First post, by evoportals
I don't understand all the hate for the Nvidia FX series. The FX5600 and FX5900 are both fantastic cards for Windows 98. After hours of research the only faults the cards really had were bad anisotropic filtering at the "high performance" mode setting which nobody ever used anyway. The "performance" and "quality" anisotropic filtering modes were equality as good as ATI's. Sub-par DirectX 9 performance, but again, it's irrelevant since nobody ran anything DirectX9 in Windows 98 back in the day. The FX series had equality as powerful DirectX 8 performance as ATI.
I think the real gems here are the FX5600 and FX5600 Ultra. Both support fog table and 8bit textures. Unlike the FX5700, both these cards can use the "more retro game compatible" 45.23 driver. The FX5600 models run cooler and use less power than the Geforce 4 TI series and have superior AA and filtering. My entire system running an Athlon 64 3200 socket 754 "Venice" cpu, 512mb ram, SSD, and FX5600 uses only 50 watts from the wall at idle, and 90 watts when running 3Dmark2001 and that is with a crappy PSU with an 80% efficiency rating. Calculating it, all the components only use 40 watts at idle and 72 watts running 3Dmark2001.
I highly recommend the FX5600 and ultra version for Windows 98 and games up until around 2002.