PowerPie5000 wrote:

Do they have Windows 98 drivers? can you get an AGP 560Ti? The answer is obviously no.

OK let me rephrase it. My GF 6800 Ultra AGP totally OWNS ... bla bla - you get the idea. 😉 Or, just use Windows XP instead (the games you mentioned will work perfectly on XP).

Oh and, please, if possible, do me a favor and do a screenshot of Might and Magic 7 in the best possible quality on MX440. I'd like to compare it to V5 4xFSAA and LOD@-2.

elfuego wrote:

PowerPie5000 wrote:

Do they have Windows 98 drivers? can you get an AGP 560Ti? The answer is obviously no.

OK let me rephrase it. My GF 6800 Ultra AGP totally OWNS ... bla bla - you get the idea. 😉 Or, just use Windows XP instead (the games you mentioned will work perfectly on XP).

Oh and, please, if possible, do me a favor and do a screenshot of Might and Magic 7 in the best possible quality on MX440. I'd like to compare it to V5 4xFSAA and LOD@-2.

I don't have Might & Magic 7 i'm afraid, and i gave my V5 to a friend as i no longer need or want it. The games i mentioned might work perfectly on WinXP, but there's plenty of other games that don't. I'm not using my Win98 PIII machine just to play 2 or 3 games.

I don't think a GF6800 Ultra would work with my 440BX board or PSU 😒.

elfuego wrote:

OK let me rephrase it. My GF 6800 Ultra AGP totally OWNS ... bla bla - you get the idea. 😉 Or, just use Windows XP instead (the games you mentioned will work perfectly on XP).

I admit I am becoming irritated reading your posts. You obviously don't understand the point of this forum let alone this thread. He doesn't want a modernized rig for retrogaming, he wants a restomod rig with era-correct hardware, optimized to play old games.

I have this same thing happen to me on other forums when I say I'm building said project with said OpAmp and want to know the optimal way to configure this or that; I get suggestions to use something else. NO, I want to use THIS. Contribute or stay out of the thread.

Well, the GF4 MX440 is two generations ahead of a V5. So on a direct comparison the GF4 obviously is faster.
In fact the V5 was targeted versus a GF1 and was released late, so the GF2 was already on the market. The GF2 was a rather fast card and at this time already faster than a V5, except at SSAA maybe. The GF4 MX440 is a GF2 core with LMA2 from the GF4 series. So they fixed the main bottleneck of the GF2 series (memory bandwidth).
For the P3 a GF2 would be also fast enough and there would be probably not much difference to a GF4MX.
The main point is, what do you really want?
For DX8 feature level a GF3Ti or GF4Ti4200 or Radeon 8500 would be the cards of choice, while being CPU limited. So do you really want to try DX8 games on the P3? (+better anisotropic filter)
For DX7 feature level a GF2 GTS would be sufficient. GF4MX is also ok, but the GF4MX was a low end consumer card, whereas the GF2 GTS was high end. From software side, this is not visible of course.
Voodoo5 is nice for Glide and FSAA, slower than a GF2 GTS and needs a faster CPU on average. A GF4MX with SSAA is probably also faster.

elianda wrote:

Well, the GF4 MX440 is two generations ahead of a V5. So on a direct comparison the GF4 obviously is faster. In fact the V5 was […]
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Well, the GF4 MX440 is two generations ahead of a V5. So on a direct comparison the GF4 obviously is faster.
In fact the V5 was targeted versus a GF1 and was released late, so the GF2 was already on the market. The GF2 was a rather fast card and at this time already faster than a V5, except at SSAA maybe. The GF4 MX440 is a GF2 core with LMA2 from the GF4 series. So they fixed the main bottleneck of the GF2 series (memory bandwidth).
For the P3 a GF2 would be also fast enough and there would be probably not much difference to a GF4MX.
The main point is, what do you really want?
For DX8 feature level a GF3Ti or GF4Ti4200 or Radeon 8500 would be the cards of choice, while being CPU limited. So do you really want to try DX8 games on the P3? (+better anisotropic filter)
For DX7 feature level a GF2 GTS would be sufficient. GF4MX is also ok, but the GF4MX was a low end consumer card, whereas the GF2 GTS was high end. From software side, this is not visible of course.
Voodoo5 is nice for Glide and FSAA, slower than a GF2 GTS and needs a faster CPU on average. A GF4MX with SSAA is probably also faster.

I know anything above a GF2 will be bottlenecked by a 1.4GHz Celeron CPU with a 100MHz bus speed, but all the extra/spare GPU power can be used effectively for things like FSAA, 32-bit colour, higher resolutions and anisotropic filtering without affecting the framerates too much (as it's mostly done on the GPU and not the CPU). Newer cards usually have better overall image quality too 😉.

I'll mainly be using this rig with Win95/98 games from around 2001/2002 and older (including some DOS games, but might i need to use Mo'slo with some of them). I'll also find another working Voodoo2 or even use a Glide wrapper if i ever play any 'Glide only' games.

Also, the GF2 GTS may have been a high end card at the time, but the newer cheap entry level GF4 MX440 still outperforms it in just about every way when it comes to gaming (as it's essentially a beefed up GF2... That's how i see it anyway 😀).

IMO, a 4200/ 4600 Ti would be a good match for a Tualeron system, or even a 1ghz Coppermine.

imho Geforce2/3 cards are awesome (Quake3 1.30 102.3 fps timedemo demofour - 1600x1200x32 max detail here with an Spectra x21 ti 500) but their fsaa algorithm plain sucks compared to 3Dfx's RGSSAA even with 4x4 samples)

swaaye wrote:

Yeah you really need to move up to Geforce FX so you have access to 4xS mode. It's a hybrid RGMSAA + SSAA mode.

Radeon 8500 has some great SSAA modes but it is such a quirky card.

Is the Radeon 8500 128mb bad? What algorithm does it use to generate aa?I was considering to buy a 128mb card just to see how its antialiasing compares to the ti500's one.

swaaye wrote:

Yeah you really need to move up to Geforce FX so you have access to 4xS mode. It's a hybrid RGMSAA + SSAA mode.

Radeon 8500 has some great SSAA modes but it is such a quirky card.

I'm guessing a Radeon 9500 Pro will also have the same, if not better AA modes than the 8500? But the whole fog issue with ATI puts me off a bit (does it even affect many games?). I'll probably go for a standard FX5600 or FX5700 anyway (not LE or XT) as the power consumption seems quite low according to this old PSU calculator: http://www.silentmods.com/modding/PSU_Watts_Calculator.html.

I could go with a model that uses an external power connector if it plays nice with my fairly generic Suntek 300W PSU (maybe an FX5700 Ultra or FX5900XT)... But the FX5600 is much cheaper to buy and should cope ok with all pre-DirectX 8/9 games (possibly faster than the MX440 & 460 at least). It might even be ok with some DirectX 8 games although i know the FX range is quite weak compared to the Radeon when it comes to DirectX 9.

EDIT:... It seems my GF4 MX440 already supports 4xS mode according to the driver properties, but it'll most likely perform better with an FX card i'm guessing?

subhuman@xgtx wrote:

Is the Radeon 8500 128mb bad? What algorithm does it use to generate aa?I was considering to buy a 128mb card just to see how its antialiasing compares to the ti500's one.

It uses some kind of programmable jittered grid SSAA. It should be as good as Voodoo5. But strangely the 128mb 8500 has the same resolution restrictions as the 64mb card. The performance hit is similar to what Voodoo5 suffers. SSAA is terribly fillrate intensive.

The problem with 8500 is it has weird texture filtering behavior and a lot of game bugs.

PowerPie5000 wrote:

I'm guessing a Radeon 9500 Pro will also have the same, if not better AA modes than the 8500?

EDIT:... It seems my GF4 MX440 already supports 4xS mode according to the driver properties, but it'll most likely perform better with an FX card i'm guessing?

No ATI cards post RV280 have supersampling modes. They only support a high quality multisampling. MSAA does not anti alias anything beyond poly edges though unless alpha test is supported (called adaptive AA by ATI). And this only affects transparent textures. There's no way to hit the whole scene with AA.

GF4MX might be able to do 4xS adequately at low resolutions. 4xS is 2x rotated grid multisampling + 2x ordered grid supersampling. It is a nice effect with reasonable performance impact.

General info about NVIDIA's many AA modes. Some are only accessible by Rivatuner.
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=30641

Something interesting to try is the oft hated Quincunx 2x mode. I think it is pretty nice at 1600x1200 or so.

Logistics wrote:

I admit I am becoming irritated reading your posts. You obviously don't understand the point of this forum let alone this thread. He doesn't want a modernized rig for retrogaming, he wants a restomod rig with era-correct hardware, optimized to play old games.

I am sorry to get anyone irritated. That is not the point. I was just pointing out that the 'era-correct' is not always the best approach. Here, take the shiny new Crysis 3 for example. In 20 years from now, would you *really* want to play it on 'era-correct' hardware which is actually struggling to play it even on middle, let alone Ultra quality, when not even NV GTX Titan can play it perfectly fluently at 60+ fps? How about playing it with a 10 years younger some-kind-of-a GTX 9000 in a 3-screen environment, with 0 dB noise from your intel i13 instead of an overclocked 'era-correct' i5 ?

Even the thread starter himself claims that he uses some advanced FSAA features on old games:

PowerPie5000 wrote:

the GF cards work better with both D3D and OpenGL games... ... I can most old games smoothly with 4x FSAA and anisotropic filtering using a 64MB Geforce 4 MX440...

So, if that is true - why not use a hardware with decent FSAA capable card instead of the crappy implemented one on the GF440? Also, he was mentioning Morrowind in an earlier post - thats an DX8 game and I am sorry to put it this way, but GF440 is not 'era-correct' for that game.

...all of which makes this:

PowerPie5000 wrote:

I could go with a model that uses an external power connector if it plays nice with my fairly generic Suntek 300W PSU (maybe an FX5700 Ultra or FX5900XT)... But the FX5600 is much cheaper to buy and should cope ok with all pre-DirectX 8/9 games (possibly faster than the MX440 & 460 at least). It might even be ok with some DirectX 8 games although i know the FX range is quite weak compared to the Radeon when it comes to DirectX 9.

a very good decision! And it also proves the point of this forum 😀

@PowerPie
The FX5600 may not be fast enough for a bit more modern games (but why would u play such games on a retro machine anyway?), but it will run cool, stable and fast enough with all the eye-candy for anything you throw at it from the older era. Even the FX5200 Ultra is a great card - dont discard it as an option. Radeons of 9x00 series are generally faster, but they arent nearly as backwards-compatible as NVIDIA.

Edit: ... and you will not have the problem of crappy 2D on FX-based cards, so no more duff hardware! 😊

About power consumption of that era:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/dis … 600gt-oc_3.html

GF 6800 (vanilla) - 39 W
GF FX 5700 - 24 W
Radeon 9600 xt - 22 W

elfuego wrote:

About power consumption of that era: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/dis … 600gt-oc_3.html […]
Show full quote

About power consumption of that era:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/dis … 600gt-oc_3.html

GF 6800 (vanilla) - 39 W
GF FX 5700 - 24 W
Radeon 9600 xt - 22 W

I found an old PSU calculator that shows similar power consumption for those cards (amongst others): http://www.silentmods.com/modding/PSU_Watts_Calculator.html

The FX5700 would be a better choice as it draws same amount of power as the FX5600 and is slightly faster... Finding a plain FX5700 (not the LE/XT/SE versions) is not so easy though. The FX5700 cards i do find usually cost more than i'm willing to pay.

I'll be keeping my eyes open anyway for good deals (FX5700 and up)... I don't really care much about DirectX8/9 support although i may come across the odd early pixel shader supported game. I just want good AA and filtering so i can make older games look better and run nicely too. It doesn't have to be era correct, but must have good Win98 drivers and work ok with DOS (and obviously work with a 3.3v AGP 1.0 2x slot 😉).

5600 Ultra might be a good idea too. Or just get a 5900. I use one on 440BX frequently.

5700 is first supported by driver 56.64 which just happens to be the last driver stable on 440BX. So you can't try older drivers as you can with the other FX cards...

swaaye wrote:

Stop worrying about power for your computer that's going to be used sporadically and get a card like FX 5900 so you don't have to compromise.

Don't compromise - get the FX 5900. Never need to worry again about your neighbor pissing you off with lawn mowing, now you have the tool to fight back 🤣

5900 is a nice uncompromising card for our purposes. It's not that power sucking compared to modern cards. Compared to a 8800 or 6970 these cards are nothing in the power department.

The main problem I have with most old cards is the damn fan noise. 6000 RPM 40-60mm fans are not welcome. They usually designed such cheap ass cooling solutions back then. Fortunately I found that sweet Chinese $4 Zalman VF700 knock off on ebay....

Gigabyte just recently put out a cooling solution on some of their cards that has those little old school fans. Not sure what they were thinking...

One can only hope those spin slowly 🤣