Right now I'm using a 4MB S3 Virge DX in my Pentium MMX 200 (soon to be 233) w/ Win95C. It's pretty good for 2D games and Quake era 3D games, but I need more juice.
Currently looking at a Matrox G200 8MB. But it apparently has awful OpenGL support unless you do some driver swapping with a later card.
What's the best bang for the buck on PCI video card? I would like to play Quake 2 at least.
A quick glance on ebay shows plenty of PCI Rage128 cards out there for $40 or less and they would be a huge upgrade over that Virge.
Ok I'll look into a Rage 128. How's the 2D on them? I still want to play DOS games and from my limited research some 3D cards actually have bugs when playing older 2D games.
Ideally you would get a voodoo 3 or a voodoo banshee. Otherwise, just about an geforce PCI card FX series or older will also work. It doesn't matter so much which one because you will be CPU constrained on most of those cards.
2D quality is solid, you can find AnandTech's original review from back at release over there still. Phil did a nice review over here a couple years back as well (ATI Rage 128 Pro - Better than expected!). If you can find a Rage128 Pro they are clocked higher, a good 33% or so if I remember correctly, but they may or may not be as numerous out there.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Diablotek-ATI-Rage-1 … lwAAOSwIIZdgNyP
How about this one? Is this standard PCI?
I bought a 8mb Rage XL that was labeled as PCI but I couldn't get it to work.
Looks solid to me, should perform just a touch behind something like a Voodoo 3 or a Tnt2. What CPU are you pairing it with?
Pentium MMX 200 and 233. I have a VT-503 Socket 7 mobo and as far as I know, the MMX 233 is the fastest CPU that fits.
The card is overkill for the CPU, but I'm fine with it.
I bought a 8mb Rage XL that was labeled as PCI but I couldn't get it to work.
I don't know much about Rage cards but I think the "Rage XL" was a late derivation that was marketed as cheap low power graphics for servers. It was onboard many server motherboards in the mid-2000s. There's one on my Socket-940 Opteron server, and I saw the same on many other servers of that period when I was shopping for them.
A PCI card containing that chip is probably from the same time period, much later than the other Rage products, probably intended for basic utilitarian purpose on P4/etc era systems.
Maybe they introduced some compatibility problems that makes the XL unusable with the systems you'd actually *want* to use a Rage with.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/ATI-Rage-XL-8MB-PCI- … Q8IAAOSwcTddN8C~
It's this card I got burned on. I can't use it for anything.
TSG wrote on 2021-04-17, 02:19:It's this card I got burned on. I can't use it for anything.
Does it play VGA games in DOS, do 1280 high color in Windows 98, and work in Socket7 through Core2 systems?
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/
This list is mostly edge cases, so don't read too deep into it. S3 and Cirrus Logic cards are the best, Voodoo cards with 2d just below that, Nvidia is also pretty good. ATI isn't that great and neither is matrox.
mothergoose729 wrote on 2021-04-17, 20:58:https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/
This list is mostly edge cases, so don't read too deep into it. S3 and Cirrus Logic cards are the best, Voodoo cards with 2d just below that, Nvidia is also pretty good. ATI isn't that great and neither is matrox.
Also newer card (as in post 2000-ish) are more lilkely to have issues, no matter the brand .
The list includes as late as the 6800gs (2004) but it doesn't include any more modern ATI cards. Anecdotally, I haven't heard good things about DOS on a few of them. I am using an FX Quadro 1000 (similiar to an FX 5800) and while I have run into a few VGA issues, it is pretty close to 95% compatibility with me so far.
For DOS/windows hybrid I think Voodoo cards are the best, but if you need something more affordable than nvidia cards are also a good choice.
