above 7%
Benchmark v1.10 Above used Page Flipping
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Tunnel 62ish 102 Defaults 320x200 64%
Full screen
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Tunnel 90ish 113 As above but no 25%
perspective correction
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Tunnel 62ish 83 As 1st Tunnel but no 33%
Page Flipping
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The settings used for Rage 2 Tweaker are

Fast Colour Fill, No wait after 3D ops, Page Flipping (unless specified above)
Fast setting for 1st option on 3rd page
Next setting = 80
Sub Division Speed boost

3) Terms & Conditions of use
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You are permitted to use this software on your own computer for non-commercial use. You are not permitted to distribute this software in anyform.

Be warned that I accept NO responsibility for any problems caused by the use or mis-use of this software. This is simple enough I think. This program should NOT damage your hardware BUT you should be careful as this does make use of undocumented settings which may have adverse effects.

If in doubt then DO NOT USE THE SOFTWARE.

You may not disassemble the software or edit the software. You may also not take any graphics from it for any use. You are only being granted a license to use the software not to the software itself.

This software has NO WARANTY at all.

The author of this software is Neil Banfield and should be credited with creating this software.

The author respects all trademarks mentioned in this document and in the application.

4) Contact Address
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Should you encounter problems or have any questions / suggestions then please contact the author at the following address. The authors e-mail address is N.Banfield-96@student.lboro.ac.uk