feipoa wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

oohms wrote:

Matrox cards were never great for gaming and have aweful drivers. I would go a TNT or GF2MX because they work, have good drivers and good dos games compatibility. They are also common enough that you can try a few to get one with the sharpest image output

What year is it? Matrox drivers are fine and the G200 PCI is a great choice here. G450 PCI is even faster and I ran one for a long while, but the only major issue I had was that OpenGL drivers are kind of problematic with Quake 2 dynamic lighting and TurboGL does not work with G450 as a workaround.

I thought I recall reading somewhere on this forum that the G400 series had an icd fix that worked for the lighting issue, and that it also worked for the G200. Is this not true with regard to Quake 2 in particular?

I am not aware of this fix, if you can dig it up and it turns out to work with Quake 2 I would replace the Radeon 7000 in my Deskpro EN 1GHz with a G450 in a heartbeat.

The Matrox OpenGL fix for the G200 meant extracting the correct ICD from the G400 driver package and overwrite the one in your Windows folder.

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Matrox#G200

But I don't know if replacing the G450 ICD with the G400 ICD would work/fix anything.

Rawit wrote:

The Matrox OpenGL fix for the G200 meant extracting the correct ICD from the G400 driver package and overwrite the one in your Windows folder.

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Matrox#G200

But I don't know if replacing the G450 ICD with the G400 ICD would work/fix anything.

Interesting. I should try this. I feel the G450 is a great all rounder card for Intel chipsets like i810 and VIA stuff that come with shitty Trident IGPs.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

How about Shogo: Mobile Armor Division and Expendable?

I've run expendable and recorded results. Now how do I play a timedemo in Shogo? I read online that you need to create your own. Do you have anything pre-recorded for me to try? Then I do what,

1edit the shortcut key, in target, "C:\program files\shogo\shogo.exe" +timedemo SerpentRiderDemo

?

appiah4 wrote:

Interesting. I should try this. I feel the G450 is a great all rounder card for Intel chipsets like i810 and VIA stuff that come with shitty Trident IGPs.

Please let me know if it works and which Matrox driver revision number and operating system you used the ICD from. I'll probably be benchmarking the G450 next. Then Oxygen VX1.

feipoa wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Interesting. I should try this. I feel the G450 is a great all rounder card for Intel chipsets like i810 and VIA stuff that come with shitty Trident IGPs.

Please let me know if it works and which Matrox driver revision number and operating system you used the ICD from. I'll probably be benchmarking the G450 next. Then Oxygen VX1.

It probably won't be anytime too soon so if you do it before me you go ahead and post it here too please 😎

I've completed the round of benchmarking for the S3 Savage 4 Pro+ 32 MB card. Nothing really stood out as no performing well or there being any glitches. I made one comment on the game Incoming that the sky looks a bit pixellated.

I will be testing:

GLQuake (timedemo)
Quake 2 (timedemo)
Quake 3 (timedemo)
Unreal (timedemo)
Outlaws (an instantaneous frame rate that is fairly consistent and of the same scene for each card)
Incoming (no timedemo, but an average up to the same point in the autoplay for each card)
Dark Forces 2 (an instantaneous frame rate)
GL Hexen II (timedemo)
Blood (an instantaneous frame rate)
Descent II - D3D (instantaneous frame rate)
Descent II - OpenGL (instantaneous frame rate)
MDK2 (timedemo)
Turok (instantaneous frame rate)
Turok 2 (instantaneous frame rate)
Expendable (timedemo)
Shogo (timedemo)

I am, for the most part, testing at 1024x768x16, but some games max at 800x600. If the game plays "too fast", I'm using 1280x1024x16.

Frame rates tend to be well under 60 fps and I do not intend to play with software for disabling Vsync unless that options is available in the game.

Next up is the Oxygen VX1. Then the Matrox G450.

I did find a Radeon 7000 PCI, the DDR 32 MB variant, hiding in the closet. It was not originally on the list in the original post. Would anybody have voted for this? If so, is there a recommended, or more optimised, driver version to use on a slower system like the Pentium Pro?

I would to try to test original drivers from Radeon 7500 and 8500 release (win 9x driver version 7.184) or any other before Radeon 9700 release date. Tried some late Catalyst drivers, but they were quite slow on Pentium MMX.

Radeon VE/7000 on a PPro is probably not a great idea..

The 3DLabs Oxygen VX1 PCI is out. I tried 4 versions of the drivers ranging from 6 June 1999 to July 2002. After installing the drivers, I see some occasional verticle lines of white flash on the screen. I view around at the Adapter Properties page, which looks intersting as it has optimisations for different D3D and OpenGL games. Then some letters on the screen start to disappear, like the letter 'o' and the tens digit of the taskbar clock. I tried newer versions, similar thing happen. I tried to run GLQuake and the screen stayed black. I tried all versions now and cannot even get to the point that it will let me view the display properties. Now the system boots up to the desktop, you can move the mouse and see the desktop icons, but you cannot click anything, nor do keyboard shortcuts work. I've spent an hour on this and have gotten nowhere. This card is coming out.

The readme's for all the drivers, including the June 1999 readme states that a Pentium II is a prerequisite. Could all these issues be due to using a PPRO and not a PII? Unfortunately, I do not have a PIIOD to test at the moment. It was interesting that, for being a CAD card, there was a lot of information in the readme files concerning getting games running properly, like Unreal, Heretic II, Half-Life, Nascar3, Descent III, etc.

Anyone have experience with the Oxygen VX1 PCI in a pre-PII system?

i would pick a 3DLabs Card, a Pentium Pro should run NT.

And 3DLabs has decent NT Drivers and also good OpenGL Support.

Try Permedia ?

feipoa wrote:

The readme's for all the drivers, including the June 1999 readme states that a Pentium II is a prerequisite. Could all these issues be due to using a PPRO and not a PII? Unfortunately, I do not have a PIIOD to test at the moment. It was interesting that, for being a CAD card, there was a lot of information in the readme files concerning getting games running properly, like Unreal, Heretic II, Half-Life, Nascar3, Descent III, etc.

I guess it's possible the drivers require MMX, which the Pro doesn't have

but if I had to guess right now, it sounds like the memory or something on the card is just bad

The Serpent Rider wrote:

I'm voting Radeon 9250 as long as it's a 128bit card.

ATi cards = horrible driver overhead. They are mostly unusable for systems with weak CPU.

I don't know, while this was often the case in 1997-2003 or so, it hasn't been my experience with more recent driver releases.

I think that much of this was patched out, and ATi has just been stuck with this stigma for too long now for people to forget past mistakes.

Anyway just my experience and YMMV

Jasin Natael wrote:

I don't know, while this was often the case in 1997-2003 or so, it hasn't been my experience with more recent driver releases. […]
Show full quote

The Serpent Rider wrote:

I'm voting Radeon 9250 as long as it's a 128bit card.

ATi cards = horrible driver overhead. They are mostly unusable for systems with weak CPU.

I don't know, while this was often the case in 1997-2003 or so, it hasn't been my experience with more recent driver releases.

I think that much of this was patched out, and ATi has just been stuck with this stigma for too long now for people to forget past mistakes.

Anyway just my experience and YMMV

Have you run through many of the driver releases in sequence to find the fastest ones? Which do you recommend for this system?

I would recommend the G450 PCI:

+stable, reliable and compatible
+good CPU scaling
+good 3D performance also on weak CPUs
+good driver and opengl quality today
+good image quality in 2D and 3D
+DVI support
+superior 32bit 3D performance
+easy to provide
+more period correct than any T&L card

-no glide support
-nothing really special

I had a G450 PCI in my socket 7 (Asus T2P4) for a while and was very satisfied.

I'm testing the G450 now. I'm using MGATweak v1.20 beta, which says it is running with a Graphics clock of 111.6 MHz and memory clock of 279 MHz. I thought for the G400 (non-Max), these values were 125 MHz and 332 MHz (effective). Why are they so low for the G450? Attempts to increase 111.6 Mhz to 124 Mhz caused the screen to go all garbled.

What software do you all use to adjust the clock rate of the G450 PCI?

Also, I"ve had some trouble installing the G450 PCI on my PPRO system. The Matrox installation software doesn't identify the card and won't install the drivers, unless I use the very latest version 6.83, 6.82, or 6.81. These version have a G450.inf file as part of their installation package, but older versions support the G450, back to at least v6.03. The older versions contain information in the install.inf for the G450. Why do I want to install older versions of the software? Well, I am trying to figure out why the g200 performs better in 3DMark99Max.

For the G200, 3DMark99Max scores 1639 3DMarks
For the G450, 3DMark99Max scores 1257 3DMarks

This is a fairly large difference and I'm curious why. I've had to hack the G450.inf file from the v6.82 installation files to get older versions working, e.g. 6.24, but the G450 3DMark score stays the same. The D3D and OpenGL performances from actual games are better on the G450 compared to the G200 though.

What software do you all use to adjust the clock rate of the G450 PCI?

Powerstrip 3.x for example. Matrox G400+ has complicated multiplier ratio between GPU and RAM, which tend to go crazy with many utilities. It's a whole new can of worms.

OK, thank you. I will try it.

Any idea what tricks Matrox is doing with 3DMark99Max for the G200 to beat the G450 by 30%? Even at at 111 MHz, the G450 is 27 MHz faster.

Maybe G450 has forced vsync, which will drop performance even if CPU can't fully load the card.

I can get 75 fps in GLQuake even without using the disable VSync setting in PowerStrip. Monitor is at 60 Hz.

I retested the G450 in 3DMark99Max with D3D and OpenGL Vsync disabled, but the result was the same: 1257 3DMarks.

Powerstrip says the G450 PCI is running at 115.2 MHz core clock and 144 MHz memory. Any idea what the maximum stable core/memory clock would be for a) fanless, b) with a fan?

I tried 125/157 MHz, but 3DMarks recorded an even lower score of 507. What happened here? Clocks got pushed down?