Radeon 8500 and 8500LE are both contemporary and great performers. The 8500LE has later been rebranded as a Radeon 9100, so you can get that as well. If you don't want time matching hardware you can go for a Radeon 9600PRO/XT (NOT SE) for better resolution/framerate, though with Win98 you won't get DX9.

For something that is easy to find and cheap, something from the 9000 series. 9200 or 9250 or something like that. Avoid any SE or LE versions though 😀

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

For something that is easy to find and cheap, something from the 9000 series. 9200 or 9250 or something like that. Avoid any SE or LE versions though 😀

9200/9250 are cut down 8500/9100 cards with half the Vertex Shaders and TMUs - they are fairly slow compared to their full counterparts I would greatly advise steering clear of 9200 parts. For the price of nearly extra nothing you can buy a 9600PRO/XT instead if you can't find a proper 8500/9100..

I can't agree with that. A 9250 does 100 FPS in Quake III at 1280 x 1024 with a decent CPU. Regarding price and availability, that depends on where you live, but at least from my end, the 9200 cards are very easy to find and cheap, whereas 8500 cards are getting rarer and cost a premium.

Anything faster the Pentium III is likely going to hold things back also.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I can't agree with that. A 9250 does 100 FPS in Quake III at 1280 x 1024 with a decent CPU. Regarding price and availability, that depends on where you live, but at least from my end, the 9200 cards are very easy to find and cheap, whereas 8500 cards are getting rarer and cost a premium.

Anything faster the Pentium III is likely going to hold things back also.

100fps in Quake3 is good enuff for me!

If you want the machine to be sort of period correct, find a radeon 7500, or even a 8500. If you want cheap and easy, a Radeon 9000 / 9200 / 9250 will do just fine.

I think you guys are way too ahead in terms of GPU.

Pentium-3 800 FCPA was released Dec 1999.
Radeon 8500 was released Oct 2001.
Radeon DDR (original R100) was released April 2000. So that would be the "most" period correct GPU. But due to its relative rarity, one could go for the much cheaper Radeon 7500 (RV200) or Radeon 7200 DDR (rebrand). The most irritating thing is actually finding a DDR version, since it sometimes wasn't explicit on the board. Avoid the Radeon 7000/VE DDR, as it is 64bit wide memory (so the same as 128bit SDR). If you're buying on eBay or locally, you can tell by searching the text on the memory.

Don't forget the all-in-wonder cards. You can usually find 32mb or 64mb 7000 or 8000 series cards for cheap. Just Google the memory specs for DDR vs SDR, as previously advised.

for Era correct its a Rage 128 Pro or Rage Fury Max, but I could also see a RAdeon 64 DDR paired with it

gaming target ?
If it should be ATI, then R9000 passive, if it should be NV, GF3-Ti200 passive. I would add a V2-SLI in this setup 😀

Yeah what games do you want to play? ATI cards are sometimes a very poor choice. They lack compatibility with some old D3D features and have major problems with some OpenGL games because developers preferred 3dfx and later NVidia. And that was partly because ATI drivers did suck back then.

Radeon 8500/9100 aka R200 is also a particularly buggy GPU. Its drivers tended to always be two steps forward one step back. Very quirky. Anti aliasing tends to not work right. Not the prettiest texture filtering either. Low quality anisotropic filtering that doesn't work with trilinear filtering so you see mipmap transitions. 9000/9250 aka RV2x0 are a mix of minor additions and removals with cost reductions. Aimed at budget and notebook market. Any R300 era card is a major jump in image quality. Same game compatibility issues though.

I have not run the gamut of that-era games, but I've found that ATI cards with the latest drivers (that came out years after their release) are quite stable and most of the compatibility issues have long been ironed out. But they still lack in OpenGL performance compared to their Nvidia counterparts of the era.

For games developed on 3dfx (even if it is OpenGL/D3D), it's just better to run them on a native 3dfx card.

I LOVE Matrox-Cards, but for a P3/800 with perhaps a Voodoo, you need some PS in Hardware, so no good advice for a matrox in that area.

I would agree your better off with a Geforce, Riva, or Voodoo for that era of games

If ebay is an option, you can get FireGL 8800 quite cheap. That's 128mb Radeon 8500 with higher default clocks.

Also the Radeons before the R300 chips have very flaky DVI. With the 7500 and 8500, I can't even get an image outside of Windows with my 1920x1200 monitor. Just a corrupted image during boot for a moment sometimes. Once the ATI Windows driver loads things seem ok.

In the NVidia camp this was ironed out by GeForce 3 (except some cheaper FX 5200 cards).

To elaborate on ATI drivers...

They lack support for some old D3D features like table fog and palletized 8-bit textures. These are "sort of" 3dfx related features that were part of D3D back then. Other vendors may have had native support or they did some emulation/translation. If they are missing it breaks some old D3D 3-5 games. Shadows of the Empire for example won't have any fog. With the original R100 Radeon there was a registry hack to unofficially enable fog table. ATI didn't care to officially support it. NVidia supported fog table until GeForce 7 and palettized textures to GeForce FX.

The OpenGL problems are another issue. ATI did not have quality OpenGL back then and developers just developed for NVIDIA who had the most marketshare and better drivers. So you have stuff like Bioware OpenGL games using NVidia extensions and just being poorly tested with ATI cards. KOTOR and KOTOR2, and Neverwinter Nights will give you some examples. Missing effects and crap performance. KOTOR and KOTOR2 each work best with one specific Catalyst release each. Catalyst 4.2 for KOTOR. I think KOTOR2 likes Catalyst 4.11. These get you all effects IIRC.

Quake based games usually run fine though. I'm sure ATI made sure those worked well because reviews always benchmarked them.