I think it's fair to consider the (1996) Rage a gaming chip for its own pre-voodoo moment in history, and it was billed as a 3D accelerator, which was a perfectly reasonable title for it at the time and was accurate in practice, insofar as it did provide some limited support for hardware acceleration of, for example, Mechwarrior 2. At any rate, it was no worse than the NV1 or Virge (which, was my own first 3D card) among pre-3DFX attempts at gaming chips, even if the Verite did ultimately outclassed it.
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I was actually referring to the Rage128, which came out in the 1998/1999 area. I was wholly unimpressed with a Rage Pro 8MB I had received for free. It didn't have native OpenGL support, and obviously no Glide. Imagine my confusion when I figured it would be possible to play 3D games, but since Glide was still the big boy I was SOL.
The Rage128 (Rage Fury) was the first ATI card I had that had good 3D performance. It had fantastic Quake 2 performance, though initially it had subpar performance, particularly on AMD K6 processors. Then they released a patch that had 3DNow! support, and I was in a whole different world. Finally I could play games with fast 3D support!!!
As I'm a supporter of the underdog, I continue to support ATI. Although their Linux drivers leave a lot to desire. Fortunately I don't do too much 3D activities in Linux.