aaronkatrini wrote on 2021-02-17, 08:05:

I had a similar experience with a Radeon 4650 AGP. The driver would install fine, but after reboot no increased resolution, and […]
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I had a similar experience with a Radeon 4650 AGP. The driver would install fine, but after reboot no increased resolution, and the card wasn't properly detected in Device Manager. I was selling the card as broken/partially working, but then someone told me about this Ati AGP HotFix driver, installed and the card worked fine after that.

There are a few versions of this driver, one of them can be found here:
https://drivers.softpedia.com/get/GRAPHICS-BO … ix-for-XP.shtml

If I'm not mistaken though, these HotFix driver are only for 3xxx and 4xxx series of cards, so I'm not sure it would on X1950 Pro...

Too bad you hadn't a chance to try 12.3 or 12.4 hotfix 🙁

I had one of those cards, and that issue really put me off Radeon. I bought it initially to play with an old KT7A. Later I ended up using it in a Socket 939 AGP board that I set my mother up with. Running Windows 7, when I installed it I went down the checkmark list for Windows 7, 4650, AGP to download the correct driver from the AMD site, and it wouldn't install correctly. I found a driver for it on the site of another manufacturer of an AGP version of the card, and that worked so I called it good.

A couple of years later I had upgraded my mother's system so I had the card back. I used it in a P4 board I had, and again installed Windows 7. I thought for sure that AMD would have resolved the issue by now, but nope. When you downloaded the AGP version of the driver for that GPU from AMD's site, it would not work. Again, I had to find the older version of the Windows 7 driver from a manufacturer's site, and again that worked. I tried emailing AMD, but the person that I contacted was completely useless. "That card won't work with the newest driver" they told me. But I wasn't trying to use the newest driver, I was using the driver that your website says is the proper one for the AGP version of the HD4650 with Windows 7! They either could not, or would not, understand the issue. I wonder if they ever did fix it?

nd22 wrote on 2021-02-20, 04:19:

6600GT does not stand a chance in Doom 3 at 1600*1200 ultra settings dipping to the low 20s frequently! I know because I tested […]
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6600GT does not stand a chance in Doom 3 at 1600*1200 ultra settings dipping to the low 20s frequently! I know because I tested quite a few nvidia cards in Doom 3:
1. geforce 5700 ultra - abysmal performance even at 800*600. I suspect all FX series suffers greatly in directx 9.0 titles.
2. geforce 6600 gt - I got Leadtek anniversary edition that has the "correct" GPU/memory clocks - 500/1000 however only 128mb of ram which is inadequate in this game. It runs OK at ultra settings 1024*768 but not 60 fps locked!
3. geforce 6800 ultra - first card that can run Doom 3 at 1600*1200 without dropping below 30 fps. AA is out of the question and the experience can get pretty choppy in RoE when you have to fight multiple enemies at once at 30 fps!
4. geforce 7800 gs - from Leadtek, first card that can run Doom 3 at 1600*1200 ultra settings with mostly 60 fps. The experience is slightly better then with 6800 ultra but not quite there!
5. geforce 7900 gs - from Gainward, this one has 512mb of ram and it really helps! First card that can use AA 2X without severe performance drops; without AA 60 fps locked at 1600*1200 ultra settings. Like all geforce 6 and 7 series AA is the Achilles kneel - 16X AA brings performance down to the 20s!

So it's the search for that elusive 1600x1200 Doom3 performance.

The game is actually fairly optimized for the FX series. In that it does some advanced effects in ways that don't absolutely cripple Geforce FX. They avoided shader programs for some things and instead used lookup tables in textures. And the high end Geforce FX cards are pretty good at stencil shadowing. Nvidia kept improving on their performance with this kind of rendering and by Geforce 8 they had reached rather insane levels of Z fillrate. That's what you need for your Doom3 enjoyment. 😀

swaaye wrote on 2021-02-09, 01:40:

The ATI bridged AGP cards were super troublesome.

Back when I bought my HD4670 AGP (when it was still fairly new) I remember being surprised that the package didn't even contain a driver disk.
It's unlikely that this was an incident because a friend of mine bought the exact same card and also didn't have a driver disk included in the box.
We managed to find a correctly working driver for it though and it basically worked without much trouble. It wasn't much faster than my 7600GS though but that was probably the AXP Barton 3200+ holding it back.

I don't remember what driver I used for that card though, but I probably still have it buried somewhere.

And I've always found it weird that these bridge chips were usually just bare, often with that pink stuff around it while the Nvidia ones I've seen usually have the bridge chip sinked.

Most of Rialto chip problems could be traced down to HD series cards, which were never meant to be used on AGP.

swaaye wrote on 2021-02-20, 16:31:

So it's the search for that elusive 1600x1200 Doom3 performance.

The game is actually fairly optimized for the FX series. In that it does some advanced effects in ways that don't absolutely cripple Geforce FX. They avoided shader programs for some things and instead used lookup tables in textures. And the high end Geforce FX cards are pretty good at stencil shadowing. Nvidia kept improving on their performance with this kind of rendering and by Geforce 8 they had reached rather insane levels of Z fillrate. That's what you need for your Doom3 enjoyment. 😀

All tests are conducted at max settings including all advanced settings turned on with the exception of V-Sync and AA which was never turned on because of the large performance hit! Until 7900GS I never encountered an AGP card that could run Doom 3 at 1600*1200 60 fps locked!
As a side note I have a request if it is possible and not against forum rules: I have downloaded Powerstrip 3.9 and installed however there is no way I could purchase it legally as it is no longer offered by the seller; does anyone know how to buy it or if it is free, does anyone has a license? I am sorry if I broke the rules!

For Nvidia cards, just use RivaTuner, which is completely free. If you still need Powerstrip - just use crack. Nobody cares at this point anyway.

Quick update:
I tested last night on the most powerful AGP system I got 7900gs because I suspected that the original system limited the card from showing its true performance! I did not bother with geforce 7800gs, 6800 ultra and so on because they were already showing poor performance in Doom 3 at 1600*1200 max settings - AA 2x.
Original system: CPU: clawhammer 3700; MB: Abit KV8 pro; RAM: Corsair 2*1gb CAS2 with silver heat-spreaders; HDD: period correct Maxtor 200gb mechanical drive from 2005; OS: Windows XP SP3 POS2009 fully updated.
Updated system: CPU: Athlon 64 X2 4800; MB: Abit AV8: RAM: Corsair 4*1gb CAS2 3500LL pro with led lightning; HDD: period correct Samsung 200gb mechanical drive from 2005; OS: Windows XP SP3 POS2009 fully updated.
Result: 7900gs maintains 60fps at all times at 1600*1200 max with AA 2x. With AA 4x there are dips in large areas or where there is a lot of smoke on the screen to the high 40fps. AA 8x and the game stutters severely! AA 16X - slideshow!
Conclusion: geforce 7900gs is already showing its full potential on socket 754 platform with a single core CPU in this particular game.