Yeah I had a 8500LE. They were about $90 and that was a good deal. They made a good budget choice. Nobody should pick one over a GeForce 3/4 though at this point. Lower image quality and more bugs is all you'll find.
Anyway, the fastest AGP cards for 9x are 6800 Ultra and 9800 XT. 9700 Pro and FX 5950 Ultra are the fastest with AGP 2x support.
If any of the games you want to play are OpenGL, I'd go NVIDIA.
I have an ATI FireGL 8800- basically an 8500 in different clothes. Much slower and poorer image quality than a 4xxx series card. But all things considered, for it's time period, when most people were gaming on MX400s and stuff, it was a bangin' card.
wrote:I wouldn't use anything from ATI before 9700 anyway because those chips generally suck for everything compared to a Geforce of similar age.
In PCI you don't have much choice, though. R200 is the last PCI Radeon with Win 9x support. I'd still pass on R200, though for a PCI only Win9x machine as the GF 6200 is common, cheap, faster and supports SM 3.0.
wrote:The Radeon 8500 was pretty decent - comparable to a Geforce 3 (not the Ti 500 though) and was a bit cheaper, and was generally regarded as having better image quality.
You could also buy the 8500LE which was the same as an 8500 just with lower clocks, and there was a pencil volt mod that you could perform to allow you to overclock it up to full 8500 speeds.
using late drivers(as late as 2005-2006) the 8500 would be faster than a ti500, sometimes even comparable to a ti4200(in 3dmark03 etc), but its driver just sucked for too long in its days. 🤣
speaking of theoretical specs the 8500 is equal to a ti4400, both with 2 shaders and 8 rendering pipelines and both clocked at 275. but actual performace is another thing, as we all know. 😎
wrote:6200 will only be faster then fx5700 in ps 2.0 performance.
In PCI the only 5700 is the 5700 LE and that is slower in everything than a 6200. The 6200 supports SM 3.0, so is more useful than a 5700 for running later games. If you're using an AGP motherboard, then you should be using a 6800 which kills a 5700.
wrote:I have an ATI FireGL 8800- basically an 8500 in different clothes. Much slower and poorer image quality than a 4xxx series card. But all things considered, for it's time period, when most people were gaming on MX400s and stuff, it was a bangin' card.
FireGL is optimized differently from Radeon even though it shared the same hardware. It is optimized more for CAD/CAM work than for gaming. It would do games faster if it was flashed with a Radeon ROM.
Yeah a 6200 on PCI would be a decent choice. I'd probably get a new motherboard instead though 🤣
