Ronin64 wrote on 2023-10-24, 22:22:

I've been looking into the Geforce 4200, but I don't think that will be powerful enough for early 2000s games. So I started looking at some of the last AGP cards like the 7600GT, but I have seen that they don't have some older features needed for some 90s games.

The 7600GT won't have drivers for Win98SE, that's a separate issue.

My general view, which I think reflects the consensus on this forum: the GF4 cards, or the FX5800-59xx cards, will run any 98SE-era game just fine at reasonable resolutions/settings. These were flagship cards in, oh, 2002-3, at a time when everybody was moving away from 98SE.

If you have a game that won't run nicely on a Ti 4xxx, then realistically, it's a game that will probably run just fine on XP. Build yourself an XP box with some early 2010s hardware and... well, that will outperform any 2003-era hardware by a huuuuuuuuuuge margin.

Also, worth noting, these older GPUs are biggish money. You can buy a very lovely XP GPU (ATI 7970, Nvidia 780, etc) for like half the price of a Ti4200, let alone a Ti4600...

For team green a pretty pokey card would be the 6800GT or 6800XT would be possible and they can be had for a reasonable price team red you have the X800XT or X800XL but they would be twice the price of the 6800 cards.

The 7600GT would be nice but I dont think there are any Windows 98 drivers for it. The 6 series was the last for the line for 98.

Ronin64 wrote on 2023-10-24, 22:22:

I've been looking into the Geforce 4200, but I don't think that will be powerful enough for early 2000s games.

What sort of early 2000s games were you thinking of? The GeForce4 series came out in 2002 and should handle anything up to 2002/2003 well enough.

Once you start getting into the mid-2000s, you're into the Windows XP era and should be looking at a Windows XP build.

The main game I built this pc for is Mechwarrior 4 with a Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro, but I was also hoping to play Far Cry. Although I haven’t even checked to see if that will run under 98SE. I’d also like to play the GTA Vice City and maybe San Andreas. I will be playing Age of Empires II as well but that’s not demanding.
Would the Nvidia 6800 run these games well? Also I have a CRT monitor so I can run these games at lower resolutions.

Win98 isn't really the platform of choice if you want to run DirectX 9 games. I think of it as the DirectX 1-7 OS and the OS to choose if you have hardware that only has VXD based drivers. DirectX 8 and 9 are more Win2K and XP territory.

Far Cry would need a GeForce 6800 or Radeon X800 to run well and look best. For example, GeForce FX cards would drop back to shader model 1.x effects because they are terrible at shader model 2. A FX 5900 or a Radeon 9800 are good for about 1024x768 card with it. Radeon 9500 onward actually have superior image quality to NVidia prior to GF8.

Ronin64 wrote on 2023-10-26, 19:00:

The main game I built this pc for is Mechwarrior 4 with a Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro, but I was also hoping to play Far Cry. Although I haven’t even checked to see if that will run under 98SE. I’d also like to play the GTA Vice City and maybe San Andreas. I will be playing Age of Empires II as well but that’s not demanding.
Would the Nvidia 6800 run these games well? Also I have a CRT monitor so I can run these games at lower resolutions.

Far Cry would run under Windows 98SE, but it's not the most ideal. Same with GTA San Andreas. For games from 2004 and onward, I'd go with a dedicated XP machine.

A GeForce 6800 would run them decently enough depending on resolution and settings like AA/AF. As I'm sure you're aware, nVidia dropped certain feature support from that card (e.g. palletized textures). So it's less ideal from a backwards compatibility standpoint with some games from the 1990s.