BigDaddyM wrote on 2020-04-25, 14:53:

What games do you aim at?

This would be my question as well!
Dos and RTS games The savage seems to be good option (not familiar with it myself)
Adding 3D titles though I'd probably want a TNT2, GF2 GF4 MX range.

As a rough idea my P2 400 came with a TNT card, following year parents got a C500 with TNT2, after which I upgraded the 400 with a GF2 MX.
and I'd say back then it was the graphics cards that were the bottleneck of the system over the CPU (unless you were rich)

Since I already tested tens of video cards on such a platform, I can - without a doubt - say that the absolute best video card (in terms of speed) for a Pentium 2 Deschutes/Pentium 3 Katmai is an nVidia GeForce 2 GTS/Pro, using driver version 7.76.
Don't think that a newer card will be faster, because it won't be. Newer cards require newer drivers, newer drivers are designed to work with newer CPUs, so they will run much slower on older platforms because of greater CPU overhead.
So my vote goes to GeForce 2 GTS/Pro + Voodoo 3 PCI (if you also want to play glide games).

kolderman wrote on 2020-03-31, 10:49:

Savage 4 is on the same performance level as Banshee\Voodoo2, so it's plenty fast for '98

I use a Diamond Stealth III S540 32MB AGP with Savage 4 Pro in one of my Retro builds. Good 2D/3D image quality, and also a good DOS VESA compatibility.

pixel_workbench wrote on 2020-04-16, 04:49:

After testing numerous Geforce cards, I would not recommend them for a Windows98 or DOS machine. Geforce4 Ti or MX have flickering in Build engine games at high resolutions. All Geforces have screen corruption in Midtown Madness.

Geforce cards and even FX should be good for 98. However I can confirm I also had these issues in Build engine on my AMD 64 4000+ tests for ultra high resolutions. Both the FX5900 and ti4200 had this issue but when I dropped to a Geforce 3 is ran perfectly, so it's not all Geforces.

What ultra resolutions do you see that happens (corruption and issues)?

1024x768 is not that high. 1280x1024 is borderline, but 1200x1600 and 1920x1080 are ultra high resolutions. Ironic that people are trying to do it at high resolutions with a older video card that is not up to this performance and older software often were not written with ultra resolution in mind.

Besides that makes things harder is ati/AMD GPUs has much more compatibility issues than geforce series?

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-04-28, 15:43:

What ultra resolutions do you see that happens (corruption and issues)? […]
Show full quote

What ultra resolutions do you see that happens (corruption and issues)?

1024x768 is not that high. 1280x1024 is borderline, but 1200x1600 and 1920x1080 are ultra high resolutions. Ironic that people are trying to do it at high resolutions with a older video card that is not up to this performance and older software often were not written with ultra resolution in mind.

Besides that makes things harder is ati/AMD GPUs has much more compatibility issues than geforce series?

Cheers,

Anything above 640x480, if I recall correctly. The thing is that with the DOS games it's not that you try to do high resolutions by using a more powerful GPU since these are all software rendered. The goal is to get the fastest single-core CPU possible - no such thing as too fast for this purpose - with the most compatible GPU. Dropping down to a Geforce 3 fixed the build engine games. On an A64 4000+ at 2.4ghz you get these kind of results... note that Blood's ingame FPS counter just gets whacked out at a few resolutions on a Geforce 3 still but the actual framerates are still good except for the 5:4 1280x1024... that bugs out.

Blood
320x200= 274FPS
640x480= ~60FPS
800x600 = 4FPS ... LIES, feels exactly the same as 640x480.
1024x768 = 24FPS ... more lies.. see above.
1280x1024 = 15FPS ... also lies but certain areas where it dips to 7FPS it feels like it is ~15.
1600x1200 = Locked 50 FPS, totally smooth

Duke3D @ 1600 x 1200 = 59/60FPS locked... perfectly smooth.

DOS/Software Quake

300x200 - 223.1 FPS
640x480 - 85.1 FPS
800x600 - 57.9 FPS
1024x768 - 40.5 FPS
1280x1024 - 41.9 FPS (not sure why but this is consistently higher than the lower resolution)

I'm not sure what kind of machine it would take to run 1280x1024 at 60+ but that machine would probably not even be able to get sound in DOS even with a decently compatible PCI soundcard.

The absolute monster for DOS software rendering is PCPBench at 1600x1200 with 32 bit color.

use NOLFB or NOLFBLIM to get rid of the flickering in duke3d (at some performance cost).

not sure why the compatibility matrix only shows this for 1280x1024 when it's definitely happening below that resolution, and certainly not just from gf4 onwards. i'm wondering if there's video BIOS differences with nvidia that could be related to this issue...

auron wrote on 2020-04-29, 04:48:

use NOLFB or NOLFBLIM to get rid of the flickering in duke3d (at some performance cost).

not sure why the compatibility matrix only shows this for 1280x1024 when it's definitely happening below that resolution, and certainly not just from gf4 onwards. i'm wondering if there's video BIOS differences with nvidia that could be related to this issue...

Even with NOLFB there was major tearing and other issues at higher resolutions beyond a Geforce 3.

Considering everything grab a geforce2 MX, not the 400 just the plain mx. It will use older drivers and speed is on par with a 256 SDR which would feel correct in an early P3 or late p2. Those chips weren't affordable until mid 99 anyway.

candle_86 wrote on 2020-04-30, 05:29:

Considering everything grab a geforce2 MX, not the 400 just the plain mx. It will use older drivers and speed is on par with a 256 SDR which would feel correct in an early P3 or late p2. Those chips weren't affordable until mid 99 anyway.

Why not the 400? Some of them are more powerful than the plain MX (albeit, not all of them, the 64 bit OEM versions are pure garbage, sometimes slower than the MX200).
But if you can find an MX 400 with a 128bit memory bus, 200 MHz GPU clock /200 MHz memory clock... it's PERFECT! Also, the same drivers that work for the plain MX also work for the MX400. In fact, the name for the card in Device Manager is GeForce 2 MX/MX400. Driver 7.76 is the fastest.

bloodem wrote on 2020-04-30, 07:41:

candle_86 wrote on 2020-04-30, 05:29:

Considering everything grab a geforce2 MX, not the 400 just the plain mx. It will use older drivers and speed is on par with a 256 SDR which would feel correct in an early P3 or late p2. Those chips weren't affordable until mid 99 anyway.

Why not the 400? Some of them are more powerful than the plain MX (albeit, not all of them, the 64 bit OEM versions are pure garbage, sometimes slower than the MX200).
But if you can find an MX 400 with a 128bit memory bus, 200 MHz GPU clock /200 MHz memory clock... it's PERFECT! Also, the same drivers that work for the plain MX also work for the MX400. In fact, the name for the card in Device Manager is GeForce 2 MX/MX400. Driver 7.76 is the fastest.

I think period correctness is his point there. The MX was released in 2000 alongside the GeForce2 Ultra and The MX400 was released in 2001 alongside GeForce2 Ti IIRC, around the time GeForce3 was released. It's about 1 year newer, maybe slightly more.

Oh, OK. That makes sense. Still, I would not discard the MX400 (again, talking about the good 128 bit ones). It's a very capable card to use either on Pentium 2 PCs, or Super socket 7.

pixel_workbench wrote on 2020-04-16, 04:49:

After testing numerous Geforce cards, I would not recommend them for a Windows98 or DOS machine. Geforce4 Ti or MX have flickering in Build engine games at high resolutions. All Geforces have screen corruption in Midtown Madness. Forcing AA&AF usually causes laggy or unresponsive mouse/keyboard in Half Life and NFS Porsche. Test Drive 5 would not render the track or cars. Blood 2 just launches to a black screen. Populous TB often has blurry/unreadable text unless you mess around with texel center alignment. Their DVI output is stupidly blurry in DOS. And the problems get only worse with later cards like the 6800 in Windows 98 games.

For games that would be playable on a P2-400, a TNT2 would offer good performance and compatibility. Maybe pick up a cheap Geforce2 MX to test how compatible it is with the games you want to play.

Later nvidia drivers break some games but still more compatible than ATI or Matrox cards. On Q3A with my Fx5500 +P3 550 caused some issues . GF2mx with a early drive was fine.

In this build I've tried some cards and found the G550 to be a "fast" Dx6 always compatible solution with a great vga output and supporting HD resolution too. I will try also a Geforce 2 MX (the original one), I've the Geforce SDR but I remember it was consuming much agp bus power and had the fan probably a bit too loud (old).
Then I may try the Radeon 9250 but I've also a Radeon DDR original to try.

Well, some specific Nvidia cards are horrible for DOS. I have ASUS GeForce 2 MX PCI on my hands which just refuse to work with any VESA mode in BUILD engine games.