Windows 9x was ancient even for 2002 standards. By 2006 only 5% or less were using 98 SE, so its no surprise that ATI dropped support.

i have never seen a OS aging so bad and fast like 9x...

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2026-07-17, 01:00:

Someone probably could port open source Linux drivers, but that would be only for OpenGL.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-07-16, 10:28:

AGP never had the capability for multiple GPUs or even multiple AGP slots

In fact, it had. That's why Rage MAXX exists.

I own a working one the two GPUs do not talk to each other over the AGP bus they use an internal PCI bus interconnect to talk to each other, the AGP bus is treated by the card as nothing more than a 66Mhz PCi slot, the OS only ever see the card as one GPU. The other dual GPU card the Voodoo 5 5500 also uses an internal PCI bus to talk to each other and does not communicate over the AGP bus, this card however is seen by windows as two GPUs, it also treats the AGP slot as a 66Mhz PCI slot.

A cool feature the Fury MAXX has that the Voodoo 5 does not is the ability to disable an entire GPU Die along with its memory, making it essentially an ATI Fury, pretty interesting feature.

AGP as a slot never supported multiple GPUs in the same system via dual AGP slots and even DUAL GPUs via PCI / AGP would have issues since the AGP slot wanted to be primary, which is why there was never dual AGP boards and why AGP SLI/Xfire never came to AGP systems. Again I will expect a Gotcha via the Voodoo 2 cards and their use of SLI via PCI but that's a different discussion and a vastly different implementation of SLI from the nVidia variety.

But I suspect you understood all this and was just playing a gotcha, I know how you work Mr Rider.

I know return to doing more useful and profitable things with my time.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-07-20, 13:16:

the OS only ever see the card as one GPU.

Nope.
https://youtu.be/BJfoyato1Ac?t=434

A cool feature the Fury MAXX has that the Voodoo 5 does not is the ability to disable an entire GPU Die

That's also not true.

The other dual GPU card the Voodoo 5 5500 also uses an internal PCI bus to talk to each other and does not communicate over the AGP bus, this card however is seen by windows as two GPUs

And this one too. Voodoo 5 is recognized as a single device.

Living wrote on 2026-07-20, 11:37:

Windows 9x was ancient even for 2002 standards. By 2006 only 5% or less were using 98 SE, so its no surprise that ATI dropped support.

i have never seen a OS aging so bad and fast like 9x...

And yet still 30 million active 9x users in 2010.

My college in 2006 was still about half 9x boxes in the lan parties, lots of k6-x, Duron, celeron and Athlon systems up to 2ghz with 9x still in tow.

Those that didn’t have 9x had 2k because it was available almost free by the school but xp was not. (School really did not like xp and kept it off their own equipment, seeing labs full of 750mhz-1.4ghz athlons with nt4 or win2k was always somehow more interesting.

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-07-20, 18:05:

And yet still 30 million active 9x users in 2010. […]
Show full quote

Living wrote on 2026-07-20, 11:37:

Windows 9x was ancient even for 2002 standards. By 2006 only 5% or less were using 98 SE, so its no surprise that ATI dropped support.

i have never seen a OS aging so bad and fast like 9x...

And yet still 30 million active 9x users in 2010.

My college in 2006 was still about half 9x boxes in the lan parties, lots of k6-x, Duron, celeron and Athlon systems up to 2ghz with 9x still in tow.

Those that didn’t have 9x had 2k because it was available almost free by the school but xp was not. (School really did not like xp and kept it off their own equipment, seeing labs full of 750mhz-1.4ghz athlons with nt4 or win2k was always somehow more interesting.

There will always residue / leftovers. I been working in IT since 1999 and my main goal between 2004 and 2007 was that all my clients had to have some flavor of NT since i was so done with the 9x bullshit, even if had to bruteforce XP in the PC. 98 SE was only reserved for people with very especific software that didnt work with anything else.

I do remember the resistance to moving to NT5. Of course it does make sense to keep gaming platforms from 1997-2000 on Win9x. They won't run 2K/XP well. But some of it was just the usual dislike of change.

I have always been an early adopter when there is a clear advantage to doing so. I didn't convert to Win2000 because it was pretty raw for games. Software compatibility and drivers were not so great and it needs a lot more RAM. XP fixed up a lot of that up and I had a more powerful machine in 2001. It even has a level of DOS game support in NTVDM. And hey there was also VDMSound, the reason I found this forum in 2002! Soundfonts on SBLive working with DOS games!!!

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2026-07-20, 17:22:

Nope. https://youtu.be/BJfoyato1Ac?t=434 […]
Show full quote

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-07-20, 13:16:

the OS only ever see the card as one GPU.

Nope.
https://youtu.be/BJfoyato1Ac?t=434

A cool feature the Fury MAXX has that the Voodoo 5 does not is the ability to disable an entire GPU Die

That's also not true.

The other dual GPU card the Voodoo 5 5500 also uses an internal PCI bus to talk to each other and does not communicate over the AGP bus, this card however is seen by windows as two GPUs

And this one too. Voodoo 5 is recognized as a single device.

Sure thing champ, what else did you learn from the internet today ?

I learned that I can mix MINOR details up about two cards that behave very much the same namely which one appears as two GPUs in windows and which one does not and that I should explicitly state that the MAXX is a PHYSICAL hardware jumper disabling the second GPU and not a driver option that simply HIDES the second GPU from the drivers preventing it from being used by programs. Yes there is a difference, please correct me if I'm wrong but I don't recall the Voodoo 5 ever having a hardware jumper for this but its possible some revisions did.

Now with that out of the way is there anything else you wish to nit pick into oblivion ? or have you had your fun and are going to contribute to the topic with more than gotchas ...I find gotchas and one mans to be incredibly obnoxious and add little value to a conversation.

Sure thing champ, what else did you learn from the internet today ?

So no objection to my statements. Everything else I see in the post is just semantics. And yes, there are two jumpers on Rage MAXX, which is not required for Voodoo 5.

There are no jumpers on my card... https://hw-museum.cz/vga/75/ati-rage-fury-maxx And IIRC it is possible to disable second GPU on RFM in the control panel too.

havli wrote on 2026-07-28, 07:23:

There are no jumpers on my card... https://hw-museum.cz/vga/75/ati-rage-fury-maxx And IIRC it is possible to disable second GPU on RFM in the control panel too.

They are hardwired (near the ROM chips). Early cards still had them as normal jumpers, probably for never released version with dual monitor support, to switch VGA boot order. I suppose if they are configured incorrectly, one of the Rage 128 Pro could be "disabled".

And IIRC it is possible to disable second GPU on RFM in the control panel too.

Yep.

So just for the heck of it I tried my X1950 XT on a fresh install of Windows 98 with DX9, IE6, and WMP9, and while the driver does install with an INF mod it shows a code 24 in device manager.
This device is either not present, not working properly, or does not have all the drivers installed. Try upgrading the device drivers for this device.

The good news is that the driver seems to load, but it does not seem to recognize the R500 (particularly R580) card and just boots with the standard VGA driver instead. No protection errors or BSODs, or random shutdowns during startup. As this is a card that does not use unified shaders like the ATI Radeon HD series and nVidia 8/9 series (that someone falsely claimed would work with a tweaked version of the 82.69 driver), I think it is possible it could work. I see this being a good option for multiboot systems that also have Linux or BSD installed, those of which do not work with nVidia 304 drivers anymore. It is also a good bit faster than the 7800 GTX or 7800 GTX 512, which in my opinion are the best nVidia cards for 9x as you can use the more stable 77.72 drivers.

havli wrote on 2026-07-28, 07:23:

There are no jumpers on my card... https://hw-museum.cz/vga/75/ati-rage-fury-maxx And IIRC it is possible to disable second GPU on RFM in the control panel too.

You have a different/newer version of that board from mine, interesting, mine is an older 1999 version with jumpers .. you do have the pads for the jumpers though so perhaps they simply took the jumpers off for cost saving. (The D-E JU101/JU202 next to the bios chips is the pads for the Jumpers, yours are shorted to be always on). My main BIOS is also socketed

I wonder if they changed anything else.

That driver setting for me to turn of one GPU always caused issues so I stopped using it, didn't matter which driver revision I used either. So if it works for you correctly I assume this is another fix between the versions.

Mine looks Identical to this card