Asus Geforce256 with Shutter Glasses.

Would a GeForce4 Ti 4800 be bottlenecked by the board or CPU?

cdosrun wrote:

Would a GeForce4 Ti 4800 be bottlenecked by the board or CPU?

Yep. Big time.

The PII-450 came out in mid-late 1998. At that point, the the Voodoo2 was still very much in its prime, and the Nvidia Riva TNT, Matrox G200, and ATi Rage 128 (in roughly descending order of popularity) were the big contenders for main graphics cards. A high-end system would have used a combination... a V2 (SLI if you could afford it) with one of the three graphics cards.

The TNT2 and Voodoo3 also followed in the early part of 1999 and would match up pretty well to such a system, but any card newer than that is quickly going to start running into CPU limitations. A Ti4800 would just be ridiculous... somewhat akin to putting a GTX680 into a Pentium 4.

Didn't the Rage128 come later like early 1999?

There is *some* advantage to putting in Geforce hardware in a Pentium II. The hardware T&L will definitely help out some 2000's games like Call of Duty.

I was thinking the Rage 128 came out in November or December '98. It's entirely possible I'm a few months off on that though... trying to remember exact chronological order of something nearly 14 years ago can be a little sketchy, plus I never really paid that much attention to ATi at the time anyhow.

As for games like Call of Duty, yeah, a Geforce would probably make 'em run on a PII 450... but why bother? They'll run a lot better on a modern machine. I mean, it's not like old DOS/Win9x games where you really need old hardware for compatibility... post-2000 games will pretty much all work fine (or can be made to work with minor tweaking) on current-gen hardware with Win7.

G400 MAX is a very good bet for Pentium II 450MHz.

If I upped the CPU to a P3 ~500MHz, would DOS games still run properly? Which video cards would compliment that?

As you get faster you'll start to notice some Borland Pascal games will begin to have runtime errors at the start

Would a GeForce2 Ultra be bottlenecked by the current processor?

cdosrun wrote:

Would a GeForce4 Ti 4800 be bottlenecked by the board or CPU?

That would depend on
a) display resolution you intend to use
b) image quality settings you would like to choose

If you want the pure 1:1 retro feeling: Yes, the graphics card is way to fast. You should probably get a Geforce 2 GTS (yes, released 2000, but Pii-450's were still common then) and a couple of Voodoo2's.

If you want to really enjoy older games like you didn't before, you could try and go for a small GF6, like a 6600 (GT), there you'll have the option of using today's antialiasing and anisotropic filtering features as well as even supersample-AA. Add 2 Voodoo2's in for better retro flavor.

In my pentium II rig iam using an Diamond Viper V770 32MB.. I think thats is a TNT2 card.. I think its powerfull enough..

I like Carsten's post.

Perhaps, but one thing to keep in mind about his suggestion is that the overwhelming majority of 6-series cards don't support the 3.3V AGP on a BX board. Supposedly there are some that do, but finding one is likely to be... troublesome, at best.

I upgraded from a 16MB TNT to a GForce 2 MX in my P2 400 which seemed to be a good match, which lasted right through till 2006, GTA3 lagged was quite playable.

The P2b is an awesome board for Win98! depending on what you want to play I’d drop something like a P3 700, plenty of power for any Win98 only game.

I’m not someone who goes for year specific systems. I like the idea that everything waits for the CPU, the CPU shouldn’t have to wait for anything else! So based on that I’ve got a GF4 Ti4600 in my Slot 1 P3 1GHz. The majority of my Dos games are mid-late 90’s only speed issues I get is I don’t get to see time to see the load screens artwork, which is ashame sometimes.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

Perhaps, but one thing to keep in mind about his suggestion is that the overwhelming majority of 6-series cards don't support the 3.3V AGP on a BX board. Supposedly there are some that do, but finding one is likely to be... troublesome, at best.

You're right. I'm usually the guy who mentions this but it slipped my mind. Best to go for GeForce FX and older.

I used a TNT+Voodoo 2 on my P2 400.
Later moved to a TNT2 Ultra.
Beyond that, nothing much to gain.

swaaye wrote:

You're right. I'm usually the guy who mentions this but it slipped my mind. Best to go for GeForce FX and older.

I thought the FX series is too fast

cdosrun wrote:

I thought the FX series is too fast

That's not really a concern. Games won't run too fast. But if you buy an older card like a TNT2 you will be bottlenecked by the video card which is no fun.

It depends on whether you're happy with 800x600 and plain bilinear filtering, or if you want to run say 1280x960 and anti-aliasing+anisotropic filtering.

TNT1/2 don't practically support anisotropic or anti-aliasing.
GeForce 1-2 have both but in limited ways and it's very slow.
GeForce 3-4 support both well but slow down considerably.

GeForce FX 5800/5900 are pretty beastly for running old games with AA and AF. Don't buy less than a 5700 Ultra though because you'll be in GeForce 4 performance territory.