dionb wrote on 2023-10-28, 08:52:

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-10-28, 06:04:

[...]

As great as this accomplishment is from historical perspective I wouldnt use one now 😀, its just a cost reduced version of contemporary Nvidia high end chip.

Depends on the build and what you're trying to do. For best 1999 performance, no, not a chance. For a recreation of what you might actually have had back then: quite likely (I definitely did), and for an AGP based DOS system with max VESA support, you can do much worse. Of course a lot of those card had crappy analog components resulting in blurry output - but given the main alternative for such a build were S3 cards infamous for the same, in both cases it's a matter of finding a low end card from a good brand.

BTW which analog components would cause a blurry image? Are they easily replacable? I have a couple of Virge cards and am planning to put them to use. Don't mind modding them.

I love the M64 series. Why?

Compatibility. Pure DOS VGA and VESA will run great.
Windows 9x and early d3d games run fine at modest resolutions. Ofc with low driver versions so there's little CPU overhead.

They just work. Never ever I've encountered a system that refuses to run with one of these unless the M64 was broken itself. So basically ideal for troubleshooting.

Low power usage. Not a chance of overheating any motherboard (as your Ti4200 may on certain boards)

Lots of OEM versions on the market, so they are cheap.

Fast compared to most of first gen cards, like Trident or S3 Trio3D

Mostly no worries about capacitors.

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-25, 01:46:

Thanks a lot! So likely a high PII/low PIII, like a 440BX-based system, right?

I'd say any P3 should be fine, even late models. I found one in a P3-1GHz system at e-waste; it even had a Post-it note with specs:

IMHO no translation needed. 😉

P3-1GHz was released (March 2000) just a quarter after TNT2 M64 (October 1999) so it was very reasonable for a casual gamer picking up this budget accelerator.

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-25, 01:46:

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-10-24, 19:58:

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-24, 19:36:

Thief 2 was based on Quake 2 if I remember it right. The Dark Project was based on Quake 1.

No.

Both games used the proprietary Dark Engine, which was developed in-house by Looking Glass Studios. The version of the engine used in Thief 2 is much more advanced, and therefore has steeper hardware requirements.

Guess my whole life has been a lie then 😁 I grew up believing Thief used a modified version of the Quake engine.

IIRC the Dark engine was superior than the contemporary Quake engine by offering the player character to pick up items above one's head (e.g. on a bookshelf) and climb up ledges, making it far more suitable for stealthy gameplays (Thief series, System Shock 2) when Quake engine required the player to step onto an item in order to "pick it up." It was funny and frustrating at the same time in Quake/Quake 2 seeing a health pack sitting on an elevated platform just 5-feet tall but you must find an alternative path to reach it as the platform was "too tall to jump on."

dormcat wrote on 2023-10-29, 03:57:

P3-1GHz was released (March 2000) just a quarter after TNT2 M64 (October 1999) so it was very reasonable for a casual gamer picking up this budget accelerator.

It's less likely that someone would buy a brand new system with a top of the line (for the time) 1 GHz CPU and pair it with a budget GPU. Unless they were a business oriented user interested in some minor gaming on the side, I suppose. In the year 2000, the M64 would have more realistically been included with Celeron and Duron builds.

Also, the M64 can use some very early Nvidia drivers like 2.08 and 3.68, which work quite well with slower CPUs. It's a good fit for pretty much anything ranging from a Pentium MMX 233, K6-2+ 450 and a Celeron 466. On more powerful systems (500+ MHz), the M64 will act as a GPU bottleneck.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-10-29, 05:09:

Unless they were a business oriented user interested in some minor gaming on the side, I suppose.

That's what I meant.

What puzzled me was its HDD: that Hitachi (HGST) Deskstar HDS728080PLAT20 was made in December 2005, far newer than any other component. The common capacity for HDD in 2000 was 13-20 GB; it probably got upgraded years later.

dormcat wrote on 2023-10-29, 03:57:

I'd say any P3 should be fine, even late models. I found one in a P3-1GHz system at e-waste; it even had a Post-it note with spe […]
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songoffall wrote on 2023-10-25, 01:46:

Thanks a lot! So likely a high PII/low PIII, like a 440BX-based system, right?

I'd say any P3 should be fine, even late models. I found one in a P3-1GHz system at e-waste; it even had a Post-it note with specs:
IMG_20231029_110846.jpg
IMHO no translation needed. 😉

P3-1GHz was released (March 2000) just a quarter after TNT2 M64 (October 1999) so it was very reasonable for a casual gamer picking up this budget accelerator.

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-25, 01:46:

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-10-24, 19:58:

No.

Both games used the proprietary Dark Engine, which was developed in-house by Looking Glass Studios. The version of the engine used in Thief 2 is much more advanced, and therefore has steeper hardware requirements.

Guess my whole life has been a lie then 😁 I grew up believing Thief used a modified version of the Quake engine.

IIRC the Dark engine was superior than the contemporary Quake engine by offering the player character to pick up items above one's head (e.g. on a bookshelf) and climb up ledges, making it far more suitable for stealthy gameplays (Thief series, System Shock 2) when Quake engine required the player to step onto an item in order to "pick it up." It was funny and frustrating at the same time in Quake/Quake 2 seeing a health pack sitting on an elevated platform just 5-feet tall but you must find an alternative path to reach it as the platform was "too tall to jump on."

Yeah, but I have a lot of AGP graphics cards at this point, so I'd rather just avoid bottlenecks.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-10-29, 05:09:

dormcat wrote on 2023-10-29, 03:57:

P3-1GHz was released (March 2000) just a quarter after TNT2 M64 (October 1999) so it was very reasonable for a casual gamer picking up this budget accelerator.

It's less likely that someone would buy a brand new system with a top of the line (for the time) 1 GHz CPU and pair it with a budget GPU. Unless they were a business oriented user interested in some minor gaming on the side, I suppose. In the year 2000, the M64 would have more realistically been included with Celeron and Duron builds.

And lower priced PIII builds, too. When I got mine with a Dell PIII 700 in June 2000, the TNT2 M64 was the second or third cheapest video card option, I forget what the next option up was, either a full-fledged TNT2 or a GeForce GTS, but it was quite a bit more money. And video cards are relatively easy to upgrade and were improving dramatically every year or less at the time, so... if you're looking for a way to save a few bucks, you can always figure you'll upgrade to a GeForce 3 a year later.

At our university, one of the more high end systems (that ran Windows XP) was a PIII 700, and that was in 2002 I think. By then I had my P4 1.8GHz with GeForce2 MX200. I remember the university computers having a variety of graphics cards, like someone had cobbled together everything they had in stock. Quite a lot of them had SiS onboard video. It was terrible. Some had S3 cards. Some had Riva TNT. Riva TNT was the best of the bunch - I remember playing Max Payne and Sims 1 on them, not maxed out, of course, but we rarely maxed anything out those days.

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-28, 10:36:

[...]

BTW which analog components would cause a blurry image? Are they easily replacable? I have a couple of Virge cards and am planning to put them to use. Don't mind modding them.

Tricky, we're talking analog circuitry here, things like trace length & thickness, location and value of filter caps. You could potentially replace poor caps, but if they're in bad positions or traces are too close together it won't help much.

Typical of bad TNT2 cards is colours shifted so red, green and blue aren't exactly aimed at the same location. This effect is particularly pronounced at high resolutions.

For bad S3 cards, typically contrast is low and everything appears washed-out and whitish.

There's no hard and fast rule to identify good or bad cards, but this is one case where brand matters. Brands like Canopus, Diamond, Elsa, Miro, Number Nine and STB generally had good designs, even on their lower-end cards. Conversely a lot of Taiwanese brands had uniformly bad cards, even brands that later moved into the high-end.

dionb wrote on 2023-10-29, 18:52:

There's no hard and fast rule to identify good or bad cards, but this is one case where brand matters. Brands like Canopus, Diamond, Elsa, Miro, Number Nine and STB generally had good designs, even on their lower-end cards. Conversely a lot of Taiwanese brands had uniformly bad cards, even brands that later moved into the high-end.

I have a Union S3 Virge/DX and a Flagpoint S3 Virge/GX2, haven't tried them yet so I don't know if they'll be good or bad. But the Virge/GX2 card itself is quite silly, to be honest - it's AGP, and I can't imagine why anyone with AGP would use a Virge.

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-29, 18:58:

[...]

I have a Union S3 Virge/DX and a Flagpoint S3 Virge/GX2, haven't tried them yet so I don't know if they'll be good or bad. But the Virge/GX2 card itself is quite silly, to be honest - it's AGP, and I can't imagine why anyone with AGP would use a Virge.

Back in the day it wasn't silly - Virge/GX2 was at least competitive in 1997 when AGP systems first started appearing. Consider that the competition at the time was cards like the ATi Rage II, Matrox Millennium II; the Rage II was priced and performed comparably, had more problematic drivers and while the Millennium II significantly outperformed both, it was a lot more expensive and neither of the alternatives played nice with DOS VESA, which was still a thing in 1997.

It wasn't until high-end 3D was integrated into VGA chipsets (i.e. Voodoo3, Rage128 and TNT era) that it wasn't a valid mid-range option that could be paired with Voodoo or M3D . Even afterwards, there was a good place for it in the low end until cheap and decent integrated 3D was a thing - with 1999's TNT2 M64. So for almost two years an AGP Virge/GX2 made more than enough sense.

In fact, I have one, a Diamond Stealth 3D 4000, in my late DOS machine with P3-500. Its VESA compatibility is as good as it gets and Diamond has (unusually for Virge cards, as with TNT2-M64) engineered the analog parts well.

dionb wrote on 2023-10-30, 00:17:

Back in the day it wasn't silly - Virge/GX2 was at least competitive in 1997 when AGP systems first started appearing. Consider […]
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songoffall wrote on 2023-10-29, 18:58:

[...]

I have a Union S3 Virge/DX and a Flagpoint S3 Virge/GX2, haven't tried them yet so I don't know if they'll be good or bad. But the Virge/GX2 card itself is quite silly, to be honest - it's AGP, and I can't imagine why anyone with AGP would use a Virge.

Back in the day it wasn't silly - Virge/GX2 was at least competitive in 1997 when AGP systems first started appearing. Consider that the competition at the time was cards like the ATi Rage II, Matrox Millennium II; the Rage II was priced and performed comparably, had more problematic drivers and while the Millennium II significantly outperformed both, it was a lot more expensive and neither of the alternatives played nice with DOS VESA, which was still a thing in 1997.

It wasn't until high-end 3D was integrated into VGA chipsets (i.e. Voodoo3, Rage128 and TNT era) that it wasn't a valid mid-range option that could be paired with Voodoo or M3D . Even afterwards, there was a good place for it in the low end until cheap and decent integrated 3D was a thing - with 1999's TNT2 M64. So for almost two years an AGP Virge/GX2 made more than enough sense.

In fact, I have one, a Diamond Stealth 3D 4000, in my late DOS machine with P3-500. Its VESA compatibility is as good as it gets and Diamond has (unusually for Virge cards, as with TNT2-M64) engineered the analog parts well.

Thing is, I don't think Virge saturates PCI's bandwidth. And early AGP motherboards still had PCI slots and could use PCI cards. So making a PCI Virge would cover both older and newer motherboards. That's the silly part. There's no reason to make an APG Virge except for, I don't know, marketing reasons?

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-30, 03:25:

[...]

Thing is, I don't think Virge saturates PCI's bandwidth. And early AGP motherboards still had PCI slots and could use PCI cards. So making a PCI Virge would cover both older and newer motherboards. That's the silly part. There's no reason to make an APG Virge except for, I don't know, marketing reasons?

A PC runs more than just a VGA card on the PCI bus - it's shared with storage (IDE/SCSI), network and anything else that hogs bandwidth. Even if VGA alone cannot fill the bus, it is a leading driver of congestion. Moving it off the PCI bus reduces that congestion a lot in a system that's also doing a lot of I/O.

Moreover, it was hardly unique in not filling the PCI bus - the first cards that really benefited from AGP came in 1999; even the Voodoo3 performed almost identically on PCI vs AGP.

Don't also forget the physical advantage - back in the day you needed a lot more cards in an average system than you do today. A typical LX or early BX board (the kind of places you would find a GX2) only had 4 PCI slots. They tended to fill up pretty quickly - think modem, network, 3D accelerator, maybe second 3D accelerator if you were rich, SCSI, sound etc. If you had an AGP slot, you wanted to get your VGA into it to free up PCI for other stuff that had to be on PCI. My main build around 2000 had all 6 PCI slots stuffed, as inconceivable as that may now seem.

dionb wrote on 2023-10-30, 07:43:

A PC runs more than just a VGA card on the PCI bus - it's shared with storage (IDE/SCSI), network and anything else that hogs ba […]
Show full quote

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-30, 03:25:

[...]

Thing is, I don't think Virge saturates PCI's bandwidth. And early AGP motherboards still had PCI slots and could use PCI cards. So making a PCI Virge would cover both older and newer motherboards. That's the silly part. There's no reason to make an APG Virge except for, I don't know, marketing reasons?

A PC runs more than just a VGA card on the PCI bus - it's shared with storage (IDE/SCSI), network and anything else that hogs bandwidth. Even if VGA alone cannot fill the bus, it is a leading driver of congestion. Moving it off the PCI bus reduces that congestion a lot in a system that's also doing a lot of I/O.

Moreover, it was hardly unique in not filling the PCI bus - the first cards that really benefited from AGP came in 1999; even the Voodoo3 performed almost identically on PCI vs AGP.

Don't also forget the physical advantage - back in the day you needed a lot more cards in an average system than you do today. A typical LX or early BX board (the kind of places you would find a GX2) only had 4 PCI slots. They tended to fill up pretty quickly - think modem, network, 3D accelerator, maybe second 3D accelerator if you were rich, SCSI, sound etc. If you had an AGP slot, you wanted to get your VGA into it to free up PCI for other stuff that had to be on PCI. My main build around 2000 had all 6 PCI slots stuffed, as inconceivable as that may now seem.

Well, I think you might find something better than a Virge if you were rich 😀) SLI came with Voodoo2, and by that time, I don't think Virge was a go-to option anymore. I would expect it to be a budget OEM option, because Virge was quite cheap and OEM builders liked stuff that was cheap and in great supply. But having an AGP Virge and a PCI Voodoo is kind of funny.

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-30, 12:16:

[...]

Well, I think you might find something better than a Virge if you were rich 😀) SLI came with Voodoo2, and by that time, I don't think Virge was a go-to option anymore. I would expect it to be a budget OEM option, because Virge was quite cheap and OEM builders liked stuff that was cheap and in great supply. But having an AGP Virge and a PCI Voodoo is kind of funny.

Why?

Voodoo covers GLide, OpenGL and Direct3D - all the AGP card needs to do is Windows 2D desktop acceleration. It's true a Matrox Millennium would handle that better, but it would be wastfully redundant to take any AGP card with extensive 3D capabilities if you intend to use the Voodoo(s) for that anyway. It would only make sense if you wanted an API not supported by Voodoo, but basically none of the others offered anything of added value until much later. Of course, the added value of an AGP Virge over an AGP Trio would be pretty much zero, but so was the price delta. It wasn't that AGP Virge was great, it was just in a situation with an add-in 3D card there was no compelling reason not to have one. Or a Trio, or a SiS 6326, or any other card offering decent 2D desktop acceleration.

In 1999 that changed, when a TNT2 would give you significantly better D3D than that Voodoo2 SLI, but you still might want the SLI for GLide, or alternately if you were an UT fan, S3TC on a Savage would give you better image quality on the couple of titles that supported it.

dionb wrote on 2023-10-30, 12:24:

Why? […]
Show full quote

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-30, 12:16:

[...]

Well, I think you might find something better than a Virge if you were rich 😀) SLI came with Voodoo2, and by that time, I don't think Virge was a go-to option anymore. I would expect it to be a budget OEM option, because Virge was quite cheap and OEM builders liked stuff that was cheap and in great supply. But having an AGP Virge and a PCI Voodoo is kind of funny.

Why?

Voodoo covers GLide, OpenGL and Direct3D - all the AGP card needs to do is Windows 2D desktop acceleration. It's true a Matrox Millennium would handle that better, but it would be wastfully redundant to take any AGP card with extensive 3D capabilities if you intend to use the Voodoo(s) for that anyway. It would only make sense if you wanted an API not supported by Voodoo, but basically none of the others offered anything of added value until much later. Of course, the added value of an AGP Virge over an AGP Trio would be pretty much zero, but so was the price delta. It wasn't that AGP Virge was great, it was just in a situation with an add-in 3D card there was no compelling reason not to have one. Or a Trio, or a SiS 6326, or any other card offering decent 2D desktop acceleration.

In 1999 that changed, when a TNT2 would give you significantly better D3D than that Voodoo2 SLI, but you still might want the SLI for GLide, or alternately if you were an UT fan, S3TC on a Savage would give you better image quality on the couple of titles that supported it.

Voodoo 1 isn't really a Direct 3D card. It is compatible, but the performance is pretty bad. As for OpenGL, I've never tried it in that context.

Another important factor is the image quality. You would lose some of it because of the passthrough cable, so Matrox was kind of a better choice. So a Riva 128 AGP I can understand, it does both 2d and 3d, but a Virge - and a top of the line Virge at that? 😀) Savage3D was released a year after AGP became a thing.

Pass-through cable is redundant. Unless you want to hook them to CRT, but you can use splitter for that.

songoffall wrote on 2023-10-30, 12:16:

But having an AGP Virge and a PCI Voodoo is kind of funny.

But Voodoo had to be PCI, if only because they probably wanted to also be compatible with all the large-OEM systems that had soldered-on-motherboard graphics. Lots of real IBMs, IBMs-nee-Acer, Packard Hells, Compaqs, etc without AGP slots. And this is an era where gamers were relatively young, and I'm sure it was seen as an important design goal to have something that an older teenager could afford and quietly stick into the family PC. AGP couldn't have delivered that.

The AGP Virge was aimed at a different markets - the white box clone shop or the Dell/Gateway/Microns of the world, both of whom shipped systems with a lot fewer things on the motherboard. (My 1998-era IBM-nee-Acer had on-motherboard audio and video, both very lousy. Only expansion slot used out of the box was an ISA slot, or at least I think it was ISA, for a modem. My 2000-era Dell had an AGP video card, a discrete SB Live Value, a discrete 3Com Ethernet card, and a discrete PCI modem. So... that's four cards, and I didn't even pick the optional TV tuner card or the optional SCSI card or... I'm sure Dell offered other ways of filling up slots.) And, well, if those guys are going to embrace AGP, why wouldn't they offer a range of AGP options? And it would be unnecessarily confusing for the low-end configurations to ship with a PCI video card and an empty AGP slot while the higher-end configurations had a populated AGP slot - one of the things Dell, at least, did back then was have a standardized slot order, so if I ordered a Dell and you ordered a Dell, both of our sound cards (regardless of which ones we picked) would be in the same slot.

And, I might add, look at it from an upgradeability standpoint. If you got an AGP Virge in your white box or Dell, and a few years later, something like the TNT2 or GeForce 2 GTS is out, you pull out the Virge, plonk the TNT2 in, and boom, done. If you got a soldered-on video chip on your IBM or your Compaq, you are... almost completely SOL... for those kinds of upgrades. (Well, I guess you are the reason why PCI GF2 MXes and other such things existed)

At the time when agp first came out, everyone who owned a pc prior to agp only had pci (myself included). I think that’s a big reason cards were still made for pci, a lot of people still had pci machines.

However, at the time (although I was a teenager) I didn’t even know the fancy graphics cards even came in pci variants. I assumed they were all agp so I upgraded my entire computer so I could use one. I think they were pushing agp pretty hard but were probably still producing pci for the vast majority of pcs that still only had pci.

Honestly we’re really lucky that they produced pci variants because they’re compatible with systems both before and after agp which is really cool. Almost all my cards are pci for that reason.

midicollector wrote on 2023-10-30, 22:04:

At the time when agp first came out, everyone who owned a pc prior to agp only had pci (myself included). I think that’s a big reason cards were still made for pci, a lot of people still had pci machines.

Many people never had AGP. A lot of systems from big OEMs may have used AGP internally to a soldered on-motherboard video chip, but didn't give you an AGP slot. Then you have the rise of chipsets with integrated graphics like the i810, the i845whatever-it-was-that-was-used-on-the-Dell-2400/3000-type machines, etc - none of those were on boards with AGP slots either.

For a huge chunk of machines, PCI remained the only viable option. The AGP slots were mostly on the white box systems and the higher-end Dell/Gateway/etc systems.

Also, one other thing - AGP is limited to one card. Back when most cards could only drive one monitor even if they had both DVI and VGA outputs (I am trying to remember when the first cards to support multiple monitors came out...), if you were one of the rare people with dual monitors, you needed a PCI card to drive your second monitor.