I have a Pentium 3 1.4s @ 1.6 and even at that speed a GF4 Ti 4800 is CPU bound (Same with a FX 5700 Ultra) and the Athlon isn't going to fare much better at 1.5ghz regardless of GPU used, so unless you set unplayable resolutions and details to actually punish both GPUs, neither CPU has enough data pushing power to feed them cards at normal playable resolutions.

Try testing them on a setup where the CPU isn't being gimped, that 3700+ is capable of 2.2ghz so why underclock it ? if you want to know which GPU is the best performer then there is zero point in running a setup where the CPU becomes the bottle neck as both GPUs will give the same constrained results. (Both are overkill for any DX8 game you would want to run on 98se, the GF4 doesnt support DX9 so I guess that wont be included here)

98 has no issues with fast CPUs so again im confused why you are making the CPU the bottle neck.

As for games having problems with a fast CPU, thats a possibility but your GPU is also likely to be the problem too especially that FX GPU, the GF4 can work with a wider range of older drivers so for me its no contest for 98, that GF4 wins simply for that reason alone.

That said .. I actually wouldn't use either for 98se, I would just grab a 9600XT or 9800XT and use that instead, likely the 9600Xt as its a rock solid GPU for older gaming.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-06-18, 12:31:

I have some time to waste and since I want to build a "definitive windows 98 machine" and settle (if possible) once for all the issue between gf4 and 5.

You won't. Not like this. The discussion is not really about which generation is the better, but rather from which segment of the palette does the FX becomes better.
For example my opinion is, avoid every FX slower than FX5600 and there is no question about what is faster starting from FX5700 Ultra.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-06-18, 12:31:

Any suggestion about benchmarks is welcome, just I will consider ones with integrated benchmarks.

The more the merrier. Different games can develop issues. Also driver version matters a lot, see: NVIDIA GeForce FX driver testing on an Intel 440EX summary and report
The FX series (just like the GF4) has two revisions. The first can be used with older drivers (FX5200/5600/5800), the second are faster (FX5500/5700/5900).

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-06-18, 12:31:

I read the previous topics and someone said that the cpu over 2ghz could give issues with some games, that's why I decided to go with 1,5ghz but suggestions are welcome.

Never heard of that. Would be an interesting comparison between Intel and AMD CPUs since AMD back than had much higher IPC and ran at much lower clocks.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-06-18, 12:45:

I have a Pentium 3 1.4s @ 1.6 and even at that speed a GF4 Ti 4800 is CPU bound (Same with a FX 5700 Ultra) and the Athlon isn't going to fare much better at 1.5ghz regardless of GPU used

You do realize that the Athlon 64, even when running at 1.5 GHz, is going to be MUCH faster than your Pentium 3, right? 😀
Like, at 1.5 GHz, I expect the Athlon 64 to be similar to a Pentium 4 @ 3 GHz / Athlon XP 3000+, which is a very good match even for a top tier GeForce FX card.

bloodem wrote on 2022-06-18, 13:06:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-06-18, 12:45:

I have a Pentium 3 1.4s @ 1.6 and even at that speed a GF4 Ti 4800 is CPU bound (Same with a FX 5700 Ultra) and the Athlon isn't going to fare much better at 1.5ghz regardless of GPU used

You do realize that the Athlon 64, even when running at 1.5 GHz, is going to be MUCH faster than your Pentium 3, right? 😀
Like, at 1.5 GHz, I expect the Athlon 64 to be similar to a Pentium 4 @ 3 GHz / Athlon XP 3000+, which is a very good match even for a top tier GeForce FX card.

no doubt but that wasn't my point.

What you want is to make this about the C3 being faster than the K6-2 . .right 😜

/wink

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-06-18, 12:55:

The more the merrier. Different games can develop issues. Also driver version matters a lot, see: NVIDIA GeForce FX driver testing on an Intel 440EX summary and report
The FX series (just like the GF4) has two revisions. The first can be used with older drivers (FX5200/5600/5800), the second are faster (FX5500/5700/5900).

I have one of those "new' FX5500 cards you can still easily get in my Win98 rig and I was able to get the older 4X.XX series drivers working on it.

It was just a matter of finding two sections in the INF file that reference the Device IDs for the 5200 and I copied them and put in the IDs on my card. So far no issues

SScorpio wrote on 2022-06-18, 13:23:

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-06-18, 12:55:

The more the merrier. Different games can develop issues. Also driver version matters a lot, see: NVIDIA GeForce FX driver testing on an Intel 440EX summary and report
The FX series (just like the GF4) has two revisions. The first can be used with older drivers (FX5200/5600/5800), the second are faster (FX5500/5700/5900).

I have one of those "new' FX5500 cards you can still easily get in my Win98 rig and I was able to get the older 4X.XX series drivers working on it.

It was just a matter of finding two sections in the INF file that reference the Device IDs for the 5200 and I copied them and put in the IDs on my card. So far no issues

The question then becomes does using the older drivers actually change the benchmarks significantly from the newer drivers for GPUs that cant normally use the older drivers.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-06-18, 13:19:

no doubt but that wasn't my point.

Well, as I understood, your point was that the Athlon 64 CPU @ 1.5 GHz will be a bottleneck... which it won't be, especially not in conjunction with a GeForce 4 Ti.
Now, I'm also not a big fan of underclocking these CPUs (mostly because, even at their default speed, they're already running very cool and energy efficient for their time). But I know that some people do prefer this approach, and in this particular case, I don't find it offensive. 😀

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-06-18, 13:19:

What you want is to make this about the C3 being faster than the K6-2 . .right 😜

/wink

Don't need to do that anymore, the existing empirical data speaks for itself 😜
/wink

Yo boys boys... something is wrong...
I'm testing the gf4 ti42000 (at 4400) on X2 and I got those results at 1024x768x32: no aa no af: 32 fps, aa4 af8: 11 fps?!

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-06-18, 13:51:

Yo boys boys... something is wrong...
I'm testing the gf4 ti42000 (at 4400) on X2 and I got those results at 1024x768x32: no aa no af: 32 fps, aa4 af8: 11 fps?!

Are you sure the chipset driver was successfully installed?
Seems like the AGP driver is missing and you're running in "PCI mode". What does the nVIDIA display properties say when looking at the "bus type"?

SScorpio wrote on 2022-06-18, 13:23:

RandomStranger wrote on 2022-06-18, 12:55:

The more the merrier. Different games can develop issues. Also driver version matters a lot, see: NVIDIA GeForce FX driver testing on an Intel 440EX summary and report
The FX series (just like the GF4) has two revisions. The first can be used with older drivers (FX5200/5600/5800), the second are faster (FX5500/5700/5900).

I have one of those "new' FX5500 cards you can still easily get in my Win98 rig and I was able to get the older 4X.XX series drivers working on it.

It was just a matter of finding two sections in the INF file that reference the Device IDs for the 5200 and I copied them and put in the IDs on my card. So far no issues

Yeah, for the FX5500 that works, it's the same GPU as the 5200 with different BIOS. I also think that the 5900 maybe works with the old driver and only the 5950 doesn't. The 5700 is also a new GPU and won't work even with ini editing.

RandomStranger wrote:

the second are faster (FX5500/5700/5900).

5500 is rebadged FX5200 and works fine with manual install.

I also think that the 5900 maybe works with the old driver and only the 5950 doesn't.

5950 can work with any driver that has FX 5900 support.
Potentially, FX5700 could be disguised as FX5900. Or at least you could assemble hybrid driver, which keeps only important parts (D3D, OpenGL) as old as possible. It could be possible to fall back to initial FX 5800 driver release with that method.

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-06-18, 13:51:

Yo boys boys... something is wrong...
I'm testing the gf4 ti42000 (at 4400) on X2 and I got those results at 1024x768x32: no aa no af: 32 fps, aa4 af8: 11 fps?!

I suggest installing WinXP as a dual boot option and then comparing your benchmark results between Win98 and WinXP using the same drivers.

If you see a significant difference between the two (as in 50%) then you may have encountered the issue described in this thread: MSI K8T NEO-V + Athlon 64 - very slow 3D performance in Windows 98 (works great in Windows XP)

bloodem wrote on 2022-06-18, 13:56:

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-06-18, 13:51:

Yo boys boys... something is wrong...
I'm testing the gf4 ti42000 (at 4400) on X2 and I got those results at 1024x768x32: no aa no af: 32 fps, aa4 af8: 11 fps?!

Are you sure the chipset driver was successfully installed?
Seems like the AGP driver is missing and you're running in "PCI mode". What does the nVIDIA display properties say when looking at the "bus type"?

They are installed, nvidia says: agp 4x
For a change installing the via 4in1 is quite tricky since they must be installed one thing at time or the installation fails... I don't know... the result of 3dmark 2k is: 12379 is it good?

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-06-18, 13:51:

I suggest installing WinXP as a dual boot option and then comparing your benchmark results between Win98 and WinXP using the same drivers.

If you see a significant difference between the two (as in 50%) then you may have encountered the issue described in this thread: MSI K8T NEO-V + Athlon 64 - very slow 3D performance in Windows 98 (works great in Windows XP)

Thank you for the tip, apparently it's not the same thing since I get a result over 12k in 3dmark 2000

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-06-18, 12:45:

I have a Pentium 3 1.4s @ 1.6 and even at that speed a GF4 Ti 4800 is CPU bound (Same with a FX 5700 Ultra) and the Athlon isn't going to fare much better at 1.5ghz regardless of GPU used, so unless you set unplayable resolutions and details to actually punish both GPUs, neither CPU has enough data pushing power to feed them cards at normal playable resolutions.

In lower resolutions, where you aren't GPU bound, there will be a pretty high difference between the P3 and the A64.

My frame rate in 640x480 doubled when going from an AthlonXP 1700+ to an Athlon64 3000+ with using a GeForce4 Ti4200 in both cases.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-06-18, 14:11:

I suggest installing WinXP as a dual boot option and then comparing your benchmark results between Win98 and WinXP using the same drivers.

If you see a significant difference between the two (as in 50%) then you may have encountered the issue described in this thread: MSI K8T NEO-V + Athlon 64 - very slow 3D performance in Windows 98 (works great in Windows XP)

I thought about that too, but then I saw that his motherboard is the Asus A8V Deluxe, so it shouldn't be the case. I have the same motherboard and it's very fast in Win98, even with newer BIOS versions (though, I'm not entirely sure if I actually tested the last available BIOS).

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-06-18, 14:14:

They are installed, nvidia says: agp 4x
For a change installing the via 4in1 is quite tricky since they must be installed one thing at time or the installation fails... I don't know... the result of 3dmark 2k is: 12379 is it good?

Yeah, that 3DMark2k score sounds right.
PS: just saw that you are using the nVIDIA 5x.xx drivers. You'll get much better compatibility and even better performance if you downgrade to 45.23. My personal favorite Win98 driver for the AGP 4X versions of the GeForce 4 Ti cards is actually driver version 30.82.

bloodem wrote on 2022-06-18, 14:16:

I thought about that too, but then I saw that his motherboard is the Asus A8V Deluxe, so it shouldn't be the case. I have the sa […]
Show full quote

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-06-18, 14:11:

I suggest installing WinXP as a dual boot option and then comparing your benchmark results between Win98 and WinXP using the same drivers.

If you see a significant difference between the two (as in 50%) then you may have encountered the issue described in this thread: MSI K8T NEO-V + Athlon 64 - very slow 3D performance in Windows 98 (works great in Windows XP)

I thought about that too, but then I saw that his motherboard is the Asus A8V Deluxe, so it shouldn't be the case. I have the same motherboard and it's very fast in Win98, even with newer BIOS versions (though, I'm not entirely sure if I actually tested the last available BIOS).

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-06-18, 14:14:

They are installed, nvidia says: agp 4x
For a change installing the via 4in1 is quite tricky since they must be installed one thing at time or the installation fails... I don't know... the result of 3dmark 2k is: 12379 is it good?

Yeah, that 3DMark2k score sounds right.
PS: just saw that you are using the nVIDIA 5x.xx drivers. You'll get much better compatibility and even better performance if you downgrade to 45.23. My personal favorite Win98 driver for the AGP 4X versions of the GeForce 4 Ti cards is actually driver version 30.82.

I have chosen the that version because according to a phil's video with similar configuration he was unable to use the 45.23, but sure I can try them, any tip about how can I clean win98 from that drivers?
Thanks

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-06-18, 14:28:

I have chosen the that version because according to a phil's video with similar configuration he was unable to use the 45.23, but sure I can try them, any tip about how can I clean win98 from that drivers?
Thanks

Not sure which video that is, but any drivers that support that specific video card should work just fine.
Of course, there might be isolated cases where a certain motherboard is a bit more fussy, but those are exceptions, not the norm.

The nVIDIA driver uninstaller (in Add/Remove programs) generally works very well, though if you are planning on using this system for a long period of time, I would personally just bite the bullet and reinstall Win98 from scratch (if you don't have a clean Ghost image or similar).

I'm refering to this video: https://youtu.be/KtyLkfvozck?t=484

I'm going to try the classic way if I encounter any quirk I will start from scratch

Nemo1985 wrote on 2022-06-18, 14:40:

I'm refering to this video: https://youtu.be/KtyLkfvozck?t=484

Yeah, that was a strange issue, it might be related to a specific BIOS version that Phil is using, or maybe the "non-Deluxe" A8V board has some other quirks.
I've never had any driver issues with my Asus A8V Deluxe build on which I have an Athlon 64 4000+ and an nVIDIA GeForce FX 5900XT (with a forced installation of driver version 45.23).