I've read that Xbox's NV2A is pretty bottlenecked by the unified memory architecture. Just think how it has similar bandwidth to nForce2 but nforce2 only has a GF4MX.

X-wing Alliance have broken every text font when using anything never than FX line of cards.

I've been messing with GeForce FX 5900 and GeForce 6800 on a KT333 and 98SE for the past week or so.

The best driver for 6800 seems to be 81.98. 61.76 BSODs on boot(!!) and 77.72 crashes games a lot. With the FX series I've been using 45.23, but the 5900 seems less troublesome than the 6800 overall.

I also noticed GeForce FX that has a more apparent 16-bit error diffusion dither than GeForce 6. This can be seen as both a positive and negative since it is noisier but it also might appeal to you in old games.

For those of you asking "Why a GeForce 6 in a Win9x box?", in my case, it's because I wanted a 98SE/XP dual-boot machine that could hold its own in 2004-era titles (think Far Cry, Doom 3, Half-Life 2) while still having backwards compatibility and being able to maintain 60 FPS in older games even when running at 1600x1200. (I can't stand low framerates, and I know even late Win9x games like Unreal Tournament are extremely demanding for the time.)

A GeForce FX would have seriously compromised performance for anything Shader Model 2.0-based, which was becoming quickly adopted in 2004 onward. That's why I'm not using one in my main retro rig, along with the 6800 Ultra generally being twice as fast, SM 2.0 or not.

However, I did go and pick up a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra from a local computer store just to find out these alleged incompatibilities for myself. Would have went with a Radeon 9800 Pro or XT instead because those don't suck at SM2.0, but issues with ATI cards and older games are widely documented here, especially with OpenGL on non-Quake-engine games.

Just gotta slap that FX 5950 into my Athlon XP 3200+ rig and put that against my Pentium 4 3.2E/GeForce 6800 Ultra setup for some side-by-side testing...

I haven't run into the palettized texture issue because I don't play any of the games. But it seems like 6800 doesn't like my KT333 board very much.

I don't really have any interest in playing Shader Model 2 games on old hardware. Maybe just experimenting occasionally. It's entertaining to see how poorly a big hot 5900 Ultra runs them.

I admit, I don't have a KT333 or any other VIA-based board to cram that 6800 Ultra into and find out if there are compatibility issues or not.

I have put it in an nForce2 Ultra 400 board (Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe) and an 875P board (BCM BC875PLG), and have had no issues in both cases.

As for running SM2.0 games on period-appropriate hardware, I suppose it's the nostalgia of it all, even though those games usually don't have compatibility problems on modern hardware that runs them much, much better. That was the height of the time when I really followed up on new PC hardware that would do justice to the likes of those three games I mentioned (Far Cry, Doom 3, Half-Life 2), though I wouldn't actually get to build that new gaming computer for myself 'til the end of 2007.

Good thing I waited, though...the Q6600 and 8800 GT stomps all over the Athlon 64 and 6800 Ultra I used to dream of back then. Now I'm just waiting on Haswell and Maxwell to hit the market and do the same thing so I can actually justify a whole new desktop after five years...too bad that new desktop still won't run the older games I need that P4/6800 box for.

I did say 81.98 + 6800 + KT333 works fine. I also think Win9x and its flakyness may be part of the cause of issues as usual. There's no doubt 6800 is a great card and works fine on NV and Intel chipsets.

You're right, 8800GT is a lot faster. That is more what I would consider the ideal D3D9 card.

Speaking of 8800 GT being the D3D9 ideal, I want to know if later cards have even more regressions for older games.

There are a few issues a friend's build with a GTX 460 had that my 8800 GT system didn't:

-The installers for Fallout 1 and 2, along with some FMV trailers, had this "color tooty-fruity" probem, as one of my friends likes to call it. Everything looks rainbowed and wrong.
-Descent 3 has an incorrectly-rendered reticle for some reasons. Pretty sure it affected both D3D and OGL renderers.

It's bound to only get worse from there...

Could be due to the OS used as well. The color problem is known to happen with AoE 2 on Windows 7.

That doesn't explain it when both computers ran Windows 7, though.

Undoubtedly it's a driver thing.

GeForce 8 actually had very poor backward compatibility early on. I remember Jedi Knight was broken. They never did implement 16-bit color dithering so such games still look awful. Radeon HD is the same way.

But game visual behavior varies across even period-correct cards. Usually if you want it to look as intended, pick a Voodoo card, otherwise hope for the best.

What we need is one whole rig for every two years of gaming! 🤣 😈

Personally I prefer XP for my retro gaming and haven't ran into too many issues that are game breaking. I don't miss the days of 98 and ie6 bsod....

Just try running Heavy Gear II or MechWarrior 2: Mercenaries with the MeX client installed reliably on XP. Those games are notoriously finicky, and it only gets worse with more modern computers. They only seem to run stably when booted into 98SE.

The other incentive for booting into Win9x, of course, is A3D. Aureal didn't survive long enough to produce solid 2000/XP drivers, and I intend to find out if the real difference with A3D back then was the wavetracing...or Aureal being smart enough to use a binaural HRTF mix long before the other sound card manufacturers thought to embrace it.

(Fortunately, I don't know of any DS3D + EAX-based games from the Win9x era that have issues with XP or later, which means I can just use my X-Fi cards and CMSS-3D Headphone to much the same effect.)

That is why I had plenty of dedicated rigs so that I wouldn't have to deal with os incompatibilities but those rigs are sadly gone now.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

(Fortunately, I don't know of any DS3D + EAX-based games from the Win9x era that have issues with XP or later, which means I can just use my X-Fi cards and CMSS-3D Headphone to much the same effect.)

I've found with at least SBLive that EAX behaves differently in XP than on 98 with the VXD drivers. I noticed because NFS3 had EAX reverb problems.

A3D has cost me many hours of hair pulling too though. The A3D API and the drivers aren't stable with some games.