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Fastest AGP video card for Super socket 7 platform?

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First post, by ruthan

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Hello,
i dont want to discuss here how pointless it is, one of best threads here is world fastest 486 threadand this is similar sub-topic.

Disscussion:

  1. So main question is what fastest videocards are usable with SS7 machine.. and if on paper some faster options are really working, which are results and if there are some compatibility issues with this combination in comparision to use of these cards in some more modern platforms.
  2. If im not wrong most super socket MBs if not all would have option so select if primary graphics card would be in AGP or PCI slot, so we can have 2 cards, depends on OS and we can have even some dedicated without card for WinXP or Linux (yes, i now that this platform is deprecated from modern kernel).
  3. As far is i know, all these MBs have AGP 3.3 slot, but majority of videcards where universal for 1.5/3.3 V or even for 0.8 V.
  4. I would be also interesting, if there is how big is benefit of AGP over PCI with these CPUs.
  5. Im mainly interested in K6-2(+) / K6-3(+) 500 MHz+ results, but i dont mind some Cyrix, Pentium MMX results.
  6. I tried Geforce 7 cards with other platform with Win98 drivers, i even paid for rLoews patch, but from my experience there are bad for it.
  7. I somewhere read that at least Geforce FX(5) are still working with 3.3 MBs.

Videocards which it would be nice to test:

  • Voodoo 3 - baseline Phi tested it
  • Radeon 9xxx, Phil tested only 9200
  • Voodoo 4/5 - Phil tested it, Vooodoo 4=3 3500, Voodoo 5 is faster with higher resolution, but was exluded from all cards comparision..
  • Geforce 2/3/4/5/6/7 - Phil tested only Geforce 1 and 3 200 TI and 4 4200, but excluded them from all card comparision.. and G5 5500 PCI - without comparision with other cards results 🙁
  • ATI X800/x850 - if there is AGP 3.3 variants
  • Matrox G400 / G400 Max - Phil tested it, there are slow
  • Kyro I / II - Phil tested it, there are slow
  • ATI x1600-x1950 - - if there is AGP 3.3 variants
  • AMD Radeon HD 2400 / 2600 /3650 / 3850 they have AGP variants, but i doubt that they would be compatible, but you never know.

Ultimate 6x86 Vogons thread results Quake 2 SW, Quake 2 OpenGL with Matrox G200:
download/file.php?id=11659 // There is also Early PII/III and Athlons comparison.

Still open questions:

  1. Radeon R3xx - 9500-9800 XT Windows 98 SS7 performance.
  2. Nvidia G6/7 Win 98 performance.
  3. Windows 2000 / XP later Nvidia / ATI cards performance, would it be better than in Win98? Would here faster card make sense?
  4. ALI and VIA chipsets performance difference? At least regarding 1 of Phils video there is quite big Windows 98 performance difference between 2 SS7 MBs with different chipsets.. and DOS performance difference is significant too.
Last edited by ruthan on 2019-06-20, 21:27. Edited 8 times in total.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 1 of 91, by cyclone3d

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If you are looking for the highest benchmark scores on this platform, then the Geforce 2 and Geforce 3 cards are the fastest.

AMD K6 3DMARK, aiming for stars.

Looking around, it looks like for nVidia, you can go up to FX 5950 Ultra. For ATI, 9700 Pro and some 9800 Pro.

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=294567

But from testing done in the first link, there isn't a point as you will end up slower even though the faster cards would be faster in a newer system.

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Reply 2 of 91, by ruthan

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Thanks, in that thread are really only Geforce 2 /3 tested and at the end someone tested Geforce 5900.. but its only about 3D Mark, im not big friend these syntetic benchmarks, they are often misleading.. There is also problem than there is known problem with Nvidia driver speed degradation. So test are done with ancient drivers, what is not idea either, because newer drivers have also some fixes for some drivers bugs..

I would be nice to see Geforce 2 / 3 result with same driver version as with newer cards. There are also not results of ATI cards X850 are slimmers in comparision with these, i doubt it a lot.. faster videocard should be faster even with slower cpu, unless drivers are completely botched.. I dunno are these drivers using 3Dnow instruction set and newer doesnt?

Is there such big degradetion even with XP drivers? I know that XP have bigger overhead but back in time, i run XP rather than Windows 98 on SS7 machine. Maybe with right new driver, XP results in anything else than 3D mark, could be also interesting.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 3 of 91, by mothergoose729

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Socket 7 has a buggy AGP implementation. In terms of building the fastest system you can for the hell of it, than you can try the later nvidia cards, but for actual use a voodoo 2/3 or a FX 5500 PCI are probably safer bets. The voodoo 3 is AGP, but implements none of the AGP features (so it basically operates like PCI), and is generally recommended for SS7.

Reply 4 of 91, by cxm717

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Phil has a few videos on the subject. I plan on doing my own comparison at some point. Based on the testing that I have done in the past driver version, chipset, CPU and the games used for testing all make a big difference in the results. An example I found is the 3dfx banshee was much faster on the VIA based board compared to the Ali.

Reply 5 of 91, by cyclone3d

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Do you have an x850 with two notches in the AGP connector? I have never seen one.

If the card isn't 3.3v compatible, it won't work.

There is apparently a version of the Geforce 7300GT that is universal AGP and is verified working in SS7 boards. Good luck finding one for a good price though. I see a few on eBay, but they are priced at about $120.

Also, once you are CPU limited, you aren't going to gain anything with a faster video card. The CPU simply can't push the data to the video card fast enough.

Edit:
Also seeing these cards that have universal AGP variants - I'll add more when I see them:
Geforce 6200
Geforce 6600
Geforce 6600 GS
Geforce 6600 GT
Geforce 7600 GS

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK

Reply 6 of 91, by The Serpent Rider

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Also seeing these cards that have universal AGP variants - I'll add more when I see them:

Sparkle GeForce 6600/6600GT are quite common variants. USA had BFG cards with universal AGP.

So main question is what fastest videocards are usable with SS7 machine

The one with least driver overdraw. Best choise should be 3dfx, early GeForce and S3.
Techically you can put in there extremely fast card like GeForce 6600GT, but it will perform overall worse due to quite sophisticated drivers.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 7 of 91, by ruthan

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Thanks for your reactions..

Socket 7 has a buggy AGP implementation.

Its the same for VIA MVP3 and ALI ALLADIN V, or there is difference? Because i thing that these are 2 different implementations.
How it manifests, cards are not working, they are not able, or its just slow? Maybe, if can see some error message, some of problems can be fixed. There is also Voodoo 5 pci: https://www.anandtech.com/show/596 - but it look like that is same speed or slower as Voodoo 3 3000 across all platforms, i thought that i would be much faster, maybe its just tested with some release bad drivers.
I would like to see some numbers.

Phil has a few videos on the subject.

I know that he has some K6-III + Geforce 5 video, any other details?

Update:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=key3tXC0axI&t=592s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArRFV4BgI7Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIOrPLjph7k

I plan on doing my own comparison at some point. Based on the testing that I have done in the past driver version, chipset, CPU and the games used for testing all make a big difference in the results. An example I found is the 3dfx banshee was much faster on the VIA based board compared to the Ali.

I think we want same thing, i really want to see some numbers.

Do you have an x850 with two notches in the AGP connector? I have never seen one.
If the card isn't 3.3v compatible, it won't work

I have found this:
http://www.playtool.com/pages/agpcompat/agp.html
I originally thought that if something has universal in name that it would be universal, but i read it again and for Radeon X800 is there this: Universal 1.5V AGP 3.0 Card - which means - Supports 1.5V and 0.8V signaling. Available speeds 1x, 2x, 4x at 1.5V and 4x, 8x at 0.8V. - So no luck, no 3.3V
Regarding table in link above - really universal are:

  1. Geforce 4 TIs.
  2. Geforce 5 alias FX
  3. Radeons 7000 - 9000, i dunno i any of these faster than Voodoo 3? 9000 release date is 18.07.2002, clocks are much higher than Voodoo 3 - 200 gpu, 500 Mem, it also have multiple processing units.
  4. Radeons - 9200 - 9500, Radeon 9700, some Radeons 9800.
  5. Matrox G200-G550 / Matrox Parhelia (XP only).

Also, once you are CPU limited, you aren't going to gain anything with a faster video card. The CPU simply can't push the data to the video card fast enough.

I dont thing that it works like that. With faster videocard, if should get still faster game.
Yes it wait for CPU to prepare data, but after that videocard do its job (faster will do it faster) and after that again cpu has to something and this is cycled. But not every game is so CPU heavy. Bigger bottleneck is slow videocard for 3D, here cpu really not helping too much. 2D games are different, there videocard usually doesnt do much.

The one with least driver overdraw. Best choise should be 3dfx, early GeForce and S3.
Techically you can put in there extremely fast card like GeForce 6600GT, but it will perform overall worse due to quite sophisticated drivers.

Well it should be same for PII / PIII / early Atholons, celerons on similar clocks, unless is AGP implementation or drivers really bugged.
What about Dos? Heere are not drivers involved.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 8 of 91, by The Serpent Rider

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Well it should be same for PII / PIII / early Atholons, celerons on similar clocks

Early Athlons in general will perform better with GeForce, unless you're playing 640x480 or/and with minimal settings.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 9 of 91, by ruthan

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In Phil Voodoo 3 3500 AGP vs Geforce 5500 PCI video, results are interesting.
OpenGL - performance is the same.
Direct3D - only 2 old games (Expandable, Incoming) are tested and Voodoo 3 is faster about 25%, i dunno if these games are best Direct3D examples, maybe some newer Direct3D games would be different story..
3D Mark 2000 / 2001 SE - Geforce smashes Voodoo (especially in 2001), it proofs that Geforce could be much faster even with this CPU, in some situations.
DOS - the same except Doom where is Voodoo 3 - 3x faster, maybe with some enhancer it could be different story.

Now i would like to see comparision with Geforce 5900 AGP, if AGP is really buggy. There is also Geforce 5600 PCI with faster clocks (gpu - 270/325, MEM - 400 / 550).

Last edited by ruthan on 2019-06-03, 19:21. Edited 1 time in total.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 10 of 91, by The Serpent Rider

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3D Mark 2000 / 2001 SE

Not relevant to game performance, also both use T&L.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 11 of 91, by cyclone3d

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ruthan wrote:
I Phil Voodoo 3 3500 AGP vs Geforce 5500 PCI video, results are interesting. OpenGL - performance is the same. Direct3D - on […]
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I Phil Voodoo 3 3500 AGP vs Geforce 5500 PCI video, results are interesting.
OpenGL - performance is the same.
Direct3D - only 2 old games (Expandable, Incoming) are tested and Voodoo 3 is faster about 25%, i dunno if these games are best Direct3D examples, maybe some newer Direct3D games would be different story..
3D Mark 2000 / 2001 SE - Geforce smashes Voodoo (especially in 2001), it proofs that Geforce could be much faster even with this CPU, in some situations.
DOS - the same except Doom where is Voodoo 3 - 3x faster, maybe with some enhancer it could be different story.

Now i would like to see comparision with Geforce 5900 AGP, if AGP is really buggy. There is also Geforce 5600 PCI with faster clocks (gpu - 270/325, MEM - 400 / 550).

The FX 5600 is basically a slightly higher clocked 5500 with 1 more TMU, which in turn is a slightly higher clocked 5200. Also.. where are you finding those clock specs for a PCI FX 5600?

As for other similar cards, there is the Quadro FX 600 PCI with has 2 vertex shaders instead of 1 that the 5200 and 5500 have.

The stock clocks are GPU - 270 and MEM - 240/480 but should be able to be clocked up pretty easily.

The PCI 5600 XT has the same cofiguration and the clocks are listed as GPU - 235 and MEM - 200/400.

Looks like there are also elusive ATI HD4350 and HD5450 PCI cards as well.

You've also got the Nvidia GT 430, 520, and 610 as well.

But really, if you want to go the PCI route, you can just try out pretty much anything with a PCIe to PCI adapter card. It does depend on the card and the adapter card whether it works properly or not though.

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Reply 12 of 91, by BinaryDemon

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cyclone3d wrote:

Looks like there are also elusive ATI HD4350 and HD5450 PCI cards as well.

You've also got the Nvidia GT 430, 520, and 610 as well.

But really, if you want to go the PCI route, you can just try out pretty much anything with a PCIe to PCI adapter card. It does depend on the card and the adapter card whether it works properly or not though.

I think your SS7 system would have to be running XP for any chance of HD4350/5450/GT430/520/610 drivers working?

About the adapter I was curious if this would work myself. I suspect it wouldn't on older systems. I think its primarily for adding an additional PCIe card (not for adding PCIe to a PCI only system). Basically could it work if the system had no understanding of PCIe (adapter card handles everything)? Which version of the drivers would you install, PCIe still?

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 13 of 91, by cyclone3d

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BinaryDemon wrote:
cyclone3d wrote:

Looks like there are also elusive ATI HD4350 and HD5450 PCI cards as well.

You've also got the Nvidia GT 430, 520, and 610 as well.

But really, if you want to go the PCI route, you can just try out pretty much anything with a PCIe to PCI adapter card. It does depend on the card and the adapter card whether it works properly or not though.

I think your SS7 system would have to be running XP for any chance of HD4350/5450/GT430/520/610 drivers working?

About the adapter I was curious if this would work myself. I suspect it wouldn't on older systems. I think its primarily for adding an additional PCIe card (not for adding PCIe to a PCI only system). Basically could it work if the system had no understanding of PCIe (adapter card handles everything)? Which version of the drivers would you install, PCIe still?

Yeah, you would have to run XP.

The chip on the adapter card is a bridge chip. The host system would not have to know anything about PCIe. Same as with these newer PCI cards that have bridge chips built on them.

ATI and Nvidia had their own proprietary bridge solutions at first. Then the newer ones use the same PLX bridge chip that is on the adapter cards.

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Reply 14 of 91, by BinaryDemon

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I was thinking about it more, Linux might work decently too.

Another issue with the adapter... PCI slots don't supply the same power as PCIe slots (25w max?). The PCI to PCI-e adapters I've seen dont use a molex, but I guess you could just piggy back adapters to add a powered PCIe slot.

Check out DOSBox Distro:

https://sites.google.com/site/dosboxdistro/ [*]

a lightweight Linux distro (tinycore) which boots off a usb flash drive and goes straight to DOSBox.

Make your dos retrogaming experience portable!

Reply 15 of 91, by ruthan

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Regarding of PCI, i really like this video - The Fastest Graphics Card on a PCI Bus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCPsfWfdFmw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAcMvJSMWIs&t=4s

Geforce 5500 PCI with more modern system and games its working quite well:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTGfiSg6YOA

Last edited by ruthan on 2019-06-03, 20:56. Edited 2 times in total.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 16 of 91, by mothergoose729

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ruthan wrote:
Thanks for your reactions.. […]
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Thanks for your reactions..

Socket 7 has a buggy AGP implementation.

Its the same for VIA MVP3 and ALI ALLADIN V, or there is difference? Because i thing that these are 2 different implementations.
How it manifests, cards are not working, they are not able, or its just slow? Maybe, if can see some error message, some of problems can be fixed. There is also Voodoo 5 pci: https://www.anandtech.com/show/596 - but it look like that is same speed or slower as Voodoo 3 3000 across all platforms, i thought that i would be much faster, maybe its just tested with some release bad drivers.
I would like to see some numbers.

The AGP implementation is buggy on all chipsets AFAIK.

When reading benchmarks, it is important to put them into context. It doesn't matter if a graphics card is faster in 3dmark 2001 if it doesn't actually perform better in games that you can play; ie getting 15 fps in a game is not substantially better than getting 9 fps in a game, as neither configuration is going to work for you.

The voodoo 3 is not the fastest card, but it is very compatible and stable on those chipsets. The games you can play comfortably on an SS7 extend to at most 2001, and even after 2000 there are some games like quake 3 and serious sam that you are just not going to get to play period. Of the games that an SS7 is at all capable of playing, the voodoo 3 performs as well or better than the geforce cards.

If the cost of a voodoo 3 is an object, a cheaper PCI card like the FX 5500 or FX 5200 is a decent substitute, but all though they are significantly more powerful than a voodoo 3, they actually perform worse on a SS7 system because of driver overhead.

If you want to get the best performance in 3dmark then a nvidia card will do that for you, but it is not indicative of performance in real games for that period.

Reply 17 of 91, by ruthan

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For somebody who never revisited this platform (from use old and new HW together), is first of all hard to imagine that faster videocard would be actually slower than older one which is much slower with all other faster platforms. If there would be some SW/HW wall, which would block this combination of component, it would be normal - not supported, but that its somehow working, but so botched that is slower that older cards, its strange (interesting) thing.

If you dont already have this platform and if will not patient or lucky, it would be already a bit expensive, so buy second AGP videocard wouldnt be such difference. I remember back in era, when i looked at AGP speeds.. 256 /512 MB and i had Voodoo 3 PCI and even i know that it not using AGP too much (im didnt know more..) is looked as big plus in comparision with PCI 133 MB/s for all device include discs. So its really shame that this potential never was used, even with more modern AGP cards.

Other view is that this platform was quite big, i dunno how much millions or tens of millions of MBs were sold and AGP was never fixed it for them.

I was also really surprised how much info about it is now available, at least at youtube, there few Phils video and almost nothing else and there are really lots of question to answer and lots of numbers to be shown - because with small numbers of sample is very easy make wrong assumptions and feed some urban legends that and that is not possible, or not working etc.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 18 of 91, by ruthan

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3DMark i spoke about that because i was mail point of most similar thread here and i dont play it whole day as some people, i like to play real games.

HW T&L - list of games which are using it is not so short as i expected:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_u … rm_and_lighting

I never fully got, what means that card is not supporting, its simply looking worse, or its running slower? When i had Voodoo 3 havent feeling that im missing something big, except 32 bit colors.. but image quality so qreat at least in reviews.. i had not change to 2 machines with different cards right besides each other. I seems that T&L was much bigger deal than Matrox G400 bump mapping from same time.. T&L was also integrated in DX7.

Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.

Reply 19 of 91, by cyclone3d

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T&L is super taxing on the CPU. That is why games that use T&L run way, way, way faster on a card that does it in hardware when compared to a card that doesn't.

See here:
https://rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33600656

3dmark vid showing a side by side comparing software to hardware T&L:
https://youtu.be/KwJS8m_pWYk

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
Yamaha XG repository
YMF7x4 Guide
Aopen AW744L II SB-LINK