leileilol wrote:

For Unreal on that card try enabling vertex lighting instead to get lighting because it appears the lightmaps aren't even working.

There have been a few cards with this problem. I haven't tried tweaking to fix it because I just want to see if the D3D drivers of each card are good enough to handle Unreal Gold without hassle.

I saw with the G200 testing that Matrox fixed their drivers to work with Unreal Gold D3D. I used to have problems with my G200 with older drivers and found that disabling "multitexture" in the game ini would fix the problem. But this isn't necessary with the final drivers.

swaaye wrote:

These settings might be present in 3DFX Tools too (the stock control panel). It sounds like the RAMDAC filtering can not be disabled however.

More info
http://www.techspot.com/reviews/hardware/voodoo5_part2/

Yes, the "Alpha blending" and "3D filter quality" settings are accessible when using the vanilla drivers. It would have been nice to have a toggle for the RAMDAC filtering, e.g. for comparison.

Thanks for the techspot link!

swaaye wrote:

As you probably know, the original Millennium used to get recommended as a great DOS card. They are exceptionally fast. I suppose that compared to the most compatible cards (S3/Tseng) they are above average?

I remember most german PC gamer magazines being full of praise for the Matrox cards, but when I tried a Millennium and a G200 some years later, I ran into a lot of compatibility problems under DOS, mostly corrupt graphics and jerky scrolling in Mode X games.

5u3 wrote:

I remember most german PC gamer magazines being full of praise for the Matrox cards, but when I tried a Millennium and a G200 some years later, I ran into a lot of compatibility problems under DOS, mostly corrupt graphics and jerky scrolling in Mode X games.

Yup it was the same with US magazines. It was also the same on usenet if you dig around.

I think that people were enamored with Millennium's speed and that it worked at least generally well. It was a good all around card. At the time it seemed that a good DOS card would usually suck for Windows and vice versa, but Millennium was pretty good at everything.

Not to say that paying $400 or whatever it was for a base model 2MB Millennium (!!) was really worthwhile over a cheap Trio64 / ET4000 / Cirrus Logic PCI chip. But as usual the latest high-end tech was exciting at the time. 😁 If they had known that in a mere two years things would change unbelievably they probably would've held off on buying stuff!

Are you going to be doing the PCX2?

TheLazy1 wrote:

Are you going to be doing the PCX2?

I don't have any PowerVR boards. I would to get a PCX2 some day though.

5u3 wrote:

I have always wanted to try out a G400, but never bought one because I suspect this card to be quite bad under DOS. Earlier Matrox cards (Millennium, G100, G200) are incompatible with Mode X and lack lots of VESA modes. Can anybody confirm that for the G400?

I still use a G400 MAX on my Celeron Mendocino and can confirm that it lacks many VESA modes, but Gx00VBE TSR adds most of them, if not all, to available video modes in both DOS and Windows 9x.

Another odd thing about these Matrox G-series cards is that you can add VBE 3.0 support to G200 by BIOS update, but not to G400, because its latest BIOS is only VBE 2.0 compliant. You need Gx00VBE again for that purpose.

review moved to first post

^ I approve 😁
To have it complete 3DMark99 tests, use driver version 3.12.01 instead. Latest 3.42.02 ones gives better image quality, but won't let 3DMark99 complete. Also, using CommandDMA would give it an extra fps...

@batracio:
Thanks for the TSRs! I will try them on my cards.

@swaaye:
Those "2FPS" 3DMark screenshots made my day 🤣

swaaye wrote:

TheLazy1 wrote:

Are you going to be doing the PCX2?

I don't have any PowerVR boards. I would to get a PCX2 some day though.

do you mean "I would love to get a PCX some day" ??? if yes, I have one I can send you as a gift 😊 it is a pcx2/66mhz card with 2 cdrom discs... it works fine but I don't ever imagine me using it... send me a pm with yer address if you want it swaaye!

Just for laughs, throw a FX5200 in that list. 😀

I really need to install every game seen in the slideshows and do some comparing. Have to cheat in some of them (like Shadows)

A game that's barely compatible with non-3dfx cards is Starsiege Tribes which should look fairly basic enough for them. It's PICKY.

I gave away my amazing GeForce FX 5200 64-bit edition. Sorry. 😁 It is a nice 2D card and was way faster for that than what my friend had. How could I have ever foreseen a need for it's 3D "capabilities"? I will probably get it back one day though.

The only FX card in my sacred archive is a 5900 Ultra. 😎 But I'm not going above the GeForce 256 speed level for the retro testing here. Even this card's Quake 2 score kinda messed up the chart with its amazing power! (relatively)

oh btw can you start in addition to GLQuake, use Darkplaces v1.05 Quake with comparing 3d accellerators?

It's way more optimized than GLQuake and might work better on some older hardware. It even works on PCX-2 to an extent. 😀

The current build would most likely not work, which is why I specified the 1.05 version. It's old from 2001 so it shouldn't demand much

swaaye wrote:

The only FX card in my sacred archive is a 5900 Ultra. 😎 But I'm not going above the GeForce 256 speed level for the retro testing here. Even this card's Quake 2 score kinda messed up the chart with its amazing power! (relatively)

take it easy, i don't care pushing my E2160 and 7900GT to over 800fps in quake2. 😁

Trying the Millennium II right now. The speed is abysmal, but there a few surprises. Jedi Knight, Croc and Tomb Raider II run with decent if not good speeds at 640x480. Games like Rayman 2, Dungeon Keeper D3D, Blood II and Half Life though will either not display textures at all or have a lot of graphical bugs. Why won't they display textures though? I remember the same problem happening with Crusader of Might And Magic. Also, I managed to run GLQuake even though the card does not support opengl 😖. Again no textures. MDK II and Oni however do run with fps ranging from 5 to even 10 fps for MDK 2 at 320x200.

I'll see if I can get a few PCX2 shots and benchmarks, I remember using the SGL miniport with Half-Life and it worked great even at 1024x768.
No chance it'll work in the Steam era but I still have my 1.1.0.8 CD 😁

I doubt you can compare the fps with the others though, right now I have a 600MHz Coppermine @300 so it's quite underpowered compared to the one you have been using.

[Derail]
Hey...
If someone were to "drop" the SGL development libraries on the floor somewhere on the internet, could a SGL->OpenGL wrapper be made?

TheLazy1 wrote:

Hey...
If someone were to "drop" the SGL development libraries on the floor somewhere on the internet, could a SGL->OpenGL wrapper be made?

It's possible, but if there's interest and a graphics programmer that has a PCX2 to develop with? Very out of luck. Though with only one supported blending function it can't be that hard can it?

TheLazy1 wrote:

I doubt you can compare the fps with the others though, right now I have a 600MHz Coppermine @300 so it's quite underpowered compared to the one you have been using.?

Keropi is sending me a PCX2 so I can take care of that part. 😀

ATI Rage IIc

// TODO:
// Picture

Notes
Driver: 5.30-C9W-WEB
DirectX: 7.0a
Looks to be an OEM card from years past...
Test system is underclocked for now, but as you will see it won't matter 😁

Test setup:
Asus P2-99
Pentium III 600EB @300MHz
128MB SDRam
ATI Rage IIC 2MB AGP
Windows 98SE

Half-Life
The only 3D accelerated game I own that this would run, even at that it was barely playable at 320x240.

- Ungodly slow, FPS ranges from 6-24 but usually around 8
- Texture warping is visible
- Texture filtering has noticeable quality problems
- Underwater fog does not work
- Visual artifacts (increases with resolution)

Performance test using small demo I made:
Software renderer at 400x300: 34FPS
Direct3D renderer at 320x240: 13FPS

Slideshow: (unordered, bah!)
http://img10.imageshack.us/slideshow/webplaye … id=halfl01e.png

3DMark 99
There was really no point to this, it would barely texture anything unless it was at 640x480.

- Missing textures
- Abysmal frame rate

255 3DMarks

Suggestions, comments, flames?
😁

Well I'm surprised that it can run Half Life that well. 😁 It has been a long time since I've used a Rage II and I remember it barely being able to run Jedi Knight.