The current setup seems great.

Geforce 4 is a very good DX8 card and I don't think it breaks DX7 compatibility.

With the sound card you might be best off going with an Audigy, but I'm not entirely sure. Depends on when the X-Fi came out.

Not sure what the ultimate would be; but mind is fairly representative of what many gamers used up until the DX9 era:

Athlon XP 2500 Barton
Nforce 2 Ultra 400 Mobo
2GB DDR 400
Geforce 3/Ti

You could play any DX7/8 game mostly error free. Driver updates tended to screw things up later on after DX9 came out; breaking compatibility. This made for some really comfy 2K/XP gaming for years.

For DX7 there's the Geforce4 MX 4000. Think of it as a Geforce2 Ultra Ultra.

I'm not too hung up on "period correctness" when it comes to the CPU. Personally, there's nothing wrong with a little more CPU to feed a graphics card. The biggest concern I have with this setup is the video card and matched drivers.

Would for instance a fx5900 be a better match for maxing out dx7/8 games with the right drivers and without actually installing dx9 on a particular machine? Or would keeping something designed for dx8 be the better pick? The newer cards were built to support the features that dx9 brought to the table, but does that mean they sacrificed something for older games?

I'd say your current build looks pretty good for DX7/8; a GeForce FX would also be a fine choice, and may be faster for a few DX8 titles (I'm thinking a 5800-5950 should be better for Morrowind than a 4600/4800 but it isn't like one is required over the other). I don't think they really started killing backwards compatibility until the move to USM/DX10 (like GF8800); not that they're entirely "broken" or anything (drivers + OS choice plays a role in backwards compatibility as well).

If you're going to make it a guide article, however, I wouldn't tie to a specific GPU or CPU model - not only does it have the potential to artificially increase demand for that one model, but it may cause confusion for people; any GeForce 4 Ti or higher-spec GeForce FX should be very suitable, just like the Radeon 8/9 cards should be very suitable.

What about the ultimate DX6 rig?

feipoa; with 1900+ posts, shouldn't you know better than to hijack someone else's topic? 😉

Anyway. Seeing as the original WinXP came with DirectX 8, I'd imagine socket 939 or 775 would be the ultimate.

@leileilol; have you compared the specs of the MX 4000 to the 2 Ultra? The MX 4000 doesn't even come close, It's a budget card!

Apparently not! I suppose I felt an extension to DX6 was worthy of interest, or I would have not commented.

Ultimate DX6 would include a Rage 128 Ultra 64MiB AGP, Riva TNT 2 Ultra 32MiB AGP or MatroX G400 MAX 32MiB AGP and a 2000+ MHz Pentium 4 or Athlon XP.
But that's just my opinion.

What about Kyro II 64MB AGP? That's as good as a DX6 card and has excellent ordered dithering for the 16bpp-only games.

Forgot about that one.

Heh, ultimate dx6 was going to be a separate thread. Personally, I've got a p3 933 with a voodoo5 as my dx6 machine.

leileilol wrote on 2014-04-02, 04:55:

For DX7 there's the Geforce4 MX 4000. Think of it as a Geforce2 Ultra Ultra.

I currently use such a card (MX-4000 64MB PCI). I don't know what memory-interface it uses,
everst tells me it has 32Bit memory interface but the card is fast in a lot of games, I think it has 64Bit memory interface, but I am not sure.
Detonator 6.32 is recommended for Win9x/DX7 but MX4000 is not supported before 54.xx I think.
I am not sure if I stick to that card, my Matrox PCI-G550 32MB has arrived today, I will have to test it..

The only card that gave me a smooth experience was that MX4000 but I am thinking about an NVS 280 PCI as well.

- (PCI) MX4000 supports TnL in hardware and it also supports S3TC !, (native drivers for Win9x/2k/xp/linux/amithlon ; (no EMBM, no win3x erhaps patched wfw-drivers work), no OS/2)
- (PCI) G550 supports EMBM, no TnL in hardware, no S3TC. (native drivers for OS/2, Win9x/2K/xp/linux, amithlon); (no drivers for Win3x; perhaps patched wfw-drivers work)
- (PCI) Radeon 7000 supports EMBM, S3TC, don't know about TnL yet. (native drivers for Win9x/2K/xp/linux, amithlon (but not preffered), (no drivers for Win3x but WFW 256color drivers work)

G550 PCI is not a bad card. Win9x driver does not recognize it, because it's the AGP Version with a bridge-chip but installing manually does work.
As I said normal textures and colors are best on G550, but overall performance is not so good. MX4000 is a lot faster and supports TnL and S3TC, this combination is more interesting to me than EMBM.

What do you think about this?