Got a new 3D-Mark-99 score, with the Medion Radeon-9800-XXL card.

I used the Catalyst 4.2 driver on this. The 4.2 have the same solid V-Sync, AA and AF control as the 6.2 version.

Massive score! No doubt because of the strong CPU.

Strong CPU? It's only a Sempron-3300+ and not a P4 Socket 775.

brostenen wrote:

Strong CPU? It's only a Sempron-3300+ and not a P4 Socket 775.

For 3DMark99 it is a very strong CPU 😀

The reason for testing with 99' is that I wanted to make a sort of 1999'ish machine (in spirit) just on steroids.
Perhaps I do have DX7 installed, and in that case, I will give 3D-Mark 2000 a shot, to see how things perform.

Yup. It had DX7 installed, so I made a quick test.
I lowered the resolution to 800x600, in order to have the same resolution as in 3DMark99

I'd keep it at the default resolution / setting. Much easier to compare with other machines that way.

Tested the following system: Athlon XP 3200+, 9800Pro, 2GB DDR400, XPSP2.
800x600x16:

1024x768x16(default):

1600x1200x32:

There is no mistake, 800x600 really gives worse results than 1024x768. The card really shines at high resolutions 😀 It would be a crime to only use it at 800x600.
P.S. Couldn't run '99. It does not like XP at all.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Just realised, 99 used 640x480 as default resolution and 800x600 IS the default for 2000 😊

Not on my systems 😀

Im pretty sure 800*600 is the default setting in 3dmark99 Max and 1024*768 in 3dmark2000

Very odd. Does it maybe depend on the graphics card? This was with a TNT2 under Windows 98.

EDIT: Sorry, you're right. Memory letting me down again 😢

This is so great to see other's having high results. On rhe other hand, I can't help notice the small differences in the numbers.
First I thought that it might be the cards. Then again. Mine is on Win98se, has 1/4'th the amount of memory and what should be an inferiour CPU.

What's the deal here? What's going on? Does someone know this or have a clue on to what could be the reason?

Anyway...
Tested with NFS-2K and UT99 last night. And shure enough. The Radeon series 9000 (9600 and 9800 in my tests), have shown no gfx glitches
on these two games. Compared to a GF4-ti4200, wich game some horrible menu in NFS, untill AAx4 was enabled.
I just can't help but conclude, that the best card's (when speaking in general) for the highest performing Win98 games, are Radeon 9XXX cards.
Perhaps something like quadro cards have it going, a bit better, compared to GF3's and GF4's. As TNT2 cards are the last to display games
as they are ment to be seen. When looking at nVidia cards and difficult to get going games like NFS-2K.

What are other peoples conclusion's and findings on this whole Radeon vs. Geforce thing?
Can someone please check un-updated/vanilla version of NFS-2K on a wide range of Radeon and Geforce cards?

Radeon 9600LE: No problems
Radeon 9800XXL-Medion: No problems
GF4-ti4200: Bad/washed out menutexts using AAx0 and AAx2.
GF-FX5200: Bad/washed out menutexts using AAx0 and AAx2.
TNT2-Ultra: No problems.

I've also had no issues with Radeon cards when I did my "10 reasons for a Pentium 4" video project. I was positively surprised to be honest.

brostenen wrote:

This is so great to see other's having high results. On rhe other hand, I can't help notice the small differences in the numbers.
First I thought that it might be the cards. Then again. Mine is on Win98se, has 1/4'th the amount of memory and what should be an inferiour CPU.

1) The amount of RAM does not matter as long as there is enough for the program to run. 512Mb, hell, even 256Mb was too much for Y2K anyway.
2) Sempron64 3300+ is much newer than AthlonXP 3200+ and even though 3300+ has smaller cache, remember that 3200+ lacks HyperTransport, SSE2, AMD64. In this appliance, I would say they are more or less equal, yours having improved memory performance and mine making up for that with much bigger cache.

I use the GF4-ti4200 on my Windows 98 machine. I can only compare it to Voodoo 2 and 3 cards because I don't have any other video hardware old enough. Overall I have been very happy with it. It is powerful enough to run every game that game out until XP was the popular gaming OS.

I have however noticed the problem you described as Bad/washed out menutexts on some games. I'm on the 41.09 forceware driver. Could you please tell me how to adjust the AAx0 and AAx2 settings? I was looking for it a few weeks ago actually and could never figure out how to change it.

Right-Click on the desktop and get into the menu with the screen resolutions.
Then click advanced (i think) and choose Geforce settings.
In there (the nView) you can set stuff like Anti Aliasing. Set it to x2 at first.
If the menu is still washed out, set it to AAx4.
I do not know anything about what drivers are the fastest.
I had good results though, using 40 to 44 drivers. I think 44+ had too many issues.