VOGONS


First post, by TehGuy

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So I've been thinking about which one of the two GPUs in the topic title I should go with in my Slot 1 machine with the following specs

Coppermine PIII 866Mhz for Win98, 1.0AGHz Ezra-T for DOS things via compatible slotkets
Gigabyte GA-6BXC Rev 2.0
256MB PC133
Orpheus sound card
AWE64

I have both GPUs in question, so it's too late for anyone to tell me to not spend money 😀

From what I've gathered thus far, even though the 4200 supports DX8 it's not exactly great with it, which has me wonder if the 2-3 DX8 games I have that run under 98 will be better served on my XP machine or if I should bust out my P4 stuff and make a more dedicated 98 box to relegate this Slot 1 machine to DOS only, but I suppose I'll list off what I'm wanting to run on it leave that call to those more knowledgeable. I'm leaning towards the majority of what I want to play being fine on a MX 460 and slapping the 4200 in something else down the line or just running the few question titles on XP

I'm looking at some of the following at a desktop resolution of 1024x768 @ 85Hz, don't have to max it graphically but would prefer to or get close

Half-Life, plus xpacks
Morrowind
Dungeon Siege
Baldur's Gate + II
Neverwinter Nights
StarCraft + BW
Diablo + II
WarCraft III + FT
System Shock 2
Unreal
Deus Ex
The Sims
SimCity 3k
Monkey Island 1-3
Fallout 1 + 2
Incredible Machines
Myst, Riven, Myst III
Call of Duty (hopefully also CoD 2)
Medal of Honor
Quake 2
various other DOS games that I'm sure would run fine on even the GF2 MX200/MX400 I've got somewhere

and then possibly others as I get my hands on them, like FFVII, but I'm sure I'll know where to run them after this thread runs its course

Win98+DOS: C3 Ezra-T 1.0AGHz / P3-S 1.26GHz, 128MB RAM, AWE64 + Orpheus + Audigy 2 ZS, Ti 4200, 128GB SD card
Win XP SP3: C2Q 9650, 4GB RAM, X-Fi Titanium, GTX 750
PowerMac G4 QS 800MHz + GeForce4 Ti4200, OS 9
PowerMac G5 DP 1.8Ghz + ATi x800 XT, Leopard

Reply 1 of 11, by Joseph_Joestar

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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.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 2 of 11, by bloodem

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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.

1 x PLCC-68 / 2 x PGA132 / 5 x Skt 3 / 9 x Skt 7 / 12 x SS7 / 1 x Skt 8 / 14 x Slot 1 / 5 x Slot A
5 x Skt 370 / 8 x Skt A / 2 x Skt 478 / 2 x Skt 754 / 3 x Skt 939 / 7 x LGA775 / 1 x LGA1155
Current PC: Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Backup PC: Core i7 7700k

Reply 3 of 11, by The Serpent Rider

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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.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 4 of 11, by bloodem

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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.

1 x PLCC-68 / 2 x PGA132 / 5 x Skt 3 / 9 x Skt 7 / 12 x SS7 / 1 x Skt 8 / 14 x Slot 1 / 5 x Slot A
5 x Skt 370 / 8 x Skt A / 2 x Skt 478 / 2 x Skt 754 / 3 x Skt 939 / 7 x LGA775 / 1 x LGA1155
Current PC: Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Backup PC: Core i7 7700k

Reply 5 of 11, by Sombrero

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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.

Reply 6 of 11, by TehGuy

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'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)

Win98+DOS: C3 Ezra-T 1.0AGHz / P3-S 1.26GHz, 128MB RAM, AWE64 + Orpheus + Audigy 2 ZS, Ti 4200, 128GB SD card
Win XP SP3: C2Q 9650, 4GB RAM, X-Fi Titanium, GTX 750
PowerMac G4 QS 800MHz + GeForce4 Ti4200, OS 9
PowerMac G5 DP 1.8Ghz + ATi x800 XT, Leopard

Reply 7 of 11, by The Serpent Rider

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All Audigy cards with DSP are fine for EAX.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 8 of 11, by Joseph_Joestar

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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.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
PC#2: AthlonXP 2100+ / ECS K7VTA3 / Voodoo3 / Audigy2 / Vortex2
PC#3: Athlon64 3400+ / Asus K8V-MX / 5900XT / Audigy2
PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 970 / X-Fi

Reply 9 of 11, by TehGuy

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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.

Win98+DOS: C3 Ezra-T 1.0AGHz / P3-S 1.26GHz, 128MB RAM, AWE64 + Orpheus + Audigy 2 ZS, Ti 4200, 128GB SD card
Win XP SP3: C2Q 9650, 4GB RAM, X-Fi Titanium, GTX 750
PowerMac G4 QS 800MHz + GeForce4 Ti4200, OS 9
PowerMac G5 DP 1.8Ghz + ATi x800 XT, Leopard

Reply 10 of 11, by Sombrero

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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.

Reply 11 of 11, by Gmlb256

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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.

VIA C3 Nehemiah 1.2A @ 1.46 GHz | ASUS P2-99 | 256 MB PC133 SDRAM | GeForce2 GTS 32 MB | Voodoo2 12 MB | SBLive! | AWE64 | SBPro2 | GUS