Okay, finally got the timedemo results for the FX5500 sorted out. What a finicky card this is to get it to work right in Windows 98SE 😖
Pentium 4 2.4GHz Northwood, Soyo P4I-845PE (Socket 478), 512mb DDR-333, NVIDIA GeForce FX5500 256mb AGP (82.63 Win9x beta drivers), Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, DirectX 8.1b, Windows 98SE.
Medium Quality:
640x480=26.3
1024x768=12.2
High Quality:
640x480=23.5
1024x768=11.3
Ultra Quality:
640x480=21.7
1024x768=10.9
Not only did I have to use the last Win9x drivers Nvidia ever made in order to get the best framerate possible, I also had to reduce AGP aperture size in the BIOS to 64mb to avoid texture corruption and severe overall performance degradation (I was getting very low fps numbers, even lower than GF3 😵 ). And after several tries, this is the best results I could get. Texture quality is also much improved when compared with GF4 and GF3. Still, I wouldn't want to play Doom 3 with this card; I much rather have an FX5700 or better to get playable average framerates.
Now to give the GF6600 a shot. Hopefully the results will be much better (cross my fingers 😊 ).