I ordered a new old stock Asus V7700Pro (OEM, AGP 32mb) to replace the Voedoo 3 3000 AGP in my Pentium III machine.

When I had the V3 in, no issues whatsoever. I had the FSB overclocked from 133 to 145 so the CPU was running at 950mhz. Nothing was crashing and everything was sweet.

Now that I've swapped over the video cards I've been having some perplexing issues. I'll start from the top.

As soon as I swapped over the card and booted up, straight away I saw that the usually colorful motherboard splash screen (Award BIOS) was greyscale. Same with the bios menus. The Windows loading screen was color, then in Windows (98SE) it's greyscale again UNTIL I installed drivers.

I didn't think TOO much of it, then I started benchmarking. 3dmark99 finished at 1280x1024 resolution - 4679 3Dmarks and 9695 CPU 3Dmarks. I recall getting about 3000~ 3D marks from the Voodoo so I assumed this was all good. I tried 3Dmark 2000 next which failed.

I rebooted, decided to run some games to see what was happening. I ran Unreal (gold) which was -fine- but seemed a bit glitchy/warpy. Framerates didn't look too crash hot... then it crashed and bluescreened with a VXD driver error.

Next I tried out NFS Porsche unleashed - it would crash instantly in the main menu after hearing a bit of sound. I googled this issue and it happens to a lot of systems out there. I tried to patch it with the 3.5 patch which made things better but only for a few seconds.

So I said f it, and formatted/reinstalled Win98.

I started with some early nvidia drivers, then installed the Vortex 1 drivers and NEC usb/usb storage driver 3.3 and the VIA chipset drivers from a CD. Once it was all up and running I tried out NFS porsche again - same issue! I tried the update, same problem.

Stressing out, I tried a whole bunch of motherboard settings in the bios, nothing seemed to change anything.

I saw that I was running on a potentially older BIOS on the mobo so I updated to the latest one I could find (7vba2001 to 7vba2aa7) - I thought this was the ticket to success because all of a sudden the colors came back to the boot screens... but no. Porsche was still crashing and after the inevitable reboot, greyscale was back.

So I went to bed after screwing around for 6 hours or so and then when I got back home last night I started over again.

On this boot with a clearer mind, I saw that AGP was using IRQ 11 and same with my sound card... so I swapped PCI ports on the sound card, it became IRQ 10. I felt this could help. Considering the amount of driver screw-around I had done the previous night I formatted and started AGAIN.

Install Win98, Installed USB card/USB storage driver/Sound/Graphics... Things were looking great! Before changing PCI slots I could get a max refresh rate of 85hz on the video output, now it was max 144hz.

I ran the benchmarks again but it was scoring a little lower. I tried out NFS:PU again - it all worked!! framerates didn't see too good but hey. I played for a few hrs, then decided to try out Unreal and a few other games to test again. Quake 2 also was working.

Things were good until I decided to look around at benchmarks online to see what other people were getting. I loaded up a video of PhilsComputerLab which was looking at driver release vs performance. My best benchmark in Q2 was 60fps at 640x480 with opengl. Phil was getting 180+. This didn't feel right.

I remembered that I didn't install any of the VIA 4in1 this time around (W98se still installs them by default) so away I went and installed 4.35 (i think?) from the internet - Quake 2 benchmarks jumped from 60 to 130fps. Not nearly as fast as Phils' (he was running a 1000mhz P3 and likely the 64mb Geforce 2 GTS) but still a great improvement. I tried out 3dmark99 again, this time I got an extra 600 3dmark points. Quake 3 was getting like 90fps.

Trying out NFS:PU again - I got into the menus, loaded my save, started to race... BAM it crashed.

I turned off my PC and went to bed. Now I'm at work wondering wtf am I gonna do. I think I've tried everything and I don't want to sacrifice 60% of the card's performance just to play 1 game.

TL;DR:

Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed seems to only work on my GF2Pro 32mb if there are no VIA 4in1 chipset drivers installed. Once installed, everything runs fine except NFS Porsche which crashes 100% of the time. Performance is overall doo-doo without the VIA 4in1.