Am I getting bottlenecked real bad with this graphics card on my 98 SE PC? Playing Unreal Tournament and Simcoaster seems to have framerate drops, not sure if it's because the graphics card is overpowering the PC or not.
If so should I go with a Geforce 256 or Geforce 2 (Voodoo cards are way too expensive) instead so that I have a consistent good framerate of around 50-60 FPS on Unreal Tournament?
A Geforce 2 or GeForce 256 wouldn't be an upgrade from the GF3 Ti 200. A 64 MB Geforce 4 Ti 4200 would be a nice upgrade, but it may be your CPU that's causing the bottleneck. I'd be surprised if the GF3 driver overhead was too much for a PIII 933 compared to a GF2.
Based on this 2001 Anandtech review, the GF3 Ti 200 was pulling over 60 FPS at 1600x1200 in unreal tournament: https://www.anandtech.com/show/831/10
They ran that test on a P4 2.0GHz Willamette with RDRAM.
An earlier review containing the GF2 and 256 on an Athlon 750 shows that those cards couldn't hit 60 FPS in UT. The PIII 933 is a bit faster, but not much.
I don't plan on going for a pentium 4 so should I downgrade the graphics card to have something that keeps a consistent framerate? Or am I completely delusion and that I should just bump it to a TI 500?
Added an edit above to expand a bit more. What resolution are you trying to play at? Lower resolutions are typically CPU-limited, so if you are playing at 640x480, you could probably go up to 800x600 or 1024x768 with that GF3 and maintain the same FPS. The CPU is likely a limiting factor here.
If you want to try a faster GPU, I'd go with a GF4 Ti4200 over a GF3 Ti500. Cheaper and faster.
If your graphics card is bottlenecked it shouldn't be slower than an older card, it will simply not be much faster in CPU limited situations. In less CPU limited situations, it should be faster with the newer card.
I don't think the CPU limitation would be that extreme with a Ti 200 and a P3 933. If games aren't running well, you probably are just expecting too much of the setup. Remember, at this time AMD's Athlons were usually faster for gaming, and clock speeds were rising rapidly. Games were also getting much more demanding year after year. In my opinion, for maximum performance in early 2000s games I would have a fast Core 2 (or better) to eliminate any CPU bottlenecks. Most people tolerated frame rates far below 60fps in the latest games in those days too, which is why a non-period-correct CPU+GPU would be recommended for consistently smooth framerates.
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.
PIII 933 and GF3 Ti200 are a nice match, a slighty faster CPU wouldn't hurt, maybe a Tualatin, if your motherboard has support for it. Or change the motherboard and the CPU, a good socket A board and any Athlon XP should be faster, easy to find and cheap.
Try Quake 3 on your machine, Unreal Tournament works better with 3dfx cards (glide). If you keep the GF3 try OpenGL and D3D, see what's better, OpenGL should be the best, but it depends. Use the latest patch for UT, I believe it's 436.
If you play a lot UT, then try you need a 3dfx card, V5 5500 would be nice, but it's getting rare and very expensive. V3 3000 is relatively common and you might find one cheap (if the seller is not aware that's a 3dfx card). If you can't find a 3dfx card, then a faster Nvidia/ATI card might help a lot in getting better framerate, but a faster CPU would also help.
If all fails, remember that UT runs without problems on modern hardware and operating systems, try it on you main machine. I have it installed on my main machine and it runs great in 3840x2160, all settings to max, also with high resolution pack installed.
