Swaaye is probably banging his head on the wall right about now... 😜

Oh, hey. Look at that, the article on VOGONS wiki just HAPPENS to have that info. I'm so glad I looked there first...

Ok, that's my fault, I should have gone there first. The factual data is useful, but I was really looking more for first-hand accounts of anyone having issues with this card and older games.

The wiki says D3D5 fog table like issues exist, but are 6 games affected as well?

I honestly just don't know enough about how D3D versions differ, and that's something I'm slowly reading up on.

ATi didn't really have the great driver or software support that Nvidia offered back then. D3D5 games will occasionally not look right/correct/as they were meant to be seen and produce graphical gliches. This also happens on Nvidia cards with newer drivers often.
Not entirely sure on D3D6 games, probably some of them, the newer the better though.

The 9700 PRO's winning card is it's D3D9 performance. On a PIII 933 though that's... you'd better forget it. I'd rather go with a good GeForce FX card on that slow a CPU. They may be dogs in DX9 performance, but they kick ass on previous versions and OpenGL, plus since you'll probably be playing games from 2001 and prior you can enable AF and AA with little performance loss, depending on the game.
I'd go with a GF 5700 or a 5600 Ultra.

Actually, I was thinking of swapping out for a 5900 Ultra or something like that. I don't play anything that uses any kind of DX9 on this thing anyway. That's what my XP or modern rigs are for.

This box will need to be able to pull double duty as a backup for my DOS machine. I'm going to assume that the FX cards have the same amazing DOS compatibility that the rest of the NVidia cards from back then do?

5700 limits you more on the oldest drivers you can try. 5600 and 5900 are supported further back. Could be useful to have that flexibility.

Well, the main trouble with FX series cards - many of them (except 59xx IIRC) aren't fully SM 2.0 compatible. They always calculating the FP as 10e5, not as the minimum requested 16e7.
Except this epic hardware failure - this videocard is the best for Win9x PC. Even GF 6xxx already have some features removed. And ATi is always in the bloody war with the termins "drivers", "opengl" and "compatibility".

You're referring to NVIDIA's evil tricks replacing shader programs with reduced precision "equivalents" that were sometimes clearly uglier but necessary to allow NV3x to perform somewhat well. FP16 vs. FP32 (or FP24).

It's certainly a bad idea to use any GeForce FX for games that use shader model 2. But games like that are best run on modern hardware anyway.

No. I am referring to this.
I have tested my FX 5600 with the included utility. Yes, only 10e5 precision.
The main PS 2.0 application on my Win9x PC is the nGlide.There are glide games w/o WinXp compatibility. And, to be precise, the proper OS for the all glide games IS Windows 95/98/ME...

I've used a Radeon 9600 Pro on my 98 rig for a while and it seems to have very good DX and older game compatibility provided you stick with older Catalyst drivers; the main reason being ATI switched to a weird legacy driver after some point (9.xx?) and it's really messed up. So you have to stick with 6.2. The only issues I've noticed are related to triple buffering in various games and some don't render properly with antialising turned on.

Compared to an FX, compatibility is roughly the same. Like Swaaye said though, you have to stick with older drivers and if you have 5500 or 5700, you're in a bind since drivers for those were released later on (like Detonator 66.xx or such); about the same time as the PCI-E versions.

"Famous" ATi drivers fails:
1) Fogging. Test Drive 5 (patch 1.1), Thief II: the Metal Age. Any game with the table fog is broken.
2) Opengl negative blending. As the example - Epsxe + Pete's OGL plugin.

Lack of table fog really sucks for older games.

And indeed ATI OpenGL is not ideal. Fine for Quake 1/2/3 based games though.

except that skybox clamp bug (black edges)

this occured because of Nvidia assuming clamped as always (which id developed q3 for) however it was ATI who were correct in their opengl implementation

NVIDIA THE WAY IT'S MEANT TO BE PLAYED 🙄

GL_Clamp_to_Edge? We have this.
It was created for the Grand Prix Legends, but is working for any game with the problem.
Another example is GL_SGIS_Multitexture, the only multitexture extension supported by the q2 engine.

Yeah, Nvidia drivers aren't ideal. But ATi fails are like hard truck vs bicycle - much more wheels and so more size. 🙁