Matrox Millennium? (MGA-2064W)
Tho you will need an 8MB version.
Then there's VooDoo3, very nice output.
Also you have plenty of nVidia alternatives.
The ramdac quality varies depending on who made it tho.

Seconding the Millennium. The DOS achilles' heel is moot under NT and you get a period correct sharp VGA image with nice high res support. Mystiques and even G100A are also good Millennium substitutes. They're fine, as long as you don't care about primary D3D/GL 3d gaming and want to use a Voodoo Graphics/2 to handle that.

doesn't voodoo D3D not work on NT?

Would probably be moot when DirectX itself hardly works on NT. 😀

Most of the 90s' Windows 95/98 games excluded NT support. idTech 2/3 and UnrealEngine1 stuff usually were guaranteed for NT4 support and don't need Direct3D anyway. But since the OP's first sentences it doesn't really matter anyhow, though...if the desire is there to ruin productivity, then there you go. 😀

I’ve had really good luck with radeon 7500 on pci and radeon 9000 (series) on agp

Seems like 3dfx glide supported NT before dos/9x.

Heck some of their workstation/cad offerings were stuck on NT drivers

leileilol wrote on 2022-07-17, 02:59:

Would probably be moot when DirectX itself hardly works on NT. 😀

Most of the 90s' Windows 95/98 games excluded NT support. idTech 2/3 and UnrealEngine1 stuff usually were guaranteed for NT4 support and don't need Direct3D anyway. But since the OP's first sentences it doesn't really matter anyhow, though...if the desire is there to ruin productivity, then there you go. 😀

IIRC WinXp was the first NT variant with full DirectX, though win 2K did mostly support it fine by the last service release.

Win2K shipped with DirectX 7. I find it almost indistinguishable to XP for games. It's probably faster than XP. But NT 5 was a pretty shaky experience initially because games and game hardware weren't really tested on NT. It was a bit like Vista days. Lots of problems that needed to be fixed by all parties.

Win2K is pretty heavy for any Socket 7 setup though. You want at least 128MB RAM. It's gonna be laggy unless you are running a K6-III. Probably even then.

NT 4 is the one with very weak DirectX support but it is much lighter than 2K.

Thanks for all the tips!

The Matrox Millennium with PCI and 8MB RAM seems to be rare as hen teeth, I wondered if it even exists, but I will keep my eyes open.
Unfortunately this system has some more issues I´m working on t the moment, so I´m not in a hurry.

I also took a closer look at one of my "Matrox G55MDDAP32DBF" and it seems like there´s a place for the card´s own 3.3V regulator at the upper-right edge.
I´ll porulate the missing parts and if I´m lucky it works in the old PCI 2.0 slots.

There was also a version with 3.3V regulator on the market, but I can´t find any high-res pictures so far.

This story finally found a happy ending.
First I added the 2nd regulator on the G550 low profile card. It´s now working in non-PCI 2.2 mainboards but I can´t use it on my Gigabyte GA-586DX, because I can´t install any windows drivers. The setup / WIN2K complains about "not enough informations in BIOS, contact your hardware reseller" (or something like that), so it seems the Gigabyte BIOS won´t provide the necessary ID / data for PCI 2.2 video cards.

Finally I got my hands on a MATROX Millenium II G200 ( G2+ /MSDP/8B/20) with 8 MB RAM (SDRAM). I now enjoy my 1600 x 1200 display with true color @ 60 Hz and a superb picture quality.

(There´s still a persistent network issue that I´ll be addressing in a seperate topic)