The Ti4200 is faster and supports the DX8 feature set. The MX460 is slower and only supports the DX7 feature set.

For pre-2002 Win9x gaming, the DX8 features don't matter, but they do for later releases such as Morrowind.

Personally, I would save the GeForce 4 Ti 4200 for a faster build (something like an Athlon XP, or at least a Thunderbird/Tualatin) and go with the GeForce 4 MX 460 in this build. It's a great card that is more than capable of running most Win98 games at very high resolutions with 60+ FPS.

Regarding DOS, I seem to remember that the GeForce 4 MX will be slower than a GeForce 2 MX/MX400 (in later DOS games, where that matters), but they should still be more than playable, especially if you enable write combining.

Neverwinter Nights is quite heavy for any GeForce 4, if you use stencil shadows. Games like Warcraft III can work fine on Pentium 3 866, but fps won't be pretty in late game.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-06-26, 17:59:

Neverwinter Nights is quite heavy for any GeForce 4, if you use stencil shadows. Games like Warcraft III can work fine on Pentium 3 866, but fps won't be pretty in late game.

Those are definitely WinXP era games. I see that he has an overkill WinXP PC, he should play those games on it.

CoD2 definitely belongs to the overkill WinXP rig, it's a DirectX 9 game from late 2005. Even if it supports earlier api I have hard time to believe it's going to run well even on good ol' 1024x768.

'twas what I expected, then. The 4200 shall swap places with the 460 in the Dark Drawer of Assorted Parts for the time being, as soon as I figure out which one that is.

Next question is if I should expect any trouble squeezing an Audigy 2 ZS in there just for EAX in win98 and leaving the ISA cards for DOS (as in disabled in the win98 device manager)

All Audigy cards with DSP are fine for EAX.

Other than speed, there is one additional advantage to using a Ti4200 over a MX460 for Win9x gaming. The Ti4200 supports Environment Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM) while the MX460 does not.

Not many Win9x games use EMBM and in some cases it only works on Matrox G400 cards. But there are a few where it also works on a Ti4200. Drakan is one such game.

Swapped the MX 460 back in and was a bit surprised that the 3dMark 99 score went up by juuust a few points; 3dmark 2000 was only about 800-1k points behind the ti 4200, which isn't as bad as I thought it would be but probably means the GF4 Ti is gettin held back (as expected).

Just hoping having DX 8.1 installed on the system won't make anything act funky. Probably won't.

TehGuy wrote on 2022-06-29, 02:15:

Just hoping having DX 8.1 installed on the system won't make anything act funky. Probably won't.

Only thing I'm aware of that might have issues with anything past DirectX 7.0a are Aureal Vortex 2 sound cards and even that doesn't seem to be sure thing, driver specific I guess. So you should be fine.

TehGuy wrote on 2022-06-29, 02:15:

Just hoping having DX 8.1 installed on the system won't make anything act funky. Probably won't.

You should be fine, there are different DLLs for each version of DirectX and these kind of problems are mainly driver related.