First post, by Frunzl
Hi,
ever since I learned about the 16x AA and AF capabilities of the 5x, 6x and 7x Geforce series' Quadro cards, I've been wanting to build a PCIe system with the best possible image quality for (later) Win98 games.
I figure, I am not alone and I want to share a recent discovery.
I benchmarked a number of 7th gen cards on my X58 system (with a Xeon X5687 @ 4.75 GHz), namely the 7600 GT, 7900 GT, 7900 GTX, 7950 GX2, (two) Quadro FX 4500 and a Quadro FX 5500. None of them ran 3DMark2000 (freezes) and I attributed it to the sketchy, modified 82.69 drivers, you have to use with this generation under Win98 (seems to be "common knowledge" in many forum posts that 3DM2K simply doesnt work with these). There were some additional incompatibilities, for example, the Quadro FX 5500 refuses to start Unreal at all. No Idea, why.
Anyway, here's my discovery: some 7th gen cards can run 3DMark2000 after all!
I just got both my Quadro FX 4500 to complete it flawlessly by flashing older VBIOS versions. The cards are two different revisions. The VBIOS versions, which do manage to run 3DM2000 are listed below:
- Rev. A01 with double-sided VRAM and cooler on the back: 05.70.02.15.02
- Rev. A00 with single sided VRAM: 05.70.02.41.01
Both can be downloaded from techpowerup.
Maybe this can be of use to someone dealing with compatibility issues of the 7th gen cards under Win98.
If anyone is interested, I will post the benchmark results for all the different PCIe cards (5th, 6th, 7th gen), including max AA and AF. I am also in the process of trying different VBIOS versions for the Quadro FX 5500.