Yup, the diff was amazing going from my 9700 to my X800.

It must be even more so for you.

My next NVIDIA card will be light years above my X800. 😀

I still have my 9600XT which allows me to play everything at 800x600, 2x FSAA, 4x Aniso, 30FPS 😦
Upgrading is not an option because of the rest of my system, which is getting really old now (and running a 1700+ at 2 GHz doesn't help matters much).
But on the other hand, the only new game I bought this year was Trackmania 😁, so I can't justify buying new hardware anyway.

Yeah, my X800 does everything I want with it and the last new game that I played that really pushed my video card was Doom 3 which was like @ the end of 2004.

The next video card I buy will have to pretty much have the performance of SLI in a single card (No I'm not talking about 2 GPU's on a single card either).

Have decent OGL support.

Decent Linux support!

Support DX10 or WTF it's called....although I don't care much about this one since I have a ton of pre DX10 games that will take me forever to finsh.

Not be a heat generating monster of a card.

Not be a noisy beast of a card. (Although I am debating on water cooling for my next computer). Kinda doubt that tho since I don't like messing around with water cooling.

Decent Linux support!

Card that doesn't break older game compatibility! (ATI, shitty OGL drivers and drivers that like to break ddraw compatibility....)

DosFreak wrote:

Card that doesn't break older game compatibility! (ATI, shitty OGL drivers and drivers that like to break ddraw compatibility....)

Wow. No pun intended but your previous posts were just complaints, 🤣!

Now, seriously talking. Could you post some examples of the aforementioned incompatibilities. They could come in handy.

On the other hand, I am rather pissed off that there are just two choices to choice from as far as video cards are concerned, i.e, ATi & nVIDIA. I think both of them suxx big time, but I WON'T PROBABLY BE GETTING and nVIDIA card anytime soon because of their shitty VESA compatibility (broken since GF4 if I am not mistaken). Besides, I truly believe output quality and colours are richer with ATi.

Nah, Ignore my DDRAW complaints. You'll see those very rarely and they can be fixed by simply disabling DirectDraw Acceleration.....for now. I'm wondering how well this will work with Vista. I'd like to compare the games that I was having issues with, with my Geforce cards but I doubt I'll bother....unless the problem increases.

As for OGL I'm sure you know all about ATI's problems there both in Windows and Linux. No sense going over those again.....

As far as D3D compatibility ATI and Nvidia seem about even there....although it's been some time since I tested the games on my list with an Nvidia card. I owned pretty much every Nvidia card since the TNT before the 9700 and had went through most of my games on Windows 2000 and most of Windows XP and compatibility was fine.....but all of that testing was done back before Sept 2002 when I picked up my 9700. I've just done testing with ATI since then. Occasionally I pop in my old Geforce cards and I haven't seen any complaints from users about D3D compatibility so yeah ATI/Nvidia are about the same there.

I'm not really up on the 2D quality between Nvidia/ATI. I did buy a Matrox G400 back in the day and compared to my TNT1 it had great 2D and excellent TV out. The Geforce cards after that weren't that hot compared to the G400 and when I picked up my 9700, I didn't worry that much about 2D/TV Out since my 9700 did everything just fine and the X800 seems to be just as good.

I really don't see how there can be that much difference nowadays as far as 2D/TV Out between Nvidia/ATI but I really haven't given it much though since I don't use TV out as much as I used to and I worry more about other things than an almost imperceptible increase/decrease in 2D quality.

As far as VESA goes....I wish there was a site that lists VESA compatibility/Speed. I do have a couple of Geforce cards laying around and if I wasn't so lazy I could probably load up whatvga and do some testing and post some results.....

Let's see I have:

Tseng ISA (dunno the model #)
Voodoo 3 AGP
Geforce 2
Geforce 3
Geforce 4
Geforce FX 5200
ATI 9700
ATI 9700 AIW
ATI X800

I think I gave my TNT1/G400 away to some friends when I got my 9700, (they needed them more than I did).

I wish Matrox would get off their asses and produce something for the gaming market. The G400 was an excellent card and they were very competive with the TNT generation when they came out. Sadly, I think that's the last we'll see of Matrox in the gaming sector.....especially since I don't see much multimonitor gaming happening with ATI/Nvidia's cards.

The only other company I can think of is S3......buy they haven't really produced anything worth mentioning since Windows 3.x days (S3 Trio!)

Interesting thread... Some thoughts:
- I've got an AGP-based system as well, with a Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB. I've thought of upgrading it to an X800 or similar, but since I'm planning to build a whole new system this year with PCI-Express I don't think it would be worth bothering
- No offense, but I honestly haven't cared about VESA for at least 5 years now. If I wanted to play VESA-based DOS games I'd build an old school DOS rig. More likely I'll just wait a couple more years and play them in DOSBox 😉
- ATI cards are required to output the exact same colors as nVidia cards (and vice versa) unless maybe you're talking about hardware overlays or color controls or built-in TV tuners or something. Same thing goes for output quality - the output of both companies' cards is rigorously tested against that of Microsoft's reference rasterizer to ensure that everyone is providing faithful Direct3D image quality. Of course it does vary a little, but I've seen side-by-side screenshots and I honestly can't say that either looks significantly better or worse than the other.
- I've been sticking with ATI for the past few years because I feel that nVidia has reached its apex as far as quality of technical achievements, and I also feel that nVidia is getting cocky and depending on marketing instead of quality to sell their products. ATI also releases official drivers once a month and has better communication with its customers. I'm sick of seeing nVidia's logo everywhere - why do they need to advertise in games that can only be played by those who already own a 3D card?
- On the flip side, I've had a few bad experiences with ATI's customer support. Also, nVidia got the SLI tech to market first. nVidia is also has a longer history with making 3D accelerator cards and beat out 3dfx.
- I'm a bit on the fence as to which brand I should buy for my next system. I'm not even sure whether I want SLI or not. It'll probably all depend on price vs. performance vs. features/comatibility.
- I think ATI and nVidia are the only companies that can currently afford and have the knowledge to both aggressively research and market new 3D accelerator technology. This may change someday, but for now we're basically stuck. At least there's a choice though, and a good one since they're on a nearly level playing field these days.