VOGONS


First post, by aigeek

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I'm building a hybrid & high end retro PC for DOS6.22 & Win3.11 & Win95OSR2.5 & Win98SE

Mobo: iWill DBS100(440BX & FSB133) Dual Slot1 with PIII-1G
RAM: PC133 CL2 256MB x 2 ( Max 256MB x 4 for NT4 or 2K late)
Video: Nvidia Geforce Ti4600 & ATI Radeon 9800 Pro @ AGP 2X
HDD: Intel SSD 80GB mSATA to 44pin IDE box with 44-40 IDE Adapter
Partition: FAT16 2GB for DOS / FAT32 8.7GB for Win95 / FAT32 32GB for Win98 / FAT32 32GB for Other or partition image backup)
MultiOS console: System Commander 9.04

It's easy and happy to make Ti4600 working on Win95 with Nvidia forceware 29.42.

Then I repalce the video card with 9800OPro, and restore the Win95 to initial state with ghost for DOS v7.5, the big problem comes up: I jsut can not found any ATI Catalyst driver for Radeon 9800Pro on Win95?!

I have come to https://www.amd.com/en/support for legacy video card, but the oldest supported OS is Win98/ME with Catalyst 6.2.

I have searching on google and get some latest ATI drivers for Win95, such as 4.13.9035 & 6.13.1.6037, but when I install them, They prompt that the current graphics card is not supported.

Has anyone successfully driven 9800pro on Win95 ? After all, 9800pro is the top graphics card that can support AGP 2X.

Last edited by aigeek on 2020-07-10, 10:36. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 4, by synrgy87

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I don't think it's officially supported on 95, you might be able to add the Hardware IDs to the driver inf files but I don't know if that'll work, 9800 is a bit too new for 95 use, ATI dropped support for 95 with their 9000 series cards, so even if you add the hardware ID the latest 95 drivers may not support the card anyway.

Reply 2 of 4, by bloodem

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Well, I gotta say, I'm also a fan of overkill PCs, but yours is just... weird 😁
First of all, I would not imagine why anyone would want a Radeon 9800 Pro (or even a GeForce 4 Ti 4600 for that matter) on a Windows 95 😁
Second... the Pentium 3 CPUs will be a major bottleneck even for the GeForce 4 Ti, not to mention the Radeon 9800 Pro.
Third... you have two CPUs, but you are using them solely with operating systems that will never use more than one.

So, a Frankenstein PC, indeed! 😁

Now, regarding the drivers, I would imagine that ATI never actually tested thoroughy the 9xxx series with Windows 95, so there's probably little chance of making these cards run with decent stability on such an OS.

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Reply 3 of 4, by aigeek

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They call it phobia due to lack of speed 😉

There are many bottlenecks for legacy OS or some components, such as max RAM size or AGP 2X bandwidth. But each one is the fastest, So the shortest board of barrel is still the longest, right?

So, the max version of DirectX for Win95 is 8.0a , then the fastest video card for Win95 is Ti4600, and Radeon 8500 ?

Reply 4 of 4, by lordmogul

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Just because Win 95 ends with DX 8.0a doesn't necessarily mean it can't run cards that support newer versions.
Think of it that way: XP only supports up to DX 9.0c, but the fastest/newest cards with driver support are the GTX 780 Ti/GTX 960 and R9 270X, which are all fairly beefy DX11 cards.
Not sure about ATi, but the 81.89 driver supports up to Geforce 6, which means the fastest card from the green team would be a 6800 Ultra.

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