xtreger wrote on 2025-11-04, 12:27:

Hi, I have a GeForce 7950 GT card working with Windows 98 SE. I'm using the unofficial Nvidia drivers from retroweb and Rloew's PTCHNVSZ to make it work. It works fine for the most part, but after exiting from some games (e.g. FIFA 2000 or NFS), I get a ddhelp related error. It's always something like ddhelp caused a general protection fault, or something along those lines.

I'm wondering if there are any more steps I should take to make it a bit more stable and to prevent such post-game exit GPFs. I saw somewhere that certain dlls should be replaced by some other versions, but really can't remember where I saw that and I also tried searching on vogons (no luck).

If anyone has any idea regarding this, would appreciate any help!

theres an unofficial d3d patch for fifa2000 on myabandonware, and on pcgamingwiki theres an unofficial patch 2 which links to soggis site.

which version of NFS do you have? if i have it i'll try it on my 7950gt.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-04, 19:56:

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-04, 12:27:

Hi, I have a GeForce 7950 GT card working with Windows 98 SE. I'm using the unofficial Nvidia drivers from retroweb and Rloew's PTCHNVSZ to make it work. It works fine for the most part, but after exiting from some games (e.g. FIFA 2000 or NFS), I get a ddhelp related error. It's always something like ddhelp caused a general protection fault, or something along those lines.

I'm wondering if there are any more steps I should take to make it a bit more stable and to prevent such post-game exit GPFs. I saw somewhere that certain dlls should be replaced by some other versions, but really can't remember where I saw that and I also tried searching on vogons (no luck).

If anyone has any idea regarding this, would appreciate any help!

theres an unofficial d3d patch for fifa2000 on myabandonware, and on pcgamingwiki theres an unofficial patch 2 which links to soggis site.

which version of NFS do you have? if i have it i'll try it on my 7950gt.

Oh nice, it's helpful that you have the same GPU. I'm trying NFS Most Wanted. As for FIFA 2000, can you confirm that it works on your PC without issue? If yes, I'll try and replicate your setup. Another thing if you want to test compatibility with an uncooperative game for Nvidia - Road Rash. When I have an ATI card installed, it works perfectly, but when I replace the card with 7950 GT, it kind of gets stuck at the start of race (the 3, 2, 1 countdown doesn't happen at all).

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-04, 20:22:

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-04, 19:56:

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-04, 12:27:

Hi, I have a GeForce 7950 GT card working with Windows 98 SE. I'm using the unofficial Nvidia drivers from retroweb and Rloew's PTCHNVSZ to make it work. It works fine for the most part, but after exiting from some games (e.g. FIFA 2000 or NFS), I get a ddhelp related error. It's always something like ddhelp caused a general protection fault, or something along those lines.

I'm wondering if there are any more steps I should take to make it a bit more stable and to prevent such post-game exit GPFs. I saw somewhere that certain dlls should be replaced by some other versions, but really can't remember where I saw that and I also tried searching on vogons (no luck).

If anyone has any idea regarding this, would appreciate any help!

theres an unofficial d3d patch for fifa2000 on myabandonware, and on pcgamingwiki theres an unofficial patch 2 which links to soggis site.

which version of NFS do you have? if i have it i'll try it on my 7950gt.

Oh nice, it's helpful that you have the same GPU. I'm trying NFS Most Wanted. As for FIFA 2000, can you confirm that it works on your PC without issue? If yes, I'll try and replicate your setup. Another thing if you want to test compatibility with an uncooperative game for Nvidia - Road Rash. When I have an ATI card installed, it works perfectly, but when I replace the card with 7950 GT, it kind of gets stuck at the start of race (the 3, 2, 1 countdown doesn't happen at all).

ive got NFS most wanted black edition, im pretty sure it works on this gpu i can double check though, road rash im pretty sure ive got, as for fifa i'll see what i can find, also what motherboard/cpu/ram are you using?, ive got the 7950gt paired with a 775 socket VIA board at the moment, its got no OS but ive been planning to do it for a while, so i may as well get around to it now, pretty sure ive got a drive with 98 installed i can chuck in there.

i havent given this gpu a good testing in 98 so will be interesting to see if there are issues, road rash and fifa should be good under 98, i forget if NFS MW runs on 98 might be 2000/xp only, ill get back to you on that, once ive got things running.

Patchnvc is the only patch I use for my 7950. I also go to HKEY-local machine/ Software / microsoft / windows / current version / run. and delete all the nvidia entries, they seem to glitch out.

I've never seen the benefit of patching the bios. Every benchmark I've run shows identical performance either way.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-04, 20:57:

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-04, 20:22:

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-04, 19:56:

theres an unofficial d3d patch for fifa2000 on myabandonware, and on pcgamingwiki theres an unofficial patch 2 which links to soggis site.

which version of NFS do you have? if i have it i'll try it on my 7950gt.

Oh nice, it's helpful that you have the same GPU. I'm trying NFS Most Wanted. As for FIFA 2000, can you confirm that it works on your PC without issue? If yes, I'll try and replicate your setup. Another thing if you want to test compatibility with an uncooperative game for Nvidia - Road Rash. When I have an ATI card installed, it works perfectly, but when I replace the card with 7950 GT, it kind of gets stuck at the start of race (the 3, 2, 1 countdown doesn't happen at all).

ive got NFS most wanted black edition, im pretty sure it works on this gpu i can double check though, road rash im pretty sure ive got, as for fifa i'll see what i can find, also what motherboard/cpu/ram are you using?, ive got the 7950gt paired with a 775 socket VIA board at the moment, its got no OS but ive been planning to do it for a while, so i may as well get around to it now, pretty sure ive got a drive with 98 installed i can chuck in there.

i havent given this gpu a good testing in 98 so will be interesting to see if there are issues, road rash and fifa should be good under 98, i forget if NFS MW runs on 98 might be 2000/xp only, ill get back to you on that, once ive got things running.

Motherboard is an Intel EX58 one, with 2 gb RAM and a Xeon W3680 CPU. And yeah would be great if you can check out these games' compatibility, as and when you get time and curiosity. As for NFSMW, yeah it does work - I think there's a Win98-specific executable of speed.exe that works even without kernelex (as far as I remember)

Dothan Burger wrote on 2025-11-04, 21:38:

Patchnvc is the only patch I use for my 7950. I also go to HKEY-local machine/ Software / microsoft / windows / current version / run. and delete all the nvidia entries, they seem to glitch out.

I've never seen the benefit of patching the bios. Every benchmark I've run shows identical performance either way.

Thank you, I just tried deleting all Nvidia-related startup tasks via that regedit path you gave above. But still getting glitches in games - e.g. race doesn't countdown in Road Rash, ddhelp error on exiting FIFA2000. If you're able to get these games working on your end without issues, let me know please? Would be interesting to try to figure out a way to resolve this.

Also here's the error I get on exiting FIFA2000, might be a hint: DDHELP caused an invalid page fault in module NVDD32.DLL ...

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-05, 05:43:

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-04, 20:57:

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-04, 20:22:

Oh nice, it's helpful that you have the same GPU. I'm trying NFS Most Wanted. As for FIFA 2000, can you confirm that it works on your PC without issue? If yes, I'll try and replicate your setup. Another thing if you want to test compatibility with an uncooperative game for Nvidia - Road Rash. When I have an ATI card installed, it works perfectly, but when I replace the card with 7950 GT, it kind of gets stuck at the start of race (the 3, 2, 1 countdown doesn't happen at all).

ive got NFS most wanted black edition, im pretty sure it works on this gpu i can double check though, road rash im pretty sure ive got, as for fifa i'll see what i can find, also what motherboard/cpu/ram are you using?, ive got the 7950gt paired with a 775 socket VIA board at the moment, its got no OS but ive been planning to do it for a while, so i may as well get around to it now, pretty sure ive got a drive with 98 installed i can chuck in there.

i havent given this gpu a good testing in 98 so will be interesting to see if there are issues, road rash and fifa should be good under 98, i forget if NFS MW runs on 98 might be 2000/xp only, ill get back to you on that, once ive got things running.

Motherboard is an Intel EX58 one, with 2 gb RAM and a Xeon W3680 CPU. And yeah would be great if you can check out these games' compatibility, as and when you get time and curiosity. As for NFSMW, yeah it does work - I think there's a Win98-specific executable of speed.exe that works even without kernelex (as far as I remember)

i tried it on my system with the 7950gt 512mb pcie on an msi p4m900m2, xeon 3070 dual core, 2gb ddr2, sblive.

i tested both games and had the exact same problems, fifa crashed with the same ddhelp error, i then tried the d3dpatch, the game didnt crash but after i quit to windows i then got the ddhelp error, if i try loading any game the pc locks on a black screen, so pc needs to reboot after getting the error.

when the game installed it wouldnt install dx6.1 since a higher version was already installed, so i copied the ddhelp.exe from dx6.1 to my windows system folder as it was an older version than what i had and it didnt make any difference as i still got the error.

theres also a 3dfx patch, i copied the files across and had nglide installed but couldnt find an option to switch from d3d to glide, i also tried software renderer which uses 640x480, on starting a match my lcd went out of range even though it can do that resolution.

i then tried road rash and same issue. the game/pc locks on starting a race, midi music plays but seems slow to start, i read somewhere something about midi causing the game to lock so i unplugged my sblive and again it made no difference. i think this games uses dx2.0 so might be better suited to win95.

i then tried both games on my other system which is an msi pm8pm-v, Celeron D 360 single core, 2gb ddr2, fx5200 128mb 64bit, CMI8738 (pci)

again i had issues, fifa was exactly the same with the ddhelp error, i was also getting another rundll32 error box right after which was related to nvcpl.dll (nvidia control panel)
i think i read in the readme that this game has issues with agp gpus paired with pci sound cards as well as VIA chipsets, this system has all three.
the readme recommends pci gpu with a pci sound card.

i then tried road rash, the game seemed to lock up the first time, but i managed to hit esc to quit so it didnt lock the pc, second time i loaded the game, it looked locked but the race did start, but i had major graphical flickery screen issues, so yeah unplayable.

seems the problems with these games isnt limited to the 7950gt but also the fx5200, ive installed a lot of games on the fx5200 and literally everything ive tried works, except these two games 🤣. id say if it wont even run on an fx5200 you're shit out of luck 😀

your only option is either use dxwnd or something similar or build a dedicated system with parts that meet the requirements.

the only time ive had this ddhelp error was with mystery of the nautilus which would cause the game to crash to desktop, i thought it was gpu/dx/driver related, eventually found the game didnt like intel cpus, i had the 7950gt in an amd AM2 board and the game worked fine without error.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-05, 09:17:

i tried it on my system with the 7950gt 512mb pcie on an msi p4m900m2, xeon 3070 dual core, 2gb ddr2, sblive. […]
Show full quote

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-05, 05:43:

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-04, 20:57:

ive got NFS most wanted black edition, im pretty sure it works on this gpu i can double check though, road rash im pretty sure ive got, as for fifa i'll see what i can find, also what motherboard/cpu/ram are you using?, ive got the 7950gt paired with a 775 socket VIA board at the moment, its got no OS but ive been planning to do it for a while, so i may as well get around to it now, pretty sure ive got a drive with 98 installed i can chuck in there.

i havent given this gpu a good testing in 98 so will be interesting to see if there are issues, road rash and fifa should be good under 98, i forget if NFS MW runs on 98 might be 2000/xp only, ill get back to you on that, once ive got things running.

Motherboard is an Intel EX58 one, with 2 gb RAM and a Xeon W3680 CPU. And yeah would be great if you can check out these games' compatibility, as and when you get time and curiosity. As for NFSMW, yeah it does work - I think there's a Win98-specific executable of speed.exe that works even without kernelex (as far as I remember)

i tried it on my system with the 7950gt 512mb pcie on an msi p4m900m2, xeon 3070 dual core, 2gb ddr2, sblive.

i tested both games and had the exact same problems, fifa crashed with the same ddhelp error, i then tried the d3dpatch, the game didnt crash but after i quit to windows i then got the ddhelp error, if i try loading any game the pc locks on a black screen, so pc needs to reboot after getting the error.

when the game installed it wouldnt install dx6.1 since a higher version was already installed, so i copied the ddhelp.exe from dx6.1 to my windows system folder as it was an older version than what i had and it didnt make any difference as i still got the error.

theres also a 3dfx patch, i copied the files across and had nglide installed but couldnt find an option to switch from d3d to glide, i also tried software renderer which uses 640x480, on starting a match my lcd went out of range even though it can do that resolution.

i then tried road rash and same issue. the game/pc locks on starting a race, midi music plays but seems slow to start, i read somewhere something about midi causing the game to lock so i unplugged my sblive and again it made no difference. i think this games uses dx2.0 so might be better suited to win95.

i then tried both games on my other system which is an msi pm8pm-v, Celeron D 360 single core, 2gb ddr2, fx5200 128mb 64bit, CMI8738 (pci)

again i had issues, fifa was exactly the same with the ddhelp error, i was also getting another rundll32 error box right after which was related to nvcpl.dll (nvidia control panel)
i think i read in the readme that this game has issues with agp gpus paired with pci sound cards as well as VIA chipsets, this system has all three.
the readme recommends pci gpu with a pci sound card.

i then tried road rash, the game seemed to lock up the first time, but i managed to hit esc to quit so it didnt lock the pc, second time i loaded the game, it looked locked but the race did start, but i had major graphical flickery screen issues, so yeah unplayable.

seems the problems with these games isnt limited to the 7950gt but also the fx5200, ive installed a lot of games on the fx5200 and literally everything ive tried works, except these two games 🤣. id say if it wont even run on an fx5200 you're shit out of luck 😀

your only option is either use dxwnd or something similar or build a dedicated system with parts that meet the requirements.

the only time ive had this ddhelp error was with mystery of the nautilus which would cause the game to crash to desktop, i thought it was gpu/dx/driver related, eventually found the game didnt like intel cpus, i had the 7950gt in an amd AM2 board and the game worked fine without error.

First of all thank you so much for testing all of this. I guess I'll try out more games then. As you mentioned almost all games you installed work, and if the problem is only with these two games, I can live with that. I'm curious about dxwnd - have you got either fifa2000 or Road Rash to work with that?

Dothan Burger wrote on 2025-11-04, 21:38:

Patchnvc is the only patch I use for my 7950. I also go to HKEY-local machine/ Software / microsoft / windows / current version / run. and delete all the nvidia entries, they seem to glitch out.

I've never seen the benefit of patching the bios. Every benchmark I've run shows identical performance either way.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-05, 09:17:

i then tried road rash and same issue. the game/pc locks on starting a race, midi music plays but seems slow to start, i read somewhere something about midi causing the game to lock so i unplugged my sblive and again it made no difference. i think this games uses dx2.0 so might be better suited to win95.

Just a quick update even if it may seem obvious - the error definitely seems to have something to do with nvidia's directx dll. When I replace the nvdd32.dll with a version from the older drivers (e.g. 77.72 or 6x.xx), then road rash actually works fine. BUT in this case the Direct3D functionality gets entirely disabled. Similarly if I go to My Computer -> Performance and set GPU acceleration to only "basic accelerator functions", again Road Rash works fine (and obviously most 3D games won't work this way).

Since there are also issues with FX5200, Nvidia likely had trash drivers for Win98. So I wonder if there is some patch for the nvdd32.dll or some replacement so that directx performance is more stable.

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-05, 10:35:

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-05, 09:17:

i tried it on my system with the 7950gt 512mb pcie on an msi p4m900m2, xeon 3070 dual core, 2gb ddr2, sblive. […]
Show full quote

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-05, 05:43:

Motherboard is an Intel EX58 one, with 2 gb RAM and a Xeon W3680 CPU. And yeah would be great if you can check out these games' compatibility, as and when you get time and curiosity. As for NFSMW, yeah it does work - I think there's a Win98-specific executable of speed.exe that works even without kernelex (as far as I remember)

i tried it on my system with the 7950gt 512mb pcie on an msi p4m900m2, xeon 3070 dual core, 2gb ddr2, sblive.

i tested both games and had the exact same problems, fifa crashed with the same ddhelp error, i then tried the d3dpatch, the game didnt crash but after i quit to windows i then got the ddhelp error, if i try loading any game the pc locks on a black screen, so pc needs to reboot after getting the error.

when the game installed it wouldnt install dx6.1 since a higher version was already installed, so i copied the ddhelp.exe from dx6.1 to my windows system folder as it was an older version than what i had and it didnt make any difference as i still got the error.

theres also a 3dfx patch, i copied the files across and had nglide installed but couldnt find an option to switch from d3d to glide, i also tried software renderer which uses 640x480, on starting a match my lcd went out of range even though it can do that resolution.

i then tried road rash and same issue. the game/pc locks on starting a race, midi music plays but seems slow to start, i read somewhere something about midi causing the game to lock so i unplugged my sblive and again it made no difference. i think this games uses dx2.0 so might be better suited to win95.

i then tried both games on my other system which is an msi pm8pm-v, Celeron D 360 single core, 2gb ddr2, fx5200 128mb 64bit, CMI8738 (pci)

again i had issues, fifa was exactly the same with the ddhelp error, i was also getting another rundll32 error box right after which was related to nvcpl.dll (nvidia control panel)
i think i read in the readme that this game has issues with agp gpus paired with pci sound cards as well as VIA chipsets, this system has all three.
the readme recommends pci gpu with a pci sound card.

i then tried road rash, the game seemed to lock up the first time, but i managed to hit esc to quit so it didnt lock the pc, second time i loaded the game, it looked locked but the race did start, but i had major graphical flickery screen issues, so yeah unplayable.

seems the problems with these games isnt limited to the 7950gt but also the fx5200, ive installed a lot of games on the fx5200 and literally everything ive tried works, except these two games 🤣. id say if it wont even run on an fx5200 you're shit out of luck 😀

your only option is either use dxwnd or something similar or build a dedicated system with parts that meet the requirements.

the only time ive had this ddhelp error was with mystery of the nautilus which would cause the game to crash to desktop, i thought it was gpu/dx/driver related, eventually found the game didnt like intel cpus, i had the 7950gt in an amd AM2 board and the game worked fine without error.

First of all thank you so much for testing all of this. I guess I'll try out more games then. As you mentioned almost all games you installed work, and if the problem is only with these two games, I can live with that. I'm curious about dxwnd - have you got either fifa2000 or Road Rash to work with that?

no worries 😀 road rash was on my list to try out, and i havent played a fifa game since 98. 🤣, ive only used dxwnd a couple of times and that was years ago so cant really advise on that, dgvoodoo is another option though not sure if its compatible with dx9 gpu's.

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-05, 22:04:

Just a quick update even if it may seem obvious - the error definitely seems to have something to do with nvidia's directx dll. […]
Show full quote

Dothan Burger wrote on 2025-11-04, 21:38:

Patchnvc is the only patch I use for my 7950. I also go to HKEY-local machine/ Software / microsoft / windows / current version / run. and delete all the nvidia entries, they seem to glitch out.

I've never seen the benefit of patching the bios. Every benchmark I've run shows identical performance either way.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-05, 09:17:

i then tried road rash and same issue. the game/pc locks on starting a race, midi music plays but seems slow to start, i read somewhere something about midi causing the game to lock so i unplugged my sblive and again it made no difference. i think this games uses dx2.0 so might be better suited to win95.

Just a quick update even if it may seem obvious - the error definitely seems to have something to do with nvidia's directx dll. When I replace the nvdd32.dll with a version from the older drivers (e.g. 77.72 or 6x.xx), then road rash actually works fine. BUT in this case the Direct3D functionality gets entirely disabled. Similarly if I go to My Computer -> Performance and set GPU acceleration to only "basic accelerator functions", again Road Rash works fine (and obviously most 3D games won't work this way).

Since there are also issues with FX5200, Nvidia likely had trash drivers for Win98. So I wonder if there is some patch for the nvdd32.dll or some replacement so that directx performance is more stable.

i tried road rash again with the fx5200, i turned down the performance slider all the way down, then had to reboot, this just seemed to disable the nvidia control panel as it was missing from the tray/display options, on starting the game it said no direct draw driver is installed and performance will be poor, this actually made the game perfectly playable.

im guessing by default it uses direct draw and without probably software renderer, still looks better than the playstation version.
so probably could be a compatibility issue with a later version of directdraw, i think its a common issue.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-06, 01:04:

no worries :) road rash was on my list to try out, and i havent played a fifa game since 98. lol, ive only used dxwnd a couple o […]
Show full quote

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-05, 10:35:

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-05, 09:17:

i tried it on my system with the 7950gt 512mb pcie on an msi p4m900m2, xeon 3070 dual core, 2gb ddr2, sblive. […]
Show full quote

i tried it on my system with the 7950gt 512mb pcie on an msi p4m900m2, xeon 3070 dual core, 2gb ddr2, sblive.

i tested both games and had the exact same problems, fifa crashed with the same ddhelp error, i then tried the d3dpatch, the game didnt crash but after i quit to windows i then got the ddhelp error, if i try loading any game the pc locks on a black screen, so pc needs to reboot after getting the error.

when the game installed it wouldnt install dx6.1 since a higher version was already installed, so i copied the ddhelp.exe from dx6.1 to my windows system folder as it was an older version than what i had and it didnt make any difference as i still got the error.

theres also a 3dfx patch, i copied the files across and had nglide installed but couldnt find an option to switch from d3d to glide, i also tried software renderer which uses 640x480, on starting a match my lcd went out of range even though it can do that resolution.

i then tried road rash and same issue. the game/pc locks on starting a race, midi music plays but seems slow to start, i read somewhere something about midi causing the game to lock so i unplugged my sblive and again it made no difference. i think this games uses dx2.0 so might be better suited to win95.

i then tried both games on my other system which is an msi pm8pm-v, Celeron D 360 single core, 2gb ddr2, fx5200 128mb 64bit, CMI8738 (pci)

again i had issues, fifa was exactly the same with the ddhelp error, i was also getting another rundll32 error box right after which was related to nvcpl.dll (nvidia control panel)
i think i read in the readme that this game has issues with agp gpus paired with pci sound cards as well as VIA chipsets, this system has all three.
the readme recommends pci gpu with a pci sound card.

i then tried road rash, the game seemed to lock up the first time, but i managed to hit esc to quit so it didnt lock the pc, second time i loaded the game, it looked locked but the race did start, but i had major graphical flickery screen issues, so yeah unplayable.

seems the problems with these games isnt limited to the 7950gt but also the fx5200, ive installed a lot of games on the fx5200 and literally everything ive tried works, except these two games 🤣. id say if it wont even run on an fx5200 you're shit out of luck 😀

your only option is either use dxwnd or something similar or build a dedicated system with parts that meet the requirements.

the only time ive had this ddhelp error was with mystery of the nautilus which would cause the game to crash to desktop, i thought it was gpu/dx/driver related, eventually found the game didnt like intel cpus, i had the 7950gt in an amd AM2 board and the game worked fine without error.

First of all thank you so much for testing all of this. I guess I'll try out more games then. As you mentioned almost all games you installed work, and if the problem is only with these two games, I can live with that. I'm curious about dxwnd - have you got either fifa2000 or Road Rash to work with that?

no worries 😀 road rash was on my list to try out, and i havent played a fifa game since 98. 🤣, ive only used dxwnd a couple of times and that was years ago so cant really advise on that, dgvoodoo is another option though not sure if its compatible with dx9 gpu's.

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-05, 22:04:

Just a quick update even if it may seem obvious - the error definitely seems to have something to do with nvidia's directx dll. […]
Show full quote

Dothan Burger wrote on 2025-11-04, 21:38:

Patchnvc is the only patch I use for my 7950. I also go to HKEY-local machine/ Software / microsoft / windows / current version / run. and delete all the nvidia entries, they seem to glitch out.

I've never seen the benefit of patching the bios. Every benchmark I've run shows identical performance either way.

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-05, 09:17:

i then tried road rash and same issue. the game/pc locks on starting a race, midi music plays but seems slow to start, i read somewhere something about midi causing the game to lock so i unplugged my sblive and again it made no difference. i think this games uses dx2.0 so might be better suited to win95.

Just a quick update even if it may seem obvious - the error definitely seems to have something to do with nvidia's directx dll. When I replace the nvdd32.dll with a version from the older drivers (e.g. 77.72 or 6x.xx), then road rash actually works fine. BUT in this case the Direct3D functionality gets entirely disabled. Similarly if I go to My Computer -> Performance and set GPU acceleration to only "basic accelerator functions", again Road Rash works fine (and obviously most 3D games won't work this way).

Since there are also issues with FX5200, Nvidia likely had trash drivers for Win98. So I wonder if there is some patch for the nvdd32.dll or some replacement so that directx performance is more stable.

i tried road rash again with the fx5200, i turned down the performance slider all the way down, then had to reboot, this just seemed to disable the nvidia control panel as it was missing from the tray/display options, on starting the game it said no direct draw driver is installed and performance will be poor, this actually made the game perfectly playable.

im guessing by default it uses direct draw and without probably software renderer, still looks better than the playstation version.
so probably could be a compatibility issue with a later version of directdraw, i think its a common issue.

Thanks for checking it all out. I'm trying to create a game compatibility checklist for GeForce 7xxx in Win98. Maybe it'll be useful to you or others who see this thread in the future. For example, a couple of other problematic games I found are Splinter Cell, Far Cry and NFS Underground 2. e.g. Splinter Cell shows blocky artifacts on the screen and is unplayable (even though its sequel SC: Pandora Tomorrow runs fine and is playable). NFS Underground 2 minimap is drawn weirdly as a square instead of a circle. Far Cry again shows artifacts if the water or shadow settings are set to high. etc.

xtreger wrote on Yesterday, 20:29:

DudeFace wrote on 2025-11-06, 01:04:

no worries :) road rash was on my list to try out, and i havent played a fifa game since 98. lol, ive only used dxwnd a couple o […]
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xtreger wrote on 2025-11-05, 10:35:

First of all thank you so much for testing all of this. I guess I'll try out more games then. As you mentioned almost all games you installed work, and if the problem is only with these two games, I can live with that. I'm curious about dxwnd - have you got either fifa2000 or Road Rash to work with that?

no worries 😀 road rash was on my list to try out, and i havent played a fifa game since 98. 🤣, ive only used dxwnd a couple of times and that was years ago so cant really advise on that, dgvoodoo is another option though not sure if its compatible with dx9 gpu's.

xtreger wrote on 2025-11-05, 22:04:

Just a quick update even if it may seem obvious - the error definitely seems to have something to do with nvidia's directx dll. When I replace the nvdd32.dll with a version from the older drivers (e.g. 77.72 or 6x.xx), then road rash actually works fine. BUT in this case the Direct3D functionality gets entirely disabled. Similarly if I go to My Computer -> Performance and set GPU acceleration to only "basic accelerator functions", again Road Rash works fine (and obviously most 3D games won't work this way).

Since there are also issues with FX5200, Nvidia likely had trash drivers for Win98. So I wonder if there is some patch for the nvdd32.dll or some replacement so that directx performance is more stable.

i tried road rash again with the fx5200, i turned down the performance slider all the way down, then had to reboot, this just seemed to disable the nvidia control panel as it was missing from the tray/display options, on starting the game it said no direct draw driver is installed and performance will be poor, this actually made the game perfectly playable.

im guessing by default it uses direct draw and without probably software renderer, still looks better than the playstation version.
so probably could be a compatibility issue with a later version of directdraw, i think its a common issue.

Thanks for checking it all out. I'm trying to create a game compatibility checklist for GeForce 7xxx in Win98. Maybe it'll be useful to you or others who see this thread in the future. For example, a couple of other problematic games I found are Splinter Cell, Far Cry and NFS Underground 2. e.g. Splinter Cell shows blocky artifacts on the screen and is unplayable (even though its sequel SC: Pandora Tomorrow runs fine and is playable). NFS Underground 2 minimap is drawn weirdly as a square instead of a circle. Far Cry again shows artifacts if the water or shadow settings are set to high. etc.

A list would be a great idea. Tested Splinter Cell and had the same blocky artifacts but I couldn't even get Far Cry to run. It would just go to a black screen when you start a campaign. Patch 1.4 didn't help.

This card is best used as a dual boot with XP, so I loaded up Far Cry in XP and wasted about an hour. I forgot how good that game looked.