My R9100 works perfectly with a Matrox m3d. Not every card is nice that way.

I briefly used the rage iic. Not often fast enough for 640 x 480, and grainy iq. I don't know if it's just my card but 2d quality is poor. Running tomb raider there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqnOW7_iVh4.

Of others, I only have the 128 pro, but haven't used it. Ati's early 3d hardware comes across a little bland in some ways but at least it's cheap.

It's usually Nvidia that has the issues with Matrox M3Ds. I haven't had a problem with it on any ATI i've tried.

ATI Rage 128 and Radeon are great competitors against their contemporaries (TNT2 and GF256) and in my opinion very interesting choices for retro builds. Rage 128 has poor texture filtering, however.

Radeon 8500/9100 is my favorite DX8 class GPU bar none, a card faster than the GF4 Ti 4200. However it lacks some features found in contemporary nVidia hardware such as table fog that can break compatibility with earlier games, or the lack of trilinear filtering when Anisotropic Filtering is enabled. It is still my go-to build for 2001/02 builds.

Radeon 9500/9600/9700/9800 are very good early DX9 hardware, the best among their contemporaries for sure. Skip the 9200/9250/9550, they are cut down OEM cards.

The X800 series is a skippable improvement on the 9800 but the X1800/X1900 series cards are solid DX9 cards, with the X1950 being the fastest AGP card from ATI with Win9x support.

I saw when phil posted his video of the 128 pro running colin mcrae rally that it failed to render the hud properly. I've seen many cards/their drivers fail the game in some way, including nvidia's from the tnt 2 to the geforce 4. Of newer cards, the g400 renders it properly even with new drivers, can't remember if 3dfx does. This makes me doubtful of the 128 pro's general compatibility esp. with older games and may at best mean having to tweak driver settings or versions for more games than I'd like.

appiah4 wrote:

Radeon 8500/9100 is my favorite DX8 class GPU bar none, a card faster than the GF4 Ti 4200.

That is a bit too generous I think. 😀 It's usually a bit slower than the GF3 Ti 500.

I'm convinced these chips have more than a few hardware problems. The drivers were never great for them and that's probably a sign. Their AGP compliance is iffy, and you would probably have troubles with VIA KT266-KT333 boards. (Been there with both!!) The DVI is really flaky. I've also read there is an internal caching problem that creates corner cases where R100 is faster. It negates some of the advantages PS 1.4 should offer.

The anisotropic filtering is very fast. But a Radeon 9500 or newer has much improved texture filtering overall.

The anti-aliasing features often don't work and don't look very good anyway. Very slow because it doesn't support MSAA like GF3/4. I've seen it disable itself during gameplay. Its behavior varies across driver versions too. 128MB version doesn't seem to work with higher resolutions as one might think. Strange stuff.

It should be possible to get table fog with a registry tweak. ATI didn't officially support it.

The 8500 is great for playing around with truform. Just get an older driver (cat 5.8 or older). I found the 8500 to generally be slower than the 4200. It does depend a bit on the settings. If you enable trlinear filtering the 8500 takes a big hit. I don't like the AA on the 8500 much. It was a bit buggy. In some games it messed up the crosshair, some games it messed up the text. In Q2 I had missing particles. It also blurs textures some and to top it off there is a big performance hit. Quake2 at 1024 was running about 420 fps without AA or AF but with it (4xAA/16xAF) enabled I got 52.9. I do like the AF though, even missing trilinear when its enabled (and how its angle dependent), I think it was a good trade off for performance. Most of the time it looks good. I also found an option in ati try tools to blend mipmaps (not 100% what it was called without looking) which looks really nice. That's not to say there weren't drawbacks to the geforce4. I found that in a number of opengl games all I would get was a 16bit z-buffer. While with the radeon I could just enable a 32 or 24bit z-buffer in the control panel.

appiah4 wrote:

ATI Rage 128 and Radeon are great competitors against their contemporaries (TNT2 and GF256) and in my opinion very interesting c […]
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ATI Rage 128 and Radeon are great competitors against their contemporaries (TNT2 and GF256) and in my opinion very interesting choices for retro builds. Rage 128 has poor texture filtering, however.

Radeon 8500/9100 is my favorite DX8 class GPU bar none, a card faster than the GF4 Ti 4200. However it lacks some features found in contemporary nVidia hardware such as table fog that can break compatibility with earlier games, or the lack of trilinear filtering when Anisotropic Filtering is enabled. It is still my go-to build for 2001/02 builds.

Radeon 9500/9600/9700/9800 are very good early DX9 hardware, the best among their contemporaries for sure. Skip the 9200/9250/9550, they are cut down OEM cards.

The X800 series is a skippable improvement on the 9800 but the X1800/X1900 series cards are solid DX9 cards, with the X1950 being the fastest AGP card from ATI with Win9x support.

Could you show me where to get these Win9x drivers for the X1950 ?

Newest that I am pretty sure most everybody is aware of with Win9x support stop at the x850.

My favorite aspect to the X1000 cards is their 16-bit color dithering. I think it looks better than any other ATI card), and also better than NV's dithering. I tried a slew of cards in 16-bit color months back out of curiosity. For old games with mostly a 16-bit color focus, and also with DGVoodoo / Zeckensack's Glide wrapper.

Unfortunately Zeckensack's Glide wrapper has a bug with ATI OpenGL. In Unreal engine games the detail texturing has a visible transition point near you. Some kind of blending bug I guess.

Thanks for all the input, this is exactly the kind of information I was looking for. The experiences mentioned here definitely sound like what I remember about ATI cards in those days: competitive performance and some nice image quality features, but success with them is highly dependent on what application you're running, what drivers and what the rest of the system consists of. Also, most of their benefits were due to the timing of their release and their price... things that are not relevant to building a retro system.

I remember being totally blown away by Battlefield 1942 running on my Tyan 9600 Pro 128MB at 1280x1024 with 8xAF on a 15" monitor. Amazing quality and frame rates. I had come from an eVGA Ti 4400 (still have the box), which died and was replaced under warranty with an FX 5600 256MB, which was a huge downgrade for the games I played. It was very noticeable and I was really unhappy about it as soon as I found out what they were sending me (because I knew about the FX series' reputation). Shortly after this I sold the 5600 256MB online for a decent price and bought a Tyan 9600 Pro 128MB which gave me all the performance of the Ti 4400 plus a lot more in later games at higher resolutions. The 9600 Pro ended up having a fan problem which lead to the card being replaced under warranty, so the one I have now was used very little.

When the 6800GT was released though, I managed to get a BFG 6800GT OC due to the BestBuy pre-order pricing snafu that had them listed for $299, rather than $399.

That was a pretty huge upgrade from the 9600 pro too, but honestly I noticed more of a difference going from the 5600 to the 9600 Pro.

As positive as my experience was with ATI during that time, I've never used another ATI\AMD card in my primary system since then.

cyclone3d wrote:

Could you show me where to get these Win9x drivers for the X1950 ?

Newest that I am pretty sure most everybody is aware of with Win9x support stop at the x850.

You are correct and the X800 series is indeed the fastest AGP card for Win98SE, I hang my head in shame and walk away now..

appiah4 wrote:

cyclone3d wrote:

Could you show me where to get these Win9x drivers for the X1950 ?

Newest that I am pretty sure most everybody is aware of with Win9x support stop at the x850.

You are correct and the X800 series is indeed the fastest AGP card for Win98SE, I hang my head in shame and walk away now..

Lol.. I was hoping that somebody had some hacked drivers that supported the X1950 on Win9x.

I think the ATICIF version (actual Windows version) of Tomb Raider 1 may be the best looking one. I've not played it on PowerVR but from what I've read the 1024x768 setting runs like a slug. By contrast, my ATI Rage Pro Turbo (last/fastest CIF capable card) can do 800x600 at mostly 30 FPS and is, to me, superior looking to the 3dfx version which can have graphical anomalies even on a Voodoo 1 and appropriate speed CPU.

So if you're big into Tomb Raider there's one reason for ATI.

I think tomb raider looks best in software, but yeh, you may want something other than the rage iic for ati's proprietary api. 15 fps at 640 x 480, 30 without texture filtering.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Thanks for all the input, this is exactly the kind of information I was looking for. The experiences mentioned here definitely sound like what I remember about ATI cards in those days: competitive performance and some nice image quality features, but success with them is highly dependent on what application you're running, what drivers and what the rest of the system consists of.

Tbh, this applies to almost any retro stuff. These days you get AMD, nVidia or Intel and it just works, with only differences being performance or price. But back before the boring days, even when titles used abstraction layers like OpenGL, early DirectX or WinG, you saw big image differences between chips, with specific titles specifically favouring one chip or another.

In DOS days you could be pretty sure an S3 Vision or Virge would cover almost everything, but the second half of the 1990s was chaotic, with everyone wanting to do 3D but different features being implemented in different ways by different vendors, and standards like OpenGL and DirectX only covering the basics, not the fancy stuff. 3Dfx's Voodoos did well in this early market, but they were by no means completely dominant and you had titles that looked better on anything from an ATi Rage to a Verite Rendition and everythign in between. Even if you had an early nVidia Riva or a nice 3DfX Voodoo2, you wouldn't get the best image quality or even performance in every game. What ATi did generally get right - and one of the main reasons they were one of only 3 winners at the end of this period - was solid, stable drivers. An ATi card might not have always gotten you bleeding-edge performance, but it was competent and reliable, with decent image quality and pretty much everything would run one way or another.

Also, most of their benefits were due to the timing of their release and their price... things that are not relevant to building a retro system.

For significant periods from 2000-2010 (and for that matter 1987-~1991) ATi cards offered the best performance of the day and several times ATi was the first to introduce new features or support new DirectX standards.

It really depends on your timeframe and goals with your retro system.

dionb wrote:

Tbh, this applies to almost any retro stuff. These days you get AMD, nVidia or Intel and it just works, with only differences be […]
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Tbh, this applies to almost any retro stuff. These days you get AMD, nVidia or Intel and it just works, with only differences being performance or price. But back before the boring days, even when titles used abstraction layers like OpenGL, early DirectX or WinG, you saw big image differences between chips, with specific titles specifically favouring one chip or another.

In DOS days you could be pretty sure an S3 Vision or Virge would cover almost everything, but the second half of the 1990s was chaotic, with everyone wanting to do 3D but different features being implemented in different ways by different vendors, and standards like OpenGL and DirectX only covering the basics, not the fancy stuff. 3Dfx's Voodoos did well in this early market, but they were by no means completely dominant and you had titles that looked better on anything from an ATi Rage to a Verite Rendition and everythign in between. Even if you had an early nVidia Riva or a nice 3DfX Voodoo2, you wouldn't get the best image quality or even performance in every game. What ATi did generally get right - and one of the main reasons they were one of only 3 winners at the end of this period - was solid, stable drivers. An ATi card might not have always gotten you bleeding-edge performance, but it was competent and reliable, with decent image quality and pretty much everything would run one way or another.

Also, most of their benefits were due to the timing of their release and their price... things that are not relevant to building a retro system.

For significant periods from 2000-2010 (and for that matter 1987-~1991) ATi cards offered the best performance of the day and several times ATi was the first to introduce new features or support new DirectX standards.

It really depends on your timeframe and goals with your retro system.

Thanks for the input. I guess my point about ATI for general retro computing (and about their advantages being due to timing) is that the situations where they are better than 3dfx or nvidia (depending on the era) were only really relevant at that time and generally all you have to do is get the next generation card from nvidia and its better than ATI's and isn't going to be lacking any features. For example, all Radeon cards are missing features that older games use (fog table and 8 bit palletized textures), so generally they're better suited for DX8 and DX9 games. If you're running DX8 or DX9 games, you might as well run the very latest card that works on the OS you're aiming for, since newer cards are missing few if any features from DX8 and on. The Radeon 9500-9800 series was excellent, but using a Geforce 6800 series will have the same OS support (Win98 or better) and better performance. My reason for making this thread was to ask what niche features or specific games would make an ATI card preferable, in spite of this trend.

I know that ATI's drivers are certainly better in 3D games than those of their smaller competitors, like S3, Trident, etc. but they were definitely always behind the most popular cards up to 2001 or so (3dfx and nvidia). Also, the apparent compatibility issues with ATI cards in several DOS titles (as shown on the compatibility chart) and the very small list of games that genuinely prefer early ATI cards mean that they fit in a niche just like the other small 3D card players... except they aren't rare, and their cards are practically everywhere. So, if we're going to use them for something rather than scrap them, it'd be nice to know where they're a better option than equally common nvidia cards.

swaaye wrote:

That is a bit too generous I think. :happy: It's usually a bit slower than the GF3 Ti 500. […]
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appiah4 wrote:

Radeon 8500/9100 is my favorite DX8 class GPU bar none, a card faster than the GF4 Ti 4200.

That is a bit too generous I think. 😀 It's usually a bit slower than the GF3 Ti 500.

I'm convinced these chips have more than a few hardware problems. The drivers were never great for them and that's probably a sign. Their AGP compliance is iffy, and you would probably have troubles with VIA KT266-KT333 boards. (Been there with both!!) The DVI is really flaky. I've also read there is an internal caching problem that creates corner cases where R100 is faster. It negates some of the advantages PS 1.4 should offer.

The anisotropic filtering is very fast. But a Radeon 9500 or newer has much improved texture filtering overall.

The anti-aliasing features often don't work and don't look very good anyway. Very slow because it doesn't support MSAA like GF3/4. I've seen it disable itself during gameplay. Its behavior varies across driver versions too. 128MB version doesn't seem to work with higher resolutions as one might think. Strange stuff.

It should be possible to get table fog with a registry tweak. ATI didn't officially support it.

it was at launch, newer drivers made it competitive with the the Ti-4200

Well if you want a modernish standalone video card, then user Nvidia TNT to Radeon 5xxx series. ATI cards have some issues. And Nvidia 6 series and later also started to drop undocumented VGA features. It is just my observation.

Had a brief look at the 128 pro v the matrox g400 with newest drivers and a fast cpu in 640 x 480 x 16 in some number of games from 199x to 200x. Tossup for speed, saw several graphics glitches with the rage though and the image quality is coarser. Matrox has a more mature driver whatever the case, not sure that there's a technical reason to prefer the rage. Maybe subjectively aesthetic or some corner case.