Neither is particularly desirable but the Radeon card should be way faster. You didn't specify which games you want to use the PC for...

Consider table fog. Radeons don't do that.

Hence my previous comment: if he's going to play DX5 games it may matter, with DX7 games not so much...

Technically you can get table fog from a first generation Radeon but it requires old drivers and some registry editing. I did it once upon a time. There are also Radeon tweak utilities that will do the registry editing for you. But I'm not sure how buggy the result is.....why was it in the driver but not officially supported, etc.

Radeon 7000 has no T&L (so it is DX6 essentially) and is a bit faster than a G400 Max or TNT2 Ultra. So yeah 810 is probably less than half as fast.

the Radeon , but it depends what games you want to play.

although ideally, you would pick neither.

Radeon's good if you want speed with that novelty noisy 16-bit color dithering 😀

well , like I said, neither is a particularly good option , if it was me , I would have gotten a Geforce2 Ultra (or maybe even a Geforce3) , which if I remember never had those issues.

just depends on the games he wants to play really.

Not very good news from what I see ;-(. I found the Radon 7000 PCI card in scrap PC and thought oh good something better then the on board 810. So I did not go out out buy something for the PC.

Now that I talk with you guys and really think about it, I really don't think there is a need for this system to began with the newest title I think I would want to play is Midtown Madness 2 that calls for a 266Mhz PII, and maybe Flight Sim 2000 that calls for a 166Mhz. The 450Mhz with the Nvidia ZX should fill the role just fine. I can't think of any games newer then 2000 that really float my boat.

I suffered with an i810 integrated graphics chip when they were current. It was awful, just absolute garbage. Anything is going to be better than that.

digitalhermit86 wrote:

Now that I talk with you guys and really think about it, I really don't think there is a need for this system to began with the newest title I think I would want to play is Midtown Madness 2 that calls for a 266Mhz PII, and maybe Flight Sim 2000 that calls for a 166Mhz. The 450Mhz with the Nvidia ZX should fill the role just fine. I can't think of any games newer then 2000 that really float my boat.

Trespasser calls for a Pentium 166MHz.....

but do you really want to run that on such a machine

leileilol wrote:

Trespasser calls for a Pentium 166MHz.....

but do you really want to run that on such a machine

Haha! No you dont! I remember testing the demo on my Compaq back when it came out. At that point in time it had the original P166 MMX CPU and a single Voodoo 2. I can't remember much good!

Trespasser runs a little weird even on a Core 2 setup!

Ya I use to have a 166Mhz and tired to run games that called for a 166Mhz, might as give up, It seems that all games prior to 2000-2001 only called for a low end PII, my PII 450 will be just fine!

Well not exactly. There were some very CPU hungry engines like UE1. In those cases even a good P3 might be a bit of a bottleneck in certain situations with contemporary graphics cards but whatever as long as it runs the game fluently enough lol. A PII 450 should be ok until 2000 I think.

With a PIII 850 you could step it up to 2001 and even 2002 with a DX8 card. But then you might run into a big CPU bottleneck with UE2 and maybe other engines too. Stuff like 25 fps in UT03 in 640x480 w/ a GF3 according to benchmarks I've seen. So not much point in that unless you are interested in an authentic bad framerate experience...

I'd say most games that need a Pentium 3 run as well on a modern computer with a few patches (even original Unreal has a DX10 renderer patch). It is really the Pentium 2 and older games that need a retro rig (Glide/DX6 "fell out of fashion" just as Pentium 3 was released).

I am kinda annoyed by people pretending low framerates is a "problem of the past through". I have a better PC than anyone I personally know, an i7 rig with 6 GB RAM and a GTX 660 that runs Metro Last Light, a famously demanding game, at an average of 50-60 fps at maximum detail with everything on full except SSAA in 1600x900 yet the first Crysis from 2007 still falls to 20 fps in every bigger firefight, sometimes even 15 fps. It doesn't even look that great, it still lags the same regardless of graphical settings, while games like Dirt 2 and 3 get me 80 fps. There are just some games that are badly programmed and optimized. I know that there are flight sims from 1994 that require a 2000 era Pentium 3 to run well in 1024x768, but what is the point? It is not like old flight sims have anything really different from the newer ones to offer (unlike about every other genre). There are a million flight sims that run well on a Pentium 2 thanks to 3D acceleration. The biggest oldschool CPU hogs were always software rendered games.

Tresspasser, well, no surprise. Fortunately, it is a shit game, so don't feel that your Pentium 2 rig is "weak", because for most old games it isn't. What I would do to have ANY retro rigs at home right now, right now I have zero 🙁 . You're a lucky man 😀 .

On topic, I'd say the Radeon 7000 is better, but a Voodoo card would be the best. It really opens a new world in vintage gaming.

I prefer to see Crysis as a trailblazer for bleeding edge tech. They probably did the best they could. Trespasser is similar. Unreal. Some of Origin's games. Etc. These sorts of games are always controversial.

Trespasser is awful but under appreciated I think. Everything about it was experimental and risky. Their project management was terrible from what I've read so that's part of why it is a disaster.

Unreal runs playably on PowerVR PCX2, a card older than the game itself. There are not many 2006 cards that can playably run Crysis.

I've read somewhere that Trespasser used methods that would make it very suitable for Microsft Talisman acceleration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Talisman . However, this project got scrapped, and Trespasser ended up using rendering methods alien to mainstream, especially 3dfx cards, including very good ones.