Do you want to try Win98 in that ServerSet system of yours when you find time to play again with the Parhelia card? Supposing it works fine, then we would have found answer for a problematic combination of 'gpu with a onboard pci reverse bridge on a P3 system'. Then I can lay my case to rest atlast as my gpu has driver support starting from XP (unless I would like to waste another year trying to write a driver for Win98).

Were there Parhelia Win9x drivers?

I'm surprised that matrox didn't release a Win98 driver for a premium card which was released around 2002(Nvidia is better). Then our best bet would be Win2K (drivers available in their site), provided that you have it. Even the OP guy I mentioned in my previous post had also used Win2K instead of WinXP.

gandhig wrote:

2d bus transfer rate is abnormally low.

sorry about the long wait, I haven't really read the newer posts so I don't know if this is still relevant, but since I did some testing...
let me share a few results I have here;

PC used was a Sempron 1.8GHz (Venice, K8 with 256K l2)
chipset was the SiS 761GX,
Windows XP SP3

Final Reality

Sis Mirage 761GX IGP - 8400GS 512Mb PCI- Voodoo 4 4500 PCI (Windows drivers) - Voodoo 4 4500 PCI (Amigamerlin r11)
2D transfer rate test (MB/s) - 241.28 - 27.04 - 78.47 - 82.38
3d transfer rate test (MB/s)- 254.6 - 30.81 - 68.74 - 72.25

as you can see the IGP have a huge advantage (now to be honest, I don't know how relevant or reliable this 1997 benchmark is running with newer hardware and windows XP), but even the Voodoo 4, using the same PCI slot is much faster, I think there is a lot to do with software optimization, the same voodoo 4 4500 on my SiS 530 board gets around 20-30MB/s, while using a 440BX board it gives me close to 100MB/s, different windows and drivers version also impact this significantly; the 8400GS originally was PCIE 16x card, that's a very high bandwidth, while PCI 33MHz is so limited... so I think Nvidia don't really care about the PCI version, it's not even made by them, but by their partners (bridge on the same PCB to PCIE 1x), also if I remember correctly, Radeons work a lot better with low bandwidth, while using special optimizations like Optimus might change this (I'm basing this on what I remember about the guys testing external GPUs on laptops using PCIE x1 1.0)

rest of results on Final Reality:

Sis Mirage 761GX IGP - 8400GS 512Mb PCI - Voodoo 4 4500 PCI (Windows drivers) - Voodoo 4 4500 PCI (Amigamerlin r11)
3d tests
25pixel (Kpoly/s) - 484.04 - 361.21 - 564.28 - 103.76
Robots (image/s) - 113.65 - 110.50 - 90.97 - 177.94
fill rate (Mpixels/s)- 21.11 - 21.45 - 21.07 - 129.40
City scene (images/s) - 136.94 - 142.26 - 152.66 - 268.52

2d image processing
Radial Blur (images/s) - 245.22 - 247.9 - 248.79 - 251.95
Chaos zoomer (images/s) - 451.86 - 484.84 - 468.92 - 469.15

now let's try 3dmark2001SE
1024x768 - Software T&L (apart from the specified run) 32bit - 32bit/24bit texture compressed (only the Mirage ran with 32bit, the others with 24)
SiS Mirage 761GX IGP - 8400GS PCI - 8400GS PCI Pure Hardware T&L - V4 4500 PCI (Amigamerlin r11)
GT1low - 25.5 - 13.0 - 115.4 - 24.4
GT1High - 13.8 - 7.7 - 37.2 - 9.0
GT2low - 23.0 - 32.0 - 84.8 - 32.2
GT2High - 12.3 - 8.8 - 56.9 - 10.8
GT3Low - 22.8 - 59.0 - 152.0 - 33.5
GT3High - 13.8 - 20.0 - 83.7 - 17.4
GT4 - xx - 13.5 - 35.1 - xx
FillrateSingle - 111.2 - 961.3 - 963.4 - 151.1
Fillratemulti - 195.7 - 2641.1 - 2640.0 - 289.2
HighPoly1l - 4.2 - 1.0 - 10.4 - 3.0
hipoly8l - 3.1 - 1.0 - 10.2 - 1.1
EnvBumpMapping - xx - 49.5 - 58.5 - xx
DOT3BumpMapping - 13.7 - 25.0 - 21.8 -xx
Vertex Shader - 21.0 - 2.8 - 78.4 - 11.4
Pixel Shader - xx - 31.4 - 33.9 - xx
AdvPixelShader - xx - 140.0 - 173.9 - xx
Point Sprites - 1.5 - 0.8 - 37.0 - 0.5

NOW
640x480 - Software T&L* (same thing) 16bit - compressed 16bit

SiS Mirage 761GX IGP - 8400GS PCI - 8400GS PCI Pure Hardware T&L - V4 4500 PCI (Amigamerlin r11)
GT1low - 58.8 - 13.3 - 132.5 - 34.7
GT1High - 23.8 - 7.9 - 40.1 - 14.9
GT2low - 53.4 - 38.3 - 95.1 - 43.4
GT2High - 21.3 - 8.8 - 60.8 - 12.2
GT3Low - 74.0 - 61.9 185.9 - 83.2
GT3High - 37.6 - 21.2 - 95.3 - 37.6
GT4 - xx - 14.7 - 49.8 - xx
FillrateSingle - 211.7 - 1031.7 - 1031.7 - 267.0
Fillratemulti - 351.9 - 2483.1 - 2483.4 - 327.8
HighPoly1l - 4.8 - 1.0 - 10.4 - 3.0
hipoly8l - 3.3 - 1.0 - 10.2 - 1.1
EnvBumpMapping - xx - 49.5 - 58.8 - xx
DOT3BumpMapping - 39.1 - 25.0 - 21.7 - xx
Vertex Shader - 40.5 - 2.8 - 81.0 - 11.7
Pixel Shader - xx - 32.2 - 34.1 - xx
AdvPixelShader - xx - 159.6 - 271.6 - xx
Point Sprites - 1.9 - 0.8 - 57.1 - 0.5

I would really like to have a 8400GS PCIE to see if it looks the same, I mean so extremely slow with software T&L, or if it's related to the low bandwidth from the PCI bus,

the Geforce tests were all made using Forceware 178, the latest version 335 I think can run 3dmark and the results are around the same, but it can't run final reality, the SIS IGP is using the latest driver from SiS website.

I also managed to run the OpenCL test from Aida 4.2 (I think) and I'm pretty sure the memory read/write speed is limited by the PCI bus more than anything

Memory Read 99.88MB/s
Memory Write 61.46MB/s

while my PCIE 16x 2.0 card gives me around 6GB/s
again, it would be great to have a 8400GS PCIE to compare.

I honestly don't think there is much hope for these newer PCI cards to perform well compared to their PCIE x16 versions, but in some conditions it can compared to slower GPUs with higher bandwidth (like the 3dmark test using hardware T&L shows), or DXVA with MPCHC or other similar software for HD videos;

for gaming or general usage... better use an older native PCI solution or specially AGP
what really kills this card for me is that even on "youtube" once you go over a certain resolution in full screen it's just to slow, even the IGP with no hardware acceleration can do a better job.

edit: I would like to add that I rarely tried any gaming with this card, but Doom 3 was running quite ok, considering the slow PCI and the fact that my 8400GS is the G98 model with only 8sps, 800x600 high (no AA) gave me 46FPS on the timedemo, if my memory is right this comparable or faster than what a high end AGP8x (pre Geforce 6800/Radeon X800) card could achieve in this game,

Wow SPBHM, that was one huge treasure you have provided for me. Just wanted to thank you in advance before i go through your post in detail later tonight.

@SPBHM, I bought the GT520 PCI thinking i will be able to play games made upto 2001 atleast, which was the time i got my P3 system. On paper, the performance of GT520 PCI should be atleast equivalent, if not better, to that of 8400GS PCI. I don't ask much, only to be able to play games like Half LIfe 1 and Deus Ex 1. Leaving out the initial days of my frustration after the purchase, my efforts were more about identifying the root cause of this issue rather than actual gaming. I'm Ok with a minimum of 30 FPS in any game and so the fact that i'm getting less than 15 FPS(in some scenes) in the above classic games is really driving me nuts, forget about DOOM3. Seeing your DOOM3 average FPS, the graphics card and the PCI bus bandwidth itself should not be a problem by itself. Further my CPU and memory are more than capable of playing games released in 1998 and before. Something is definitely wrong with my system, but i don't know whether it is a driver issue or a hardware issue or what else. I have tried this card on two different P3 motherboards to rule out Platform/Hardware issue and benched Quake3 and Unreal1 (again old games), but never got the performance as expected.

Initially i thought that the synthetic benchmarks will help me identify the bottleneck in my system, but it wasn't helping much due to the difference in its comparison with an an actual game(involving various variables) and my limited knowhow about what is going on 'behind the scenes'(that too with different games). So it's now more of a trial and error situation for me. If you have the 8400GS PCI still live on a system, can you try Deus Ex 1 or Half Life 1 to observe especially the minimum FPS in their opening sequences.

I must have wrongly assumed that the youtube videos run poorly because of the lack of SSE2 support on my CPU. Seeing that even your Sempron which has SSE2 performs poorly, i wonder what is the reason then?

Sorry if this was already covered but could it be a latency issue?
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=951

Thanks DosFreak, I tried it now and remembered what happened earlier when i tried it before. It does not even list the graphics card and neither the onboard PCI reverse bridge too for me to change it. I don't know whether this happens only with NVIDIA's new graphics cards or those with onboard reverse bridge.

On a separate note, i tried tweaking the latency registers both ways with WPCREDIT for the host bridge as well as the PCI reverse bridge and got nothing much out of it. I can't even edit the latency register of the graphics card in WPCREDIT, probably the nvidia driver prevents me from doing so. I may be wrong as i don't remember if i was able to change it by booting to DOS and running a PCI config tool before loading Windows.

In this line of thought, i was actually suspecting the implementation of PCI bulk data transfers in my VIA chipset more than the latency timer settings. But then again, i found the similar performance issue with my other ECS Mainboard having SiS630 chipset(tested only unreal1 however).

edit1: Changing in DOS didn't work too. Maybe a particular sequence is required to change its value or else it is implemented to display a value of Zero always.

edit2: After googling, i think i found out a possible reason why the latency tool doesn't list my graphics card. Since the card is basically a PCI-E one, there is no latency timer involved. But atleast the onboard reverse pci bridge should have gotten listed.

gandhig wrote:

Since the card is basically a PCI-E one, there is no latency timer involved. But atleast the onboard reverse pci bridge should have gotten listed.

Send whoever programmed the tool an e-mail to consider adding the reverse PCI bridge to their program.

feipoa wrote:

Were there Parhelia Win9x drivers?

I don't remember there being any. I just checked and there aren't any listed now.

(Incidentally - didn't Matrox used to have a forum? I swear I have recollections of a forum...I remember discussions over Call of Duty 2 and Matrox attempting to make Parhelia play with DX9. I'm going to assume they never did. Or I hallucinate/dream about computer hardware...]

gandhig wrote:

@SPBHM, I bought the GT520 PCI thinking i will be able to play games made upto 2001 atleast, which was the time i got my P3 system. On paper, the performance of GT520 PCI should be atleast equivalent, if not better, to that of 8400GS PCI. I don't ask much, only to be able to play games like Half LIfe 1 and Deus Ex 1. Leaving out the initial days of my frustration after the purchase, my efforts were more about identifying the root cause of this issue rather than actual gaming. I'm Ok with a minimum of 30 FPS in any game and so the fact that i'm getting less than 15 FPS(in some scenes) in the above classic games is really driving me nuts, forget about DOOM3. Seeing your DOOM3 average FPS, the graphics card and the PCI bus bandwidth itself should not be a problem by itself. Further my CPU and memory are more than capable of playing games released in 1998 and before. Something is definitely wrong with my system, but i don't know whether it is a driver issue or a hardware issue or what else. I have tried this card on two different P3 motherboards to rule out Platform/Hardware issue and benched Quake3 and Unreal1 (again old games), but never got the performance as expected.

Initially i thought that the synthetic benchmarks will help me identify the bottleneck in my system, but it wasn't helping much due to the difference in its comparison with an an actual game(involving various variables) and my limited knowhow about what is going on 'behind the scenes'(that too with different games). So it's now more of a trial and error situation for me. If you have the 8400GS PCI still live on a system, can you try Deus Ex 1 or Half Life 1 to observe especially the minimum FPS in their opening sequences.

I must have wrongly assumed that the youtube videos run poorly because of the lack of SSE2 support on my CPU. Seeing that even your Sempron which has SSE2 performs poorly, i wonder what is the reason then?

considering what I've seen here I would think some older games could also have a problem, like the massive drop on 3dmark with software T&L shows,

let me start with videos, when I use DXVA it's excellent, CPU usage is almost nothing it runs any HD video I tried smoothly, but if you don't use DXVA it's a disaster, using the default nvidia hardware decode also doesn't help... it runs worse than the IGP (which have no video acceleration for current formats, but have a high bandwidth, AGP style), youtube is a lot worse, it's really hard to get it to work at full framerate, when you have the video on a small windows at 360P-480P it seems OK (but CPU usage looks to high), it even uses hardware decoding, but once I go fullscreen it's problematic, it runs with hardware decoding and redering for a few secs, and than it disables hardware decoding (keeps rendering), and performance is not good, same thing as forcing it all to run on software, while the IGP seems to run (again no acceleration) it fine just with the CPU power at 360p fullscreen, the first time I tried this card with a dual core CPU it was also bad for youtube, while once again the IGP (geforce 6100 in that case) with no GPU acceleration could handle 720p fine, I think it's simply the PCI bandwidth, while DXVA have very low bandwidth requirements, most of video playback requires decent bandwidth I think.
Oh yes, with the P3 it might not have flash acceleration at all, but I would think it could run worse than using AGP cards (also with no acceleration), but... youtube, flash, flash acceleration is just to unpredictable, a small variation in software can have a big effect.

now as I said, basically seeing how poor this card was playing youtube videos made me forget about it for a while, and I never really tried gaming, but I've tried Half life 1, OpenGL 1024x768 and it wasn't to bad, I mean, with vsync it dropped to 30fps in one of the first parts of the introduction with a more open area, so I disabled vsync I tried fps_max 100, the same area was running at around 48fps (lowest I've seen, and for a brief moment), while most of the time it was 100FPS and some areas around 70-80... I don't really know how this compares to a PCIE 8400GS, but I don't expect a 1.8GHz k8 to be the cause of these slowdowns? so it could be bandwidth again, it would be interesting to test the IGP at the same place but... it's so underpowered that I don't know, the few seconds I actually run around in the game felt ok, but perhaps I noticed some small stutters,

if you have a timedemo or any specific area I would be glad to test... what I did was basically to run the opening sequence.
If I can find my quake 3 CD I could also give a go, same for deus ex.

I think the 8400GS pci score here with the default settings on 3dm2001se was 7700 points, which is around what a geforce 3 ti 200 with similar CPU would achieve I think.

Youtube has changed over the years. Several years ago, we could of watched youtube with a P3, or a 1.8 ghz single core. But these days with what they've changed to youtube and what it requires from hardware today, you're not going to see 720p full screen without something around a 2.4 - 3 ghz dual core at least, regardless of what video card you have. Pretty much you're never going to be able to watch 720p smoothly on a P3, no matter what you do or what video card you put in it.

Edit: Also are you guys using Windows XP? Because I don't think there's any drivers that exist to get the GT520 PCI running in Win98se, or are there?

kithylin wrote:

Youtube has changed over the years. Several years ago, we could of watched youtube with a P3, or a 1.8 ghz single core. But these days with what they've changed to youtube and what it requires from hardware today, you're not going to see 720p full screen without something around a 2.4 - 3 ghz dual core at least, regardless of what video card you have. Pretty much you're never going to be able to watch 720p smoothly on a P3, no matter what you do or what video card you put in it.

Edit: Also are you guys using Windows XP? Because I don't think there's any drivers that exist to get the GT520 PCI running in Win98se, or are there?

I remember being able to run 720P youtube with a 2.2GHz single core K8 (also a s754 sempron), pretty high CPU usage but smooth playback (without any GPU acceleration, using the geforce 6100 IGP), but it was back in 2009-2010, but yes, youtube is currently a big challenge for my k8 with the 8400GS PCI, but for DXVA accelerated videos the P3 should handle 1080P high quality videos just fine with one of these cards.

anyway, I'm running windows XP, unfortunately I'm unable to get my 8400GS PCI working with anything newer (drivers can't be installed because the PCI bridge chip is not detected properly or something, while in XP the first thing it does is automatically install the pci to pci bridge driver with no problem),

I never really tried anything lower with this card, but there is no official driver for windows 9x and geforce 8 (2007/2008), even less for a GT 520 (2010/2011), which is another big con for these cards and playing older games...
if you absolutely only have a PCI slot, something like a FX 5200/5500 PCI should work for windows 9x.
also it's probably less problematic, it's not a PCI Express GPU.

edit; another interesting thing I notice, on 3dmark 2003 the 8400GS PCI is getting around 4500-5000 points, but the CPU score is like 10 times lower than usual for my CPU.

the CPU test on 3dmark 2003se is a low quality version of 2 game tests. it was running really slowly... don't know if it's the same situation as 3dmark2001 with software T&L and if it's exactly a consequence of the low bandwidth.

EverythingOldIsNewAgain wrote:

(Incidentally - didn't Matrox used to have a forum? I swear I have recollections of a forum...I remember discussions over Call of Duty 2 and Matrox attempting to make Parhelia play with DX9. I'm going to assume they never did. Or I hallucinate/dream about computer hardware...]

Indeed there was. It was located at forum.matrox.com/mga/

Now it seems they only have support forums for users of their video editing tools
http://www.matrox.com/video/en/search/?query=forum&search=1

Additionally, there was the "Matrox Users' Resource Center", an unofficial fan site, which became "MURC" as people stopped paying attention to what the "M" stood for.

I touched on both with a recent post on MURC, thankfully posted by DosFreak (registration is disabled).
http://www.murc.ws/showthread.php?72893-Looki … e-Interface-SDK
which links to:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061018231735/htt … ic.php?p=101844

Anyhow, off-topic 😀

feipoa wrote:

gandhig wrote:

Since the card is basically a PCI-E one, there is no latency timer involved. But atleast the onboard reverse pci bridge should have gotten listed.

Send whoever programmed the tool an e-mail to consider adding the reverse PCI bridge to their program.

This guy seemed to have done exactly that but for a different problem.

I even "tracked down" the author of PCI Latency Tool, Szymon Modzelewski living in Poland, and I sent him mails to his known addresses but I haven't recieved a reply.

Anyway there wasn't any improvement when i directly tweaked(increased and decreased) the latency register of the reverse bridge through wpcredit as well as in DOS before Windows is loaded.

SPBHM wrote:

considering what I've seen here I would think some older games could also have a problem, like the massive drop on 3dmark with software T&L shows,
let me start with videos, when I use DXVA it's excellent, CPU usage is almost nothing it runs any HD video I tried smoothly, but if you don't use DXVA it's a disaster, using the default nvidia hardware decode also doesn't help... it runs worse than the IGP (which have no video acceleration for current formats, but have a high bandwidth, AGP style),

I think this might be the reason(correct me somebody if i'm wrong) from what I know,
Slowness with software T&L : The poor CPU(which is never good at parallelism) does all the hardwork of converting a relatively small amount of game data (needed for rendering) into a scene again & again and transferring this huge amount of now processed data through the poor PCI bus into the display buffer on the discrete card. CPU does the same hardwork in case of IGP too, however the processed data's route to the onboard display buffer is through a high speed bus(AGP/PCI-E). On the other hand with hardware T&L, only the relatively small amount of game data needs to be sent through the PCI bus for further processing by the GPU and rendering onto the display buffer aboard the graphics card. Hence the PCI bus is the limiting factor like you said.

Slowness with Videos in non-DXVA: Here the only difference with respect to the above case is the decoding of video streams by CPU(again which it is not good for) instead of game data processing. Huge volumes of data transfer through PCI bus likewise and rest is the same. I don't have much idea about Youtube/flash videos and will skip that.

SPBHM wrote:

if you have a timedemo or any specific area I would be glad to test... what I did was basically to run the opening sequence.
If I can find my quake 3 CD I could also give a go, same for deus ex

Thanks again for the offered help. I have attached 3 timedemos of half life in this thread Tualatin PIII 1400-S + Geforce FX5900 Ultra Windows 98 build and really nice to know that the minimum FPS you got was 48. I got a sudden dip at the into's first bend opening into an area and right at the end where the radio active green thingy comes up. I remember getting around 13-14 FPS ingame even inside the complex which is when i threw up my hands, shouted enough is enough(inside my head) and stopped playing. Otherwise it would have resulted in an unforgettable experience on the wrong side. I have the steam version of half life(goldsrc) and if yours is not, then probably it won't work. I don't even want to start about Deus Ex the greatest disappointment for me of all games(12 FPS in opening dock scene). However Quake 3 was very much playable and so was Unreal 1. I do believe that if the issue is identified and resolved, it will translate to playable performance in all other games of that era.

@kithylin, WinXP SP2 it is for me. Anyway i have only WinME and no Win98. However i'm tempted to go to the Linux path just for the sake of ruling out OS specific issues with my system combination. The same card works fine(though didn't try many games only unreal and quake3) in a Core2Duo with WinXP SP3.

@SPBHM, I was able to get this GT520 PCI working in my system with Vista, obviously with more poor performance than XP. No driver issues, however

No reservations for me even if it is off-topic in this thread. It won't really matter as it will anyway seem like a long and incoherent essay if i read it again down the road.

I only managed to run the demo1, since I'm using the steam version,

demo1
OpenGL - default

8400GS PCI 1024x768
208.869 seconds 108.317 fps

8400GS PCI 18% core/memory OC 1024x768
179.995 seconds 125.692 fps

8400GS PCI 1024x768 AA8x
344.966 seconds 65.583 fps

8400GS PCI 18% core/memory OC 1024x768 AA8x
295.001 seconds 76.691 fps

8400GS PCI 640x480
134.703 seconds 167.955 fps

8400GS PCI 18% core/memory OC 640x480
121.252 seconds 186.586 fps

I don't get anything near 15fps, and with the overclock, it looks clear that even with the PCI interface you can go higher than this performance, and a GT 520 should be a lot faster than this card on average, now your CPU or something specific from your PC seems to be limiting performance more than just the fact the card is limited to PCI 32bit bandwidth!?

I'm going to attach 2 pictures from the worst part I mentioned earlier at 48fps, but now, I did this run with the card running the 18% OC, that's why it's a little higher, and I also did the same with lower resolution,

but unfortunately I don't think it helps directly with your problem,

also, regarding Vista, your card is newer, it probably uses a different bridge chip, or some kind of fix, if you do a google search for "8400gs pci windows 7", "pci to pci bridge 8400gs", you are probably going to find many users with the same problem I have, and no solution, the card displays videos, but it's impossible to install a driver, and the bridge chip gets a error warning on device manager.

@SPBHM, can you post a report of your windows 7 system generated by the attached system information tool?

Thank the stars that you also have the steam version and pleasing to see your results. Yeah it was the same location where i got the dip. I will have to reinstall steam and half life as i recently did a complete os reinstall, will report later tonight.

gandhig wrote:

@SPBHM, can you post a report of your windows 7 system generated by the attached system information tool?

The attachment siv.zip is no longer available

Thank the stars that you also have the steam version and pleasing to see your results. Yeah it was the same location where i got the dip. I will have to reinstall steam and half life as i recently did a complete os reinstall, will report later tonight.

thanks, this tool can identify the PLX chip and the card/GPU with no problems, but unfortunately on device manager on anything newer than XP it just shows the pci to pci chip with "error 10", and there is not much to be done, the VGA is not even displayed on device manager, and it can't be detected by the nvidia drivers.

back to XP;
I should mention that 3dmark05 acts just like 03, game tests are OK, but CPU tests (lower quality versions of the game tests) also run at less than 1fps with results 10x lower than expected for my CPU.

also found this CUDA tool to test bandwidth
http://forums.evga.com/tm.aspx?m=1972266

it gave me
average HtoD bandwidth in MB/s: 61.501908
average DtoH bandwidth in MB/s: 99.921296

(and failed for the last part)

SPBHM wrote:

thanks, this tool can identify the PLX chip and the card/GPU with no problems, but unfortunately on device manager on anything newer than XP it just shows the pci to pci chip with "error 10", and there is not much to be done, the VGA is not even displayed on device manager, and it can't be detected by the nvidia drivers.

Mine is a Pericom chip. Assuming that the default win7 driver(pci.sys) is sufficient for your PLX chip(couldn't find much in their website, atleast the pericom website had FAQ section), then only the bridge vendor can do something about the code 10 error. Chances are however remote to get any meaningful support from them. But I'm sure that if that is resolved, your graphics card will get detected and drivers will get installed.

SPBHM wrote:

3dmark05 acts just like 03, game tests are OK, but CPU tests (lower quality versions of the game tests) also run at less than 1fps with results 10x lower than expected for my CPU.

I didn't test with 3dMark05 but with 3dMark06 and yeah the CPU tests were terrible compared to a slide show even, something around 0.09 FPS. Even a Core2Duo E7500 scored only 0.83
For some reason, the cuda tool didn't run on my system. I found similar tools and their results on my system are in the previous pages of this thread. I guess we shouldn't read much into these synthetic benchmarks.

I installed HalfLife1 and the lowest i got was 21 FPS standing still(snapshot attached) inside the office complex till now. The lowest i got in the intro was 32 FPS. If your Sempron 1.8GHz platform gets 48 FPS, then it seems that my P3 850MHz platform getting 32 is normal. It's only that the overall gameplay is somewhat jerky though it doesn't look like stuttering. If only someone can confirm that a P3 850 MHz coppermine @100 FSB with PC133 3-3-3-6 timings will not go below 30 FPS at any point in HalfLife1(other than during loading, obviously) with a decent native PCI/AGP graphics card (Voodoo or Geforce FX5500/6200) on a VIA Chipset motherboard!!!