I had one X1950 Pro AGP too, it was just fine until it suddenly died on me. No idea why.

Archer57 wrote on 2025-07-22, 00:22:

So far i was not able to notice a difference between x800GTO and 7600GT in a few games i tried...

Prior to GeForce 8, NVidia's anti aliasing was noticeably lower quality in that you can see stair stepping on the edges much more clearly. This is probably due to ATI having gamma corrected MSAA, starting with the first D3D9 Radeons (R300). Nvidia added this with GF8.

GeForce 6/7 have pretty aggressive texture filtering "optimizations". You might notice lower/softer detail in the distance than with the ATI card. There may also be more mip map transition shimmer. When I played Oblivion on a GeForce 7, I had to set it to HQ texture filtering or the snow in particular was rendered incorrectly. HQ texture filtering is a sizeable performance hit on GF7.

If you run any games at 16-bit color depth, the Radeon's dithering will look a bit nicer. Less muddy and the dither pattern less clearly tiling.

The Radeon X1000 cards in particular are far superior to the GF7 in these areas. They are really in another class though, a half generation step towards the D3D10 cards. GF7 is more or less a wider GF6 chip, as Radeon Xxx0 is a scaled up form of Radeon 9800/9600. The X1000 cards have lots of improvements including robust D3D9 SM3 that is far beyond GF6/7's implementation, improved texture filtering including a top quality HQ AF mode, and even improved 16-bit dithering.

X1950pro agp = fun to experiment with on fast agp systems, acceptably quiet, but I would not use it regularly. Expensive, not common, and I don't trust the single slot cooler to keep the card alive with regular use. Also no drivers for Win98, so not very useful.

X850xt pe agp = very fast card for late 98 and early XP games, drivers work ok in many win98 games I tried. But the stock cooler is too loud. Also expensive and not commonly found. Unnecessary overkill for win98 unless you want to dual boot.

X600 pci-e = I know it's a bit off topic, but get one while they're still cheap. Tried it in a bunch of Win 98 games, and compatibility is the same as my agp Ati cards. I used a lga775 Via chipset board with chipsets drivers for Win98, a regular ide hard drive, and if I was going to build a cheap but fast Win98 rig, this would be it. Performance is plenty fast for any game I would run in that OS.

pixel_workbench wrote on 2025-07-22, 13:56:

X600 pci-e = I know it's a bit off topic, but get one while they're still cheap. Tried it in a bunch of Win 98 games, and compatibility is the same as my agp Ati cards.

The X600 uses RV370 GPU. It's basically an updated PCI-e variant of the RV350/RV360, that is the 9600 Pro/XT. Usually clocked the same as the Pro too.

Has anyone managed to get SimCity 4 to work well with the Radeon X series cards? I've only managed to get ~5-10 fps on max graphics settings at 1024x768 even on a Core 2 Duo.

swaaye wrote on 2025-07-22, 13:48:

Prior to GeForce 8, NVidia's anti aliasing was noticeably lower quality in that you can see stair stepping on the edges much mo […]
Show full quote

Prior to GeForce 8, NVidia's anti aliasing was noticeably lower quality in that you can see stair stepping on the edges much more clearly. This is probably due to ATI having gamma corrected MSAA, starting with the first D3D9 Radeons (R300). Nvidia added this with GF8.

GeForce 6/7 have pretty aggressive texture filtering "optimizations". You might notice lower/softer detail in the distance than with the ATI card. There may also be more mip map transition shimmer. When I played Oblivion on a GeForce 7, I had to set it to HQ texture filtering or the snow in particular was rendered incorrectly. HQ texture filtering is a sizeable performance hit on GF7.

If you run any games at 16-bit color depth, the Radeon's dithering will look a bit nicer. Less muddy and the dither pattern less clearly tiling.

The Radeon X1000 cards in particular are far superior to the GF7 in these areas. They are really in another class though, a half generation step towards the D3D10 cards. GF7 is more or less a wider GF6 chip, as Radeon Xxx0 is a scaled up form of Radeon 9800/9600. The X1000 cards have lots of improvements including robust D3D9 SM3 that is far beyond GF6/7's implementation, improved texture filtering including a top quality HQ AF mode, and even improved 16-bit dithering.

Curious. I do have pci-e x1950pro, perhaps i'll compare with that to see if i notice something. I've never practically seen any consequential difference, large enough to be immediately noticeable when i run a game. So that'd be a curious experiment...

Also received my "not working" x700pro and... yikes. The card is likely fine - half of the capacitors missing from the bridge chip. That'll be a fun soldering session... One of the reason why i prefer not to remove those pad to add cooling...

Archer57 wrote on 2025-07-23, 04:14:

swaaye wrote on 2025-07-22, 13:48:

Prior to GeForce 8, NVidia's anti aliasing was noticeably lower quality in that you can see stair stepping on the edges much mo […]
Show full quote

Prior to GeForce 8, NVidia's anti aliasing was noticeably lower quality in that you can see stair stepping on the edges much more clearly. This is probably due to ATI having gamma corrected MSAA, starting with the first D3D9 Radeons (R300). Nvidia added this with GF8.

GeForce 6/7 have pretty aggressive texture filtering "optimizations". You might notice lower/softer detail in the distance than with the ATI card. There may also be more mip map transition shimmer. When I played Oblivion on a GeForce 7, I had to set it to HQ texture filtering or the snow in particular was rendered incorrectly. HQ texture filtering is a sizeable performance hit on GF7.

If you run any games at 16-bit color depth, the Radeon's dithering will look a bit nicer. Less muddy and the dither pattern less clearly tiling.

The Radeon X1000 cards in particular are far superior to the GF7 in these areas. They are really in another class though, a half generation step towards the D3D10 cards. GF7 is more or less a wider GF6 chip, as Radeon Xxx0 is a scaled up form of Radeon 9800/9600. The X1000 cards have lots of improvements including robust D3D9 SM3 that is far beyond GF6/7's implementation, improved texture filtering including a top quality HQ AF mode, and even improved 16-bit dithering.

Curious. I do have pci-e x1950pro, perhaps i'll compare with that to see if i notice something. I've never practically seen any consequential difference, large enough to be immediately noticeable when i run a game. So that'd be a curious experiment...

Also received my "not working" x700pro and... yikes. The card is likely fine - half of the capacitors missing from the bridge chip. That'll be a fun soldering session... One of the reason why i prefer not to remove those pad to add cooling...

I've seen a similar failure pattern lately on another ebay card. People thought they they'll do themselves a favor tinkering with the rialto chip, but I think more often than not they made things worse.
Fingers crossed that you can get yours going again.

RandomStranger wrote on 2025-07-22, 20:01:

pixel_workbench wrote on 2025-07-22, 13:56:

X600 pci-e = I know it's a bit off topic, but get one while they're still cheap. Tried it in a bunch of Win 98 games, and compatibility is the same as my agp Ati cards.

The X600 uses RV370 GPU. It's basically an updated PCI-e variant of the RV350/RV360, that is the 9600 Pro/XT. Usually clocked the same as the Pro too.

X600 / PRO / XT performs very close to a 9600. Depending on witch version you have, it makes a decent card for games up to 2002. Core configuration is 4 / 2 / 4 / 4 just like the 9600, but it can be clocked lower then a 9600XT or a fast 9550.

I prefer the x700 which has the same core config as a 9800, but with a narrower memory bus and faster ram. Because of the 128 bit memory bus, the 9800 cards have higher fillrate (in theory). Core config on the X700 is 8 / 6 / 8 / 8, while the 9800 is 8 / 4 / 8 / 8. Core clocks are higher for x700 cards, and they run a lot cooler then 9800's.

Problem is, x700's can be somewhat rare.

Socket3 wrote on 2025-08-19, 19:26:

X600 / PRO / XT performs very close to a 9600. Depending on witch version you have, it makes a decent card for games up to 2002. […]
Show full quote

RandomStranger wrote on 2025-07-22, 20:01:

pixel_workbench wrote on 2025-07-22, 13:56:

X600 pci-e = I know it's a bit off topic, but get one while they're still cheap. Tried it in a bunch of Win 98 games, and compatibility is the same as my agp Ati cards.

The X600 uses RV370 GPU. It's basically an updated PCI-e variant of the RV350/RV360, that is the 9600 Pro/XT. Usually clocked the same as the Pro too.

X600 / PRO / XT performs very close to a 9600. Depending on witch version you have, it makes a decent card for games up to 2002. Core configuration is 4 / 2 / 4 / 4 just like the 9600, but it can be clocked lower then a 9600XT or a fast 9550.

I prefer the x700 which has the same core config as a 9800, but with a narrower memory bus and faster ram. Because of the 128 bit memory bus, the 9800 cards have higher fillrate (in theory). Core config on the X700 is 8 / 6 / 8 / 8, while the 9800 is 8 / 4 / 8 / 8. Core clocks are higher for x700 cards, and they run a lot cooler then 9800's.

Problem is, x700's can be somewhat rare.

In general, I agree with your opinion.
9600 Pro is about half as productive as 9800XT.
But the PCI-e versions are about 10% more performance.
It is the x600XT (or Pro, overclocked to XT frequencies) that shows very good performance, sometimes comparable to PCX5900.
If the charged version of GeCube RADEON X600XT Extreme is available, you can take it without hesitation.
For Windows 98, this is a great thing.

I can get cheap Powercolor Ati Radeon X1650 PRO 512MB AGP, but i have no clue will it run any good on Pentium 3 with 1.4ghz Tualatin. I experimented with lot of cards, 9600 XT was great and it had nice support for both 98 and XP, but 6600 GT so far is the most amazing i ever tried on this system, well for XP at least. I tried as few catched on forum HD2600 AGP but it had hickups in performance, some stats are over the top, and some simply make games glitch or i cant start them at all, those old late 98 and early XP games.

Studiostriver wrote on 2025-08-21, 21:13:

I can get cheap Powercolor Ati Radeon X1650 PRO 512MB AGP, but i have no clue will it run any good on Pentium 3 with 1.4ghz Tualatin. I experimented with lot of cards, 9600 XT was great and it had nice support for both 98 and XP, but 6600 GT so far is the most amazing i ever tried on this system, well for XP at least. I tried as few catched on forum HD2600 AGP but it had hickups in performance, some stats are over the top, and some simply make games glitch or i cant start them at all, those old late 98 and early XP games.

My feeling is that something in Directx9c has changed so much that it had to reduce compatibility with 7-8 a little. Maybe at the standards level - everything is the same, but some optimizations or undocumented behavior that was often used in older games were removed.

Studiostriver wrote on 2025-08-21, 21:13:

I can get cheap Powercolor Ati Radeon X1650 PRO 512MB AGP, but i have no clue will it run any good on Pentium 3 with 1.4ghz Tualatin. I experimented with lot of cards, 9600 XT was great and it had nice support for both 98 and XP, but 6600 GT so far is the most amazing i ever tried on this system, well for XP at least. I tried as few catched on forum HD2600 AGP but it had hickups in performance, some stats are over the top, and some simply make games glitch or i cant start them at all, those old late 98 and early XP games.

I am not sure about pentium3, this cards are going to be a serious overkill for a system like this and i am not sure about 98 drivers, but here is 3dmark2001 on XP, AthlonXP 3200+:

And 7300GT, which i find quite close to 6600GT, on the same system:

And just FYI about bottlenecks, here are the results for the same 7300GT on s939/athlon64 x2:

No x1650pro here as i no longer have the card.

I've also now experimented with this cards for a while, and my conclusions so far are:

- I must be blind, but i can not see image quality difference between different X series cards, GF7 and GF8 cards. On static zoomed in pictures i can see some differences, but in motion - nope. So for me it is not really worth worrying about.

- Compatibility is poor. GF7 cards i have work flawlessly on any motherboard i have, X series have some stability issues on multiple S462 boards. It is better than later HD cards, but still. At the same time - they work perfectly on my S939 board so the cards themselves are not defective.

- Performance is very good, availability is good for later cards, prices are... decent. I easily got x1950pro for around $50, on nvidia side even 7800GS is more like $100 and it is not comparable in terms of performance. Also even X800GTO compares pretty well to cards like 6600GT or 7300GT.

- Coolers on most common sapphire cards are trash -noisy, hot, hard to disassemble and replacement fans are relatively hard to source. Rialto situation is annoying and a source of a lot of dead cards - it is really easy to damage which many people do trying to cool it. On nvidia side the bridge on GF7 cards is much more reasonably placed, is cooled and causes no complications at all.

- To really see that performance very late AGP platform is needed. By the looks of it even S939 is not always sufficient, it probably has to be LGA775 or maay be AM2. This makes later cards like x1950pro somewhat questionable because at that point pci-e starts making more sense. Now i see why nvidia was actually right to stop making AGP cards when they did.

- Driver situation is better than i originally thought - when the cards work they do so with different drivers. But there are still issues. Like for some reason on my monitor they fail to correctly detect max resolution and it has to be changed in CCC to be able to set it. Not sure why, good thing it, at least, can be configured.

Overall i'd say this are interesting and quite nice when they work, but... i would not go out of my way or pay a lot of money to get one.

I wanted to do benchmarks with this cards and S462 vs S939, but the stuff just is not stable enough on S462 for that and i abandoned the idea...

Archer57 wrote on 2025-08-22, 04:50:

I am not sure about pentium3, this cards are going to be a serious overkill for a system like this and i am not sure about 98 dr […]
Show full quote

Studiostriver wrote on 2025-08-21, 21:13:

I can get cheap Powercolor Ati Radeon X1650 PRO 512MB AGP, but i have no clue will it run any good on Pentium 3 with 1.4ghz Tualatin. I experimented with lot of cards, 9600 XT was great and it had nice support for both 98 and XP, but 6600 GT so far is the most amazing i ever tried on this system, well for XP at least. I tried as few catched on forum HD2600 AGP but it had hickups in performance, some stats are over the top, and some simply make games glitch or i cant start them at all, those old late 98 and early XP games.

I am not sure about pentium3, this cards are going to be a serious overkill for a system like this and i am not sure about 98 drivers, but here is 3dmark2001 on XP, AthlonXP 3200+:

The attachment s462.png is no longer available

The attachment 1650pro_2001.jpg is no longer available

And 7300GT, which i find quite close to 6600GT, on the same system:

The attachment 7300GT_AXP3200_1024_cut.png is no longer available

And just FYI about bottlenecks, here are the results for the same 7300GT on s939/athlon64 x2:

The attachment s939.png is no longer available

The attachment 2001-1024.jpg is no longer available

No x1650pro here as i no longer have the card.

I would not use it for 98 of course, there are no drivers for it, but for XP since system is dual boot, for 98 i use 5200 FX PCI...
But who knows how will it perform on old P3 with Tualatin CPU. And as Shevalier mentioned its more likely that it would cause compabillity issues and stutter with old Direct X 7/8 games.

I have 2 Radeons with the Rialto bridge: one is a X1650 pro with 256mb of RAM and the other one is Radeon X1950 512mb; both from Sapphire.
I replaced the thermal paste and pads on both of them and used Ati tool to modify the default fan curve for a more aggressive one with a lot more noise - stock fans are simply trash! This way I managed to keep them running under 65 C even in games. I used the X1950 PRO quite a lot and performance is excellent; always above geforce 7800gs, the strongest NVIDIA card I have used.
Drivers are absolutely horrible, including some nasty incompatibilities with ULI chipsets that forced me to use Omega drivers.

nd22 wrote on 2025-09-17, 06:43:

I have 2 Radeons with the Rialto bridge: one is a X1650 pro with 256mb of RAM and the other one is Radeon X1950 512mb; both from Sapphire.
I replaced the thermal paste and pads on both of them and used Ati tool to modify the default fan curve for a more aggressive one with a lot more noise - stock fans are simply trash! This way I managed to keep them running under 65 C even in games. I used the X1950 PRO quite a lot and performance is excellent; always above geforce 7800gs, the strongest NVIDIA card I have used.
Drivers are absolutely horrible, including some nasty incompatibilities with ULI chipsets that forced me to use Omega drivers.

Yep, i actually got x1950pro in 2 versions - pci-e and AGP, just to check the idea that the bridge is causing issues. Nope. Some stuff still can and will crash on both cards, depending on drivers. Sadly my cards have different amount of memory - 512 and 256, so direct performance comparison between pci-e and agp is not possible. But performance is good, when it works.

Ultimately... i must be weird, but for me stability and compatibility beats performance. I want my stuff to work reliably and if i need more performance i can always use later system. So... i have a bunch of faster ATI cards in a box, while i use 7600GT...