I have a GeForce 8500GT PCI in my Prescott P4 system.

Quick update but I'll open a new thread with more detailed analysis.

Test system.

GA-8IPE 1000 pro (Socket 478, 865 chipset).
3.2GHZ Prescott
512meg DDR400
Windows 98SE

3DMARK 2001SE

Geforce FX5200 128meg/128bit(250/400) - 6,275
Geforce FX600 128meg/128bit(275/490) -6,977
Geforce FX5600 128meg/128bit(320/550) -7,782
Geforce 6200 256meg/64 bit(350/530) - 7,537
ATI 9100 64meg/128bit (250/500) -7,859
ATI 8500 64meg/128bit (275/550) -8,305

#The Geforce FX series results were from one card the Quadro FX600, down clocked and overclocked, didn't test the FX5500 because its only a 20mhz boost on the core clock not worth the effort.
#Actual specs for "FX5600" should read 325 CPU clock but 320 was as high as I could reliably overclock, the fan is pretty small so I'd imgaine a new fan & thermal grease will see it operate safely at these speeds.
#ATI 8500 is the reference speed for that card which was never made for PCI, I've simply overclocked the 9100 to replicate its performance for this PCI test.

It was good to see the FX series responding well to overclocking but I suspect unless you find a Quadro FX600, a standard FX52/5500 will never reach the speeds of the 5600, the FX600 has memory rated to 550mhz.
The ATI is a good performer despite only having 64meg but around 2001/2002 this wasn't a deal breaker especially if you only had a PCI system I doubt you were using resolutions higher than 1280x1024.

That is a fairly respectable boost from FX600 to FX5600. it would be nice to see some real game frame rate tests.

I had a Diamond Stealth II s220 as my 3d card before i bought a voodooII 12mb. And after that i still used it, combined with the voodoo. Later on i switched the s220 for a matrox g200 for better 2d performance.
But i remember being very happy with my s220.

I started benchmarking in Windows XP SP3 and ran into some problems.

The overclocked FX600 scores a maximum of 6,300 vs 7,800points in 3DMARK 2001SE no matter what driver version I use, 45.23, 61.76, 81.98,175.19, etc.

The high scores above was using Windows 98SE, I saw a similar decrease for the ATI 9100 scoring around 7,000 compared 8,300 under Windows 98SE.

The reason I wanted to use Windows XP is because some of the games I want to test dont run on Win98, IE Doom3, Unreal Tournament 2003, 3DMark 2003, Mafia locks up etc.

The 6200 didn't seem to loose any speed.

Not sure If its worth trying windows 2000 😒 .

That's probably due to Windows Xp having much more OS overhead, what CPU did you test this with? Windows 2000 may or may not be faster; I remember at the time Windows 2000 was faster if you suffered from a CPU bottleneck in XP, but above say the 1GHz mark XP tended to run games faster due to better drivers optimizations and a more refined kernel.

I have a 9400GT PCI, I haven't actually used it as a primary display yet... It's a low profile one, and I bought it, because I thought it would be ideal for my wife's Dell s775 box, an optiplex. However, that machine has onboard x300 and an AGP slot and won't initialise a PCI vga. Also it has weird issues with video and more than 2GB RAM installed, something to do with memory mapping. You can stick 4GB in with the onboard and have no other expansion, or try to use something better and be stuck with 2GB max... Forgot what it has in now, think I found an x1600 or something. So beware of Dell machines I guess.

Anyway, I've used the 9400GT for a second monitor in another machine, and also for physX, yah, it's got a really lame physX capability for a GPU, but it benches 3 or 4 times as fast as software, so I was using it as a physX copro with a HD4650. Damned if I can remember what I was playing on that though, was sometime in 2012 I think. Oh, might have been one of those open simulators. Also yah, if say your PIII 1.4s is puffing and panting trying to run a game where physX is supported, then this might help it out a tad.

A couple of random points in relation to earlier posts...

Beware of 3DMark2001 cheats... it was super prevalent for that version.. It was an intel chipset being the worst I remember, the game tests were basically slideshows, with numerous elements missing, and it still scored as high as a GF2MX400 ... whereas actual gaming it felt like a rage128 at best. Not sure if renaming the executable gets around it, I know it has for some other benchmark cheats. Actually, I think I did a 16 bit test against my Voodoo 3 PCI and the V3 was smoother, no glaring visual glitches, but scored less than half what the intel did.

Surprisingly fast Rage prior to 128, yah, I had one, it was either the card or a "trick" miniGL/openGL driver. In my head at the moment I'm thinking it was a RageXL. The machine was a surfing box in use around 2002 basically built from leftovers, maybe it had a K6-2 at 350ish in it, might have been a 430VX motherboard, and whatever Rage I threw in there basically as a pixel pusher, running win 98SE. Much to my amazement, when I'd found some kind of openGL driver, it ran American McGee's Alice... and it was fairly playable, and looked pretty good. Kind of speed/quality you'd have seen on older Rage in Tomb Raider or something older. That game had more puzzle solving than being a frenetic action shooter so I guess occasional slowdowns when lots was on screen, didn't get in the way of the game. It ran pretty slick on my V3/K6-2 450, in a higher res, but the fact that it ran at all on the other machine was amazing, think it must have only had 8MB video RAM also, looking up AMGA specs now, says PII-400 and 16MB.

S3 Savage cards.

S3 gets a bad rap from under-performing Virge series, however while they may not be as strong as Voodoos or Nvidias, they do perform well enough for games of the time to be playable AND they have great backwards compatability with DOS, Direct3D and OpenGL so they are of great use in any socket 5/7/s7 system.

Also, these cards have really nice image quality! I tested a savage4 in my underdog build here and it produced a very nice picture.

Example - look at the texture on the gun and the filtering on the marked platform in the distance (modern GTX 960 on the left, Savage 4 on the right)

SIS 6326 PCI ! 🤣 ... provided you pretend it was released in 1996 and just use it in place of older cards.

dirkmirk wrote:

It was good to see the FX series responding well to overclocking but I suspect unless you find a Quadro FX600, a standard FX52/5500 will never reach the speeds of the 5600, the FX600 has memory rated to 550mhz.
.

I don't know about that. I have a soltek FX 5200 witch comes with 3.6ns ram - it's clocked at 500MHz (250x2) but the chips are rated for 550MHz. They do 575MHz w/o artifacting. On the other hand, I have an Inno3d FX5500 witch came with crappy 5ns ram, rated at 400Mhz..

look at the texture on the gun and the filtering on the marked platform in the distance (modern GTX 960 on the left, Savage 4 on the right)

That's LOD difference. Glide renderer have negative LOD and Metal renderer most likely too.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

look at the texture on the gun and the filtering on the marked platform in the distance (modern GTX 960 on the left, Savage 4 on the right)

That's LOD difference. Glide renderer have negative LOD and Metal renderer most likely too.

I tested it again in OpenGL and the texture filtering still seems to be better.

kanecvr wrote:

I don't know about that. I have a soltek FX 5200 witch comes with 3.6ns ram - it's clocked at 500MHz (250x2) but the chips are rated for 550MHz. They do 575MHz w/o artifacting. On the other hand, I have an Inno3d FX5500 witch came with crappy 5ns ram, rated at 400Mhz..

Even if you could clock it that high, you can't overcome the lack of Z-buffer and color compression.

I have no idea if that's what the Quadro equivalent has or not. But the NV34 (5200/5500) and NV31 (5600) are different enough that you can't simply emulate one or the other with clock tuning.

BitWrangler wrote:

I have a 9400GT PCI, I haven't actually used it as a primary display yet... It's a low profile one, and I bought it, because I thought it would be ideal for my wife's Dell s775 box, an optiplex. However, that machine has onboard x300 and an AGP slot and won't initialise a PCI vga. Also it has weird issues with video and more than 2GB RAM installed, something to do with memory mapping. You can stick 4GB in with the onboard and have no other expansion, or try to use something better and be stuck with 2GB max... Forgot what it has in now, think I found an x1600 or something. So beware of Dell machines I guess.

I've never heard of a Dell Optiplex from the LGA775 era with AGP (and a 2GB RAM limit). I thought every model from GX280 onwards had PCI-e, do you happen to know the model number? This sounds like an interesting system to me.

Ok making progress again, I think I had the drivers stuck at 185.XX or something high like that, went back to 45.23 and the drivers gave a similar 6300 rating in 3Dmark 2001se, I systematically tried a few different driver versions and found some interesting results but I'll sum it up.

61.76

3DMark 2001se - 7,674
3DMark 2003 - 1,675

The big difference for 3Dmark 2001SE was the Nature benchmark going from 20.3 to 29.7fps amoungst general improvements in other benchmarks
3Dmark 2003 saw the score increase from 1,594 to 1,675, the biggest change was the Mother Nature benchmark going from 8.1 to 10.2fps, a 25% improvement

71.84

3DMark 2001se - 7,986
3Dmark 2003 - 1,675

The difference for the score increase for 2001se was the dragothic fps increasing from 42.3 to 64.9

91.31

3Dmark 2001se - 7,229
3Dmark 2003 - 1,645

The scores saw a general drop across the board, the biggest in 2001se was the car chase going from 55.1 to 43.2

I also benchmarked Unreal tournament 2003 & saw no real changes in the benchmark scores, at 1024x768 the flyby fps was around 89 & 59 for botmatch.

The most interesting result was for Doom3, at 800x600 medium details the FX5600 was severely crippled showing 6.2fps for the older drivers but when I switched to 91.31 the framerate increased to 15.1fps!

Still unplayable though.

I've had enough tonight but I think somewhere between driver 71.84 & 91.31 will be the best for the FX series, I'll be looking to see which driver gives the best Doom3 score but retains a high 3dmark score, I shouldve been benching Quake3 but I might go back and quickly test with the other driver versions.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

BitWrangler wrote:

I have a 9400GT PCI, I haven't actually used it as a primary display yet... It's a low profile one, and I bought it, because I thought it would be ideal for my wife's Dell s775 box, an optiplex. However, that machine has onboard x300 and an AGP slot and won't initialise a PCI vga. Also it has weird issues with video and more than 2GB RAM installed, something to do with memory mapping. You can stick 4GB in with the onboard and have no other expansion, or try to use something better and be stuck with 2GB max... Forgot what it has in now, think I found an x1600 or something. So beware of Dell machines I guess.

I've never heard of a Dell Optiplex from the LGA775 era with AGP (and a 2GB RAM limit). I thought every model from GX280 onwards had PCI-e, do you happen to know the model number? This sounds like an interesting system to me.

Yah, that's a brain fart, or an old fart thing, thinking every long graphics slot is AGP, it's PCIe of course.

Edit: off the top of my head I want to say it's a 360, but that's probably wrong too.

Edit 2: Yah whoops, a 320, current gfx a X1300XT, p dual core swapped for E4600

I miss my 32 mb ati rage128 pro. It was performing well. Unless my father left it on store along with other parts (except hd) when I burned bios of my first computer (p3 800) with wrong bios when I was noob.

5200 PCI popped up locally, price isn't terrible, but I'm thinking I wouldn't use it... especially with that 9400GT available... anything pre AGP I've got V3 PCI for which is plenty for them.

They're a good option if your running one of those budget mainboards up to Pentium 4 era without AGP for windows 98se/early 2000s games, Doom3 is horrible but Unreal tournament 2003 runs fine, hit and miss but they're definitely a viable option if that's all you had.

Personally I don't find newer cards that exciting for pci bus as they're really flogging a dead horse, if you search for "fastest graphics on a pci bus" the YouTube video by pixel pipes, his testing only shows 8,000 points in 3dmark 2001 and I'm basically hitting that with the overclocked 5200(fx600).

The 5200 can run alot of games the voodoo3 cant and is useful for windows 98/dos, certainly scenarios where it can make alot of sense.