A guilty pleasure for the early radeons to me are their error-diffusion dithering 😀 Something no other manufacturer seems to do and it brings a psuedo film-grain effect to games in 16-bit color.

It was axed in R300 though 🙁

leileilol wrote:

A guilty pleasure for the early radeons to me are their error-diffusion dithering 😀 Something no other manufacturer seems to do and it brings a psuedo film-grain effect to games in 16-bit color.

It was axed in R300 though 🙁

I agree it is an interesting effect.

havli, I used to have a 8500 as a kid, great card! I still want to get one because of Truform, something to play Homeplanet the way it's meant to be played. I remember 9600 series supporting trueform via software. Do you know if 9800 supports it as well? 😀

RacoonRider wrote:

havli, I used to have a 8500 as a kid, great card! I still want to get one because of Truform, something to play Homeplanet the way it's meant to be played. I remember 9600 series supporting trueform via software. Do you know if 9800 supports it as well? 😀

I still have my Radeon 8500 in a Pentium II 350 box 😀
I have a Radeon 9600XT in an Athlon XP1800+.
And yes, 9500/9600/9700/9800 all support TruForm, but iirc you have to enable it in the control panel (and it could be that they removed the option from later drivers).

I remember problems with Truform on cards after 8500. Performance hit and possibly instability. I suggest getting 8500 or 9100 (both R200) specifically if one wants to play with the few Truform games.

Catalyst 5.8 is the last driver with Truform support. It may work with Cat.5.9 if you use Atitraytools.
Radeon X800-family is the last supporter of Truform.

Uhh.. people are talking of truform here.

This cannot miss

I had TruForm working on a 9800 Pro in Morrowind at one point. It had a really nice effect, smoothing out the angles on giant winding trees and such. It had a huge performance penalty though, so much that I ultimately turned it off.
It did require using an older driver, ATI removed it from later drivers as was mentioned.
I want to try it on an 8500 sometime. I wonder if the 8500 would outperform the 98Pro in that situation.
It appears to me that the Radeon 8500 might have been the ultimate video card for Morrowind, at least prior to the modern era of extreme graphics mods, anyway.
It's disappointing that there's no brute force way to get tesselation back on old games with a modern overpowered system. From the link mirh posted it sounds like there are developers interested in this, so I hope something comes out of it.

sounds like a todo for dgVoodoo/DXGL/WineD3D 😀

shamino wrote:

It's disappointing that there's no brute force way to get tesselation back on old games with a modern overpowered system. From the link mirh posted it sounds like there are developers interested in this, so I hope something comes out of it.

On the contrary, I just believe there are the right resources available for this venture.. but afaik nobody with the right skills seems to care

So it seems these red coloured, Chinese-origin Radeon 7500 cards are really Radeon 9000 cards. It just so happens that mine was DOA. Not surprised. However, I do see some authentic PCI Radeon 7500 cards selling on eBay for obsurd amounts: ~$1000 USD. Is there anything special about these?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/190829886920
http://www.ebay.com/itm/131084697006

I have been having a hard time finding NT4 drivers for the Radeon 9000 series. Do NT4 drivers exist for the Radeon 9000 series? Drivers seem to exist for the 7000 series. Perhaps these 7500 PCI Radeons are so expensive because they are the last Radeons with NT4 drivers?

Those are non-standard 7500s. The seller is trying to play the rarity/curiosity card. They may only function on Compaq / DEC systems.

What is non-standard about them? Proprietary firmware for some OEM's medical device?

They look like they were used in Compaq / DEC Alpha machines. Custom BIOS firmware possibly. Similar to the Mac Radeons, for example.

swaaye wrote:

They look like they were used in Compaq / DEC Alpha machines. Custom BIOS firmware possibly. Similar to the Mac Radeons, for example.

Couldn't you just flash original one?
I mean.. I remember it was damn easy at least that time I tried with my HD 2600 XT

Just for the records (and to shade the stupid pointlessness sensation I have since these testings) I'll post my benchmarks with 3Dmark2000 on a Pentium IV @1.6GHz with windows XP SP3. My Radeon 7500LE 64MB was running with agp 4x and 64mb aperture size

1First Radeon drivers: 6.13.3276.0   14/09/2001  2676
2
3XP built-in drivers:  6.14.10.6462  23/03/2004  2996
4
5                      6.14.10.6517  22/02/2005  3053
6
78.231.0.0        (aka 6.14.10.6601) 21/02/2006  3035
8
98.252.0.0        (aka 6.14.10.6614) 03/05/2006  3035

1 3 4 5

Now, tired of "official drivers" I tried some of the custom ones... and I realized how much those advanced 3D settings can make the difference when you set them to high performance instead of high quality. I didn't actually retested older drivers tbh. I can't even exclude there couldn't have been little different graphics drivers settings since I did not check.

1DNA 3.7.5.2-high       6.14.10.6512  30/11/2004  3530
2
3Omega 2.5.97a          6.14.10.6497  30/11/2004  3538
4
5DNA 3.5.4.12           6.14.10.6497  30/11/2004  3353~3407
6
7NGO(8.263.0.0)         6.14.10.6618  07/06/2006  3036...3031
8
9Omega 2.2.18           6.13.10.6218  07/11/2002  3562
10
11Omega 2.5.36b          6.14.10.6436  17/02/2004  3553

1 2 3 4 5 6

Oddly, albeit NGO is latest ever driver version to date since it comes with catalyst 6.6 (with files dated June 2006, contrarily to official legacy 6.11 with files dated the same of old 6.5 released in May).. it seems it was still stick to in the 3000-ish even after driver settings tweaks.
Speaking of dna drivers (and putting aside their stupid installer that requires .NET 2.0 in some versions) I tried 5.0.7.1, 5.1.7.2b4 and 5.1.6.5_L but even if their inis supported my RV200.. windows could only boot in VGA mode with 4 bit color depth.

In the end I decided to stick with Omega because I liked their integration with windows own display settings and the fact that it installs radlinker that (when I'll have time) should be able to slightly overclock the card.
I'll stick with early 2004 version because I noticed that between 6.14.10.6462 and 6.14.10.6497 RAM requirements seemed 20~25MB higher (and i was to lazy to find the actual driver version... or to find this is just my feeling)

Don't know if anyone mentioned this (didn't seem like it) but that card was actually a Mobility 7500.

You see, I came across one of these cards and I never could get the regular drivers to work and one day the card had died.

I took off the cooler to be greeted with a Mobility 7500 chip.

7500 is what the 7200 should have been, supposed to overclock well, does OK, but is beat out by the comparable geforce2 ultra.

Can't use HyperMemory on a PCI card, that requires PCI Express

candle_86 wrote:

Can't use HyperMemory on a PCI card, that requires PCI Express

I don't even think that the Mobility 7500 even supported HyperMemory.