A Matrox/RIVA 128/S3 card with Voodoo1/2 would be optimal. Out of those listed Voodoo3.

ibm5155 wrote:

I tested a radeon 7200 and a fx5500, and both are slow D:)

I don't understand what makes you think putting in a slower video card will make things faster – especially DOS games which have no hardware acceleration. If you want to play those games faster, you should get a faster CPU.

The V3 is fast enough for those games but not at high ress (for that era) 800x600 is about the most that it can handle on a rig like that. For raw speed look at a cheap P2/3 rig. For dos games the system with the v3 is more than enough.

Jorpho wrote:

ibm5155 wrote:

I tested a radeon 7200 and a fx5500, and both are slow D:)

I don't understand what makes you think putting in a slower video card will make things faster – especially DOS games which have no hardware acceleration. If you want to play those games faster, you should get a faster CPU.

Because, they don't use too newer drivers? the one from radeon are from 2003 and fx5500 are from 2005 (the older drivers didnt found the gpu =/)
Radeon 7200 is too heavy for this processor, the drivers to install take almost one hour to install D:

And on both, quake 2 I get 13 - 19 fps at opengl - 640x480 and 1000 score at 3Dmark99, and like I see quake 2 playing at 60 - 70 fps on a pentium mmx, I think if I replace the new video card by an older would use less processor.

I found another options
-Nvidia TNT2 M64 pci
-Diamond 3d/4mb pci
-Ati Rage 128gl 32mb pci
-Sis 6326 4mb agp
-Matrox G450 Atx Dual Vga 16mb Agp
-Ati Rage 128pro 16mb agp
-Nvidia TNT 8mb agp

ibm5155 wrote:

Because, they don't use too newer drivers? the one from radeon are from 2003 and fx5500 are from 2005 (the older drivers didnt found the gpu =/)
Radeon 7200 is too heavy for this processor, the drivers to install take almost one hour to install D:

For starters, DOS games don't really care about drivers. And secondly, since the 7200 apparently came out in 2001, you should be able to find older drivers if you really want to.

I really don't understand what makes you think the drivers are slow because they take a long time to install. I think you should be able to find compatible Omega Drivers if you just want to get rid of the extra cruft. I agree that Catalyst Control Center is an abomination.

And on both, quake 2 I get 13 - 19 fps at opengl - 640x480 and 1000 score at 3Dmark99, and like I see quake 2 playing at 60 - 70 fps on a pentium mmx

Well, where did you see it running at 60-70 fps?

What version of Windows are you running, anyway? And how much RAM does your system have? Extra RAM might make a much bigger difference than a slower video card.

i suggest the mx200 is a better pair of the pmmx, and use the 30.82 driver.
getting quake2 play at 60-70 fps on pmmx is not feasible, it requires a k6-2+500 or so. but you can get quake2 to over 30 fps with some tweaks.

For DOS games I can't recommend the riva128(/zx) enough... it has almost excellent compatibility, it is fast and has native VBE3.0 support.
Couple it with a voodoo2 and you have a solid setup.
I have used the 128zx + voodoo2 combo for a couple of years, no complains at all. I have now removed the v2 since I use my 200mmx build mainly in DOS. It's great.

For dos games the radeon 7200 is just fine, the problem is with quake 2 and other windows games like tomb raider II.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/272/15 here's where I saw the frames per second. (but with a celeron 266MHz, I didn't find a score with a pentium mmx =/

And the problem with the older drivers is because I get a error :"video card inf not found" then a french mensage I think.
Hmm I remember the omega drivers, I'll give it a try 😀

I'm using a pentium MMx 233MHz with 1mb l2 cache, 128mb sdram (pc100), 80gb ide hd, maxi sound game theater 64 sound card, agp2x,and the good and old ati radeon 7200 (I remember that gpu could easy do more than 100 fps at higher resolution at quake 2, but here it's only giving me 15 - 19 fps '-' [15fps with an older driver]).
The operational system is windows 98se.
I would like to play windows game like tomb raider 2, need for speed II or III, quake 2, half life,... and even dos games (but for dos i wouldnt need to change the gpu since it works perfect).

EDIT:OPS now i noticed I typed it got 50 - 70 fps on a pentium mmx, but it was a celeron with 266MHz :s

EDIT2:The system was using 384mb of ram, but it looks like the 256mb memory is failing (The bios say it failed on the fast memory test)

ibm5155 wrote:

For dos games the radeon 7200 is just fine, the problem is with quake 2 and other windows games like tomb raider II. […]
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For dos games the radeon 7200 is just fine, the problem is with quake 2 and other windows games like tomb raider II.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/272/15 here's where I saw the frames per second. (but with a celeron 266MHz, I didn't find a score with a pentium mmx =/

And the problem with the older drivers is because I get a error :"video card inf not found" then a french mensage I think.
Hmm I remember the omega drivers, I'll give it a try 😀

I'm using a pentium MMx 233MHz with 1mb l2 cache, 128mb sdram (pc100), 80gb ide hd, maxi sound game theater 64 sound card, agp2x,and the good and old ati radeon 7200 (I remember that gpu could easy do more than 100 fps at higher resolution at quake 2, but here it's only giving me 15 - 19 fps '-' [15fps with an older driver]).
The operational system is windows 98se.
I would like to play windows game like tomb raider 2, need for speed II or III, quake 2, half life,... and even dos games (but for dos i wouldnt need to change the gpu since it works perfect).

EDIT:OPS now i noticed I typed it got 50 - 70 fps on a pentium mmx, but it was a celeron with 266MHz :s

EDIT2:The system was using 384mb of ram, but it looks like the 256mb memory is failing (The bios say it failed on the fast memory test)

the ati drivers are too cpu-consuming for socket7, and so are later nvidia drivers for geforce5(and later).
and whats your board? from your 1mb cache i can assume its a mvp3, so make sure you have installed proper via drivers, and the via memory interleave enabler which boosts cpu performance a bit too.

from this page you can see that pmmx-233 is capable of getting 32fps in quake2. he tested with a voodoo2 which is known for low cpu consumption, but i believe nvidia cards won't be much slower.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-perfo … lot-1,63-2.html

I got playable framefrates (25-ish) in Q3A on a p200mmx with a voodoo1 & 64mb ram.

640x480
Lightmap off
medium textures

The only time it would start to struggle was on the larger maps. All on a 430TX pcchips board.

Havent tested on Q2 yet, But anything from 3dfx would be the way to go. Other cards really do need a faster CPU.

Forevermore wrote:

I got playable framefrates (25-ish) in Q3A on a p200mmx with a voodoo1 & 64mb ram. […]
Show full quote

I got playable framefrates (25-ish) in Q3A on a p200mmx with a voodoo1 & 64mb ram.

640x480
Lightmap off
medium textures

The only time it would start to struggle was on the larger maps. All on a 430TX pcchips board.

Havent tested on Q2 yet, But anything from 3dfx would be the way to go. Other cards really do need a faster CPU.

64mb is indeed too tight for quake3. quake3's default setting requires 64mb of FREE ram, you can limit its memory usage but not without performance degradation. and the tx chipset can only cache for 64mb of ram, so its not really a good option.

and if you are satisfied with your quake3 performance, i invite you to my quake3 benchmark demo in this post:
introducing my quake3 benchmark demo
this demo requires quake3 v1.32, and also download the map in the link. if your quake3 is old version that uses *.dm3 demo format, then try the original nv15 demo that comes with the map.

noshutdown wrote:

64mb is indeed too tight for quake3. quake3's default setting requires 64mb of FREE ram, you can limit its memory usage but not […]
Show full quote

64mb is indeed too tight for quake3. quake3's default setting requires 64mb of FREE ram, you can limit its memory usage but not without performance degradation. and the tx chipset can only cache for 64mb of ram, so its not really a good option.

and if you are satisfied with your quake3 performance, i invite you to my quake3 benchmark demo in this post:
introducing my quake3 benchmark demo
this demo requires quake3 v1.32, and also download the map in the link. if your quake3 is old version that uses *.dm3 demo format, then try the original nv15 demo that comes with the map.

You want to see bad performance, try a Celeron 300A, 48mb RAM & a Rage Pro Turbo 4mb 🤣 That's what my old Acer Aspire's specs were. Loading times in Q3A were abysmal.

Forevermore wrote:

You want to see bad performance, try a Celeron 300A, 48mb RAM & a Rage Pro Turbo 4mb 🤣 That's what my old Acer Aspire's specs were. Loading times in Q3A were abysmal.

thats surely not the slowest i have seen. i've already scored 0.5fps on a cyrix6x86-66 and rage128vr(not the slowest card i have, but i am lazy of changing cards from my stockpile).
someday i'll use a board that supports 50fsb, and run it with a rendition1000. 😎

noshutdown wrote:

Forevermore wrote:

You want to see bad performance, try a Celeron 300A, 48mb RAM & a Rage Pro Turbo 4mb 🤣 That's what my old Acer Aspire's specs were. Loading times in Q3A were abysmal.

thats surely not the slowest i have seen. i've already scored 0.5fps on a cyrix6x86-66 and rage128vr(not the slowest card i have, but i am lazy of changing cards from my stockpile).
someday i'll use a board that supports 50fsb, and run it with a rendition1000. 😎

Speaking of rendition, I have a v2100. I know that vquake & vquake2 exist, but is there any other patches/drivers out there that can make the card run better? Or even maybe something Q3A specifically?

Wouldn't a Voodoo only be particularly useful for Glide games, or at least games specifically designed for the Voodoo (i.e. Quake 2 with the MiniGL) ?

ibm5155 wrote:

EDIT2:The system was using 384mb of ram, but it looks like the 256mb memory is failing (The bios say it failed on the fast memory test)

You should worry about this problem first before concerning yourself with the GPU, I think. That could probably be more responsible for slowing down your system.

Well, I tried again, memtest gave me some fail results, and wow, it's so easy to test the memory, I think I can even make a progrma to test the memory rofl...
But the 128mb was clean, and the omega drivers didn't changed nothing at performance...
I'm going with the Voodoo 3 2000 pci, it's not the cheapest gpu and it's not the agp, but it looks like the agp and pci had almost the same performance on that time

ibm5155 wrote:

I'm going with the Voodoo 3 2000 pci, it's not the cheapest gpu

If you're actually sinking money into this, why not just get a Slot 1 board? The games you mention will likely be able to take advantage of it.

Quake2's playable on a Pentium MMX with a Voodoo2 just fine, it even flies on a Cyrix6x86 with one (which are usually slow with Quake engines at software rendering).

You can forget about Half-Life however (until Pentium II or K6-2 at least - skeletal processing, very split BSP leafs and the sound DSP tends to choke)