I don't know Giants: Citizen Kabuto, the other two games should run well even on a PC half this fast with maxed out graphics in higher resolution than what your are using. This should be a triple-digit-frame-rate PC for those games.

thanks for the confirmation. i have a vague memory of playing half-life 2 with my 9600 xt (the card even came with a code for the game) back in 2004 with acceptable framerates so i was a bit confused by how this current computer is running. not sure what the problem could be. my first thought is the board but it's a stab in the dark

Virtua wrote on 2022-12-23, 12:26:

there are a couple of things i'm unsure of. firstly, agp fast write is disabled despite enabling this setting in the bios. secondly - and this may be related to the first issue - my board is not strictly an asus k8v-mx, but a k8v-mx/s by fujitsu siemens, aka the d1711. it was a bit difficult to track down updates for the board but i updated the bios to the latest.

Updating the BIOS to the latest version is likely what caused the performance drop. See this thread for more details. With that board, you want to stick with the earliest possible BIOS version, something like v0112.

i've been installing v2.1 of the unofficial service pack so i haven't tried a windows install without it yet but that will probably be my next attempt.

Don't use unofficial service packs. Apply this Microsoft Security Update CD instead. If you need USB flash stick access then install Nusb 3.3 as well. Don't use the newer Nusb 3.6 because that version messes with Win98 system files.

thank you for the help! will try everything suggested, but reading through the link you provided i see that you've personally experienced almost identical issues to me, including agp texture acceleration being disabled under dxdiag. that was something i noticed the other day but slipped my mind until i saw your post

There is another thread related to this issue - Not Another Ultimate Windows 98 Build

My MSI K8T Neo V has the same problem in Windows 98. Fortunately I never intended it being used as a Windows 98 machine. Solving this issue will need someone to fix VIA AGP driver to initialize correctly. Most likely it completely fails to initialize and AGP ends up functioning as a faster PCI.

i flashed the board's bios to the absolute earliest and it worked... somewhat. performance is definitely better in all games but still not as great as i expected. max payne still has performance issues even at 800 x 600 with anti-aliasing disabled. agp texture acceleration under dxdiag is now enabled but i still can't get agp fast write to work, though i can't imagine that would make a huge difference. i downloaded every bios release from the official site so i don't mind trying different versions but to avoid this headache altogether i may try a different board