Rikintosh wrote on 2022-06-03, 17:18:

As I said, for Win9x the best choice is still GF4. Every nvidia FX line was a mistake.

Uhm.... this is not true, especially not as a general rule. There are very good FX cards that are objectively better in every possible way, while also having the same excellent Win98 compatibility that the GeForce 4 Ti has.
The high-end FX models allow you to play most Win98 games at 1920 x 1440 x 32 with 60+ (usually 100+) FPS. The GeForce 4 Ti series can generally also handle 60 FPS at this resolution, but in fewer games.

We all know that the GeForce FX was a pretty disappointing series of cards (mostly because of how good the ATI's Radeon 9700/9800 series turned out to be + the fact that the FX came too late to the party), but we still need to acknowledge that the high-end models are some (if not THE) best cards that one can use on a Win98 retro rig.

Don't get me wrong, I also love the GeForce 4 Ti cards, but facts are facts.

The bad name of the FX is a mix of bad DirectX9 performance back then (compated to ATI) and a lot of mutilated budget cards.
Aside of the known garbage cards (anything 5200/5500, almost anything XT, LE or VE) they are good for pre-XP.
Problem is, known good FX series cards are usually much more rare and expensive than Geforce 4 cards. You need at least an FX5700 to match or beat the TOP GF4 cards.

So FX 5600/Ultra; FX5700/Ultra or any 5800 or 59x0 series cards are good. At least as good as a Ti4200.

FX cards were fine as long you didn't try to use them for DX9, which is unfortunately precisely what they were designed/manufactured/advertised for.....
Yes the high mid tier and high end cards performed fine, when competing against the previous generation cards, but that is hardly a notable achievement.
When that is the best thing that can be said about them then I'm sorry but they were, objectively speaking, bad products.

Jasin Natael wrote on 2022-06-03, 19:40:

FX cards were fine as long you didn't try to use them for DX9, which is unfortunately precisely what they were designed/manufactured/advertised for.....
Yes the high mid tier and high end cards performed fine, when competing against the previous generation cards, but that is hardly a notable achievement.
When that is the best thing that can be said about them then I'm sorry but they were, objectively speaking, bad products.

I think that horse has been dead for quite a while now. The point is, they are acceptable cards for a DX7/8 PC for retrogaming.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-06-03, 20:28:

Jasin Natael wrote on 2022-06-03, 19:40:

FX cards were fine as long you didn't try to use them for DX9, which is unfortunately precisely what they were designed/manufactured/advertised for.....
Yes the high mid tier and high end cards performed fine, when competing against the previous generation cards, but that is hardly a notable achievement.
When that is the best thing that can be said about them then I'm sorry but they were, objectively speaking, bad products.

I think that horse has been dead for quite a while now. The point is, they are acceptable cards for a DX7/8 PC for retrogaming.

More than acceptable. It's like they were made for legacy rather than for (back then) modern stuff.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-06-03, 20:28:

Jasin Natael wrote on 2022-06-03, 19:40:

FX cards were fine as long you didn't try to use them for DX9, which is unfortunately precisely what they were designed/manufactured/advertised for.....
Yes the high mid tier and high end cards performed fine, when competing against the previous generation cards, but that is hardly a notable achievement.
When that is the best thing that can be said about them then I'm sorry but they were, objectively speaking, bad products.

I think that horse has been dead for quite a while now. The point is, they are acceptable cards for a DX7/8 PC for retrogaming.

Very true, and probably the only point worth making at this juncture.

Yes, but the few decent cards, like the FX5700 are very expensive and are little better than a 4200ti (very little). Above FX5700 you would have to be willing to open a fat wallet and dump the value of two good agp cards or more. This makes them unfeasible from a functional point of view, and only applicable to enthusiasts who want to have one on the shelf, or something. geforce fx5950 ultra is a good card, but it's so rare and expensive, it's almost a legend (not to get into the overheating subject). The only advantage of the FX line over gf4 was the additional features (like dx9) but that's not an advantage if you're not running an XP system.

Nvidia created much weaker products for its low-end line, and that was one of the problems that burned the image of the FX line. The GF4 4200, which used to be a good price card (below it, there were the MX, which were basically GF2), but with the FX line, the good price card became 5600, so they created fx5200 and fx5500 (5500 it was like a faster fx5200) they were supposed to be the extremely low cost line to follow the MX, but the nomenclature led the public to buy them thinking it was the successor to the 4200, and that led many people to feel wronged.

This nomenclature has been used in recent years and we are used to it today, so for better understanding, think of the 4200 as a "Geforce GT/FX 4600" and the 4600 as a "Geforce GTX/FX 4800".

People sounded like they were talking about DX 9 for FX series. Not in this case, I wanted and others interested about performance how they compare using DX 6, 7 and 8 using FX 5600, FX 5700, for high end FX 5800 and FX 5900 compared to ti 4200 and MX 440/460?

Cheers,

I think both GPUs are probably a bit fast for this machine. My 700mhz class P3 uses a Geforce 4 MX 440 (full speed version) and it performs fine.

I'd choose the 4200ti between those 2 options though.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-06-03, 22:49:

People sounded like they were talking about DX 9 for FX series. Not in this case, I wanted and others interested about performance how they compare using DX 6, 7 and 8 using FX 5600, FX 5700, for high end FX 5800 and FX 5900 compared to ti 4200 and MX 440/460?

Depends on settings. Without AA and AF 5600 can be slower than 4200.

Rikintosh wrote on 2022-06-03, 22:25:

Yes, but the few decent cards, like the FX5700 are very expensive and are little better than a 4200ti (very little). Above FX5700 you would have to be willing to open a fat wallet and dump the value of two good agp cards or more.

These days the FX5700 is the bang/buck champion (alongside with the full-speed MX440). Those go for around the same price as the Ti4200 while offering on average 20% higher performance and in some cases 50% (in my personal experience with a Barton 2800+). That's not nothing. Geforce 4 is also expensive from starting Ti4400 and in the past 3 years the prices of the Ti4200 quadrupled.

The fastest MX440 is roughly equivalent to FX5200 in terms of texture rate, but with half the pixel rate. Far behind Ti4200. I would use them for early PIII Katmai.

AlexZ wrote on 2022-06-04, 10:23:

The fastest MX440 is roughly equivalent to FX5200 in terms of texture rate, but with half the pixel rate. Far behind Ti4200. I would use them for early PIII Katmai.

Exactly, every MX series is designed to be cost effective. But for a pentium 3, even an MX is pretty generous. We should also remember that there was no AGP 8x, so any modern card will not benefit from the bandwidth.

At the time I had a pentium 3 800 or 900mhz, with an MX4000 128mb, which made me very happy for several years.