I’ll try it tomorrow after work on my P3.

Make sure you're not using some later fanmade 'fixed' version with some modern wrapper DLL attached.

It's the official Dawn from NVIDIA's website. Its not a fan wrapper.

Alright I just downloaded dawn from the internet archive, copying to my P3/98SE machine right now.

EDIT - Got an illegal operation error when I ran the "Dawn Ultra" shortcut in the start menu.
EDIT 2 - Attached screenshot. This is on a CUBX-E motherboard with a Tualatin 1.4GHZ P3-S, 512MB of ram and a FX5900XT, driver version 56.64

Looking forward to getting some more data on this.

I get the same result as pete8475 but on different hardware. I've tried two demos on two FX cards: Dawn (sourced from Archive.org) and Vulcan (sourced from Nvidia).

XP 2800+ - Barton 333
Asus A7V333 - KT333
512MB 333 CL2
FX5500 and FX5900U
Win98SE - Vanilla
45.23 Detonator - lines added for FX5500

This is going to sound silly, but have you tried setting the computer clock back to the early 2000s? Maybe there’s some bizarre date-related calculation in there that never imagined running in 2021…

I don't think any of the demos run on Windows 98 or ME. I thought it had to do with SSE being required but it still crashes with a Pentium 3.

Usually it's fairy.exe that crashes but once I had it crash in cg.dll. I don't remember on what hardware this was but it would have been something completely different like an SiS or Via chipset.

LightStruk makes a good point about the date. I'll have to try that.

I tried it with my P4 2.8, 98SE with an FX5600 56.64 driver, and I had the same error as the others. I tried Kernel EX set for Windows 2000 SP4, but that made no difference.

Just to be sure, I tried it on my Socket A /XP system with a 6800GS, and it ran with no issues.

I'm having issues with the Dawn demo on my ASUS P2B 440BX even on Windows XP. With driver 81.98 the demo straight up crashes. With the latest driver 175.19 I get a popup saying that I'm missing a number of features and that I need a GeForce FX card. The results were the same with a FX 5600 and 5950.

I also tried my GeForce 6600 on this same system and Windows blue screened when launching Dawn but Unreal and 3DMark2001 work fine.

There seems to be some kind of issue with these older chipsets beyond just Windows 9x compatibility.

The reason this was crashing and the error is misleading. These features are not available on later versions of the drivers without SSE but the error incorrectly says that it's your video card that is missing the features. Earlier versions of the driver after version 56.64 will instead just crash, corrupt, or blue screen when a driver path tries to use SSE when it isn't present.