Yes you were GPU limited. It seems like nVidia made various versions of the GeForce 6200 AGP but all of them were pretty slow. A Radeon 9600XT should be a better match for the system.

Another thing I might point out is that some of the games you listed are newer than your system, and would run better on a newer computer running Windows XP (they might even run well on a modern computer).

Pentium 3 is good for DOS games and early Windows games up to about 2000. Athlon 64 is good enough up to about 2004.

hey mate,

Halo CE and Morrowind is quite demanding games for your build i remember it was not that good on Athlon 1.4GHz with Geforce 3 and 9600PRO after . Was 15-40 fps @1024x768 at high settings.

Half- Life should do well, I never played Halo CE, but Morrowind needs a fast GPU. I don't know if a 9600 XT will be enough to max it out and have a consistently high frame rate.

I got it in and installed the new drivers and it still runs Halo pretty bad honestly. Scored 700 points higher in 3DMark 2000 though. I still have to try the other games but based on a slight score increase and no visible difference in Halo, I imagine it is still going to be bad 😁. I play those games on my modern gaming PC just fun to play with old stuff (isn't that why we are all here?). Gotta find my copies of NFS 3 Hot Pursuit and NFS High Stakes again. Those also ran poorly when I first built this PC, might be better now.

Halo is just too new a game for your retro system. I guess can just play it on your modern PC as you said.

NFS 3 and 4 should run really well on a Radeon 9600. You could probably play at 1600x1200 (or whatever 4:3-ish resolution your monitor supports) with the details maxed out. I believe NFS 3 and 4 don't run properly on Windows XP (or newer) out of the box. I have gotten NFS 4 (High Stakes aka Road Challenge) to run in Windows XP with a patch. So these are great games to play on a Windows 98 retro PC.

bZbZbZ wrote on 2022-02-09, 21:52:

Halo is just too new a game for your retro system. I guess can just play it on your modern PC as you said.

NFS 3 and 4 should run really well on a Radeon 9600. You could probably play at 1600x1200 (or whatever 4:3-ish resolution your monitor supports) with the details maxed out. I believe NFS 3 and 4 don't run properly on Windows XP (or newer) out of the box. I have gotten NFS 4 (High Stakes aka Road Challenge) to run in Windows XP with a patch. So these are great games to play on a Windows 98 retro PC.

Yeah I found them, but they don’t recognize the gpu of course. Says I need to install DirectX 5 Drivers when launching NFS3 and says DirectX 6 drivers with high stakes. Both work with the 6200. Probably need to patch them or change the d3da.dll. I have not played these since the early 2000s regularly because I never got them to run on XP and up correctly.

I use this patch for Need For Speed High Stakes: https://www.hsscoring.com/HSGuide/
There is a "Stock Pack" which (among other things) adds support for Windows XP and newer graphics cards. There is also an "Expansion Pack" that adds more cars/tracks, etc. There is a note that IP Lounge multiplayer doesn't work in Win 9x (XP or above only) but for single player Win98 should be fine.

I was able to play NFS4 with an Athlon 64 + Radeon 9800 Pro in Windows ME, at 1600x1200 with 4xAA. I didn't bother trying NFS3 on that machine because NFS4 with the "Expansion Pack" contained most of the NFS3 content anyway.

bZbZbZ wrote on 2022-02-10, 21:53:

I use this patch for Need For Speed High Stakes: https://www.hsscoring.com/HSGuide/
There is a "Stock Pack" which (among other things) adds support for Windows XP and newer graphics cards. There is also an "Expansion Pack" that adds more cars/tracks, etc. There is a note that IP Lounge multiplayer doesn't work in Win 9x (XP or above only) but for single player Win98 should be fine.

I was able to play NFS4 with an Athlon 64 + Radeon 9800 Pro in Windows ME, at 1600x1200 with 4xAA. I didn't bother trying NFS3 on that machine because NFS4 with the "Expansion Pack" contained most of the NFS3 content anyway.

Awesome thanks for the link! I found some other patches yesterday, like one where someone made it work with different GPUs. I think this is the patch I was looking for! I might just have to do a clean install of WinME at this point. After installing Office XP on it to remember what it looked like, it has started to lock up and BSOD like 3 times an hour. Also, I think my CD Drive is dying all of a sudden. Suddenly half-life said please insert CD and it dropped out of explorer. Idk, this thing is starting to get more and more expensive 🙁.

Coming back to this PC now. Just ordered some Star Tech IDE/SATA converters so I could switch to SSD (bought a 120GB one in case there were size issues) and use a SATA DVD drive I have that is new. With my old drive dying I did not want another old ebay IDE drive. Excited to see how it works!

I don't see much point in playing game like Need for Speed 3 at 1600x1200 as the game simply doesn't have sufficiently detailed textures. It came out when 16MB graphics cards were the norm. I play it at 800x600. Higher resolutions only start making sense for games from 2001 and beyond.