lets just settle this, get a Geforce 7950GT AGP XFX, get the modded drivers and get very big overkill 🤣
wrote:lets just settle this, get a Geforce 7950GT AGP XFX, get the modded drivers and get very big overkill 🤣
(I'm not very educated on this, and I'm sure that Obobskivich will be able to provide more accurate details.)
Because the GF6 cards came out at a time when ATI and NVIDIA were beginning to transition to PCI-E cards, some of them have an "HSI Bridge" chip on them. The AGP cards that have these get an extra level of instability added to them. My 7900GS has it, but I've never really encountered any problems with it. I've got an AGP 6800GT that I'm saving because it's one of the last "native" AGP cards that was made. If I ever have issues with the 7900GS, I'll be switching to the 6800GT.
From what I've read, the AGP Radeon 3850, and especially the 4670, had lots of problems. I don't know if those problems were caused by the HSI Bridge, but the drivers have very serious issues that were never fixed, and never will be fixed. Even though they're the fastest AGP cards you can get, I intend to avoid the Radeon headaches.
Moved the texture filtering chat to a new thread
Texture filtering quality comparison
wrote:(I'm not very educated on this, and I'm sure that Obobskivich will be able to provide more accurate details.) […]
wrote:lets just settle this, get a Geforce 7950GT AGP XFX, get the modded drivers and get very big overkill 🤣
(I'm not very educated on this, and I'm sure that Obobskivich will be able to provide more accurate details.)
Because the GF6 cards came out at a time when ATI and NVIDIA were beginning to transition to PCI-E cards, some of them have an "HSI Bridge" chip on them. The AGP cards that have these get an extra level of instability added to them. My 7900GS has it, but I've never really encountered any problems with it. I've got an AGP 6800GT that I'm saving because it's one of the last "native" AGP cards that was made. If I ever have issues with the 7900GS, I'll be switching to the 6800GT.
From what I've read, the AGP Radeon 3850, and especially the 4670, had lots of problems. I don't know if those problems were caused by the HSI Bridge, but the drivers have very serious issues that were never fixed, and never will be fixed. Even though they're the fastest AGP cards you can get, I intend to avoid the Radeon headaches.
well for 9x you can't get anything newer than the x800 to work, but modded drivers will make all gf7 cards work. But yes the HD3850 is the fastest AGP card, if you can get it stable 🤣.
The nvidia cards used the same HSI they'd been using since they made the PCX 4300, 5300, 5750, and 5900 series, its a bi directional chip, it remained the same throughout but it didn't support G80 cpu's and Nvidia didn't bother to make a newer revision as the install base with machines new enough to use a G80 based card while also being AGP was small by then. We are talking Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or greater pretty much.
wrote:lets just settle this, get a Geforce 7950GT AGP XFX, get the modded drivers and get very big overkill 🤣
There's no kill like overkill! 🤣
wrote:(I'm not very educated on this, and I'm sure that Obobskivich will be able to provide more accurate details.)
Because the GF6 cards came out at a time when ATI and NVIDIA were beginning to transition to PCI-E cards, some of them have an "HSI Bridge" chip on them. The AGP cards that have these get an extra level of instability added to them. My 7900GS has it, but I've never really encountered any problems with it. I've got an AGP 6800GT that I'm saving because it's one of the last "native" AGP cards that was made. If I ever have issues with the 7900GS, I'll be switching to the 6800GT.
From what I've read, the AGP Radeon 3850, and especially the 4670, had lots of problems. I don't know if those problems were caused by the HSI Bridge, but the drivers have very serious issues that were never fixed, and never will be fixed. Even though they're the fastest AGP cards you can get, I intend to avoid the Radeon headaches.
nVidia has "HSI Bridge" (I think that's actually its retail name, like "GeForce"), ATi has Rialto. GeForce 6600 and later (on AGP) use HSI (HSI is also what enables GeForce 4 MX, FX, and the 6800 to have PCIe variants); Rialto has been used on *lots* of ATi cards from the X series through the HD 4000 series. My guess/theory/whatever is there's actually multiple versions of Rialto as well. I have AGP variants of X1600 Pro and HD 4350, and the 4350 is considerably less headache to work with. You do need the "AGP Hotfix" drivers for those cards to work perfectly though (AMD keeps them on their website, or you can email AMD support for them). When I say "less headache" what I mean is, the X1600 will have random screen drop-outs on boot-up, the VGA performance (like in FreeDOS) is not great, and on some systems there's minor screen corruption in BIOS or from UBCD or similar. It also will hang randomly in some 3D games and benchmarks (it does it in 3DMark01 on the car chase every time). HD 4350 has none of those problems - it behaves just like a native AGP card should, at least in all of the machines I've plugged it into. This improvement is what leads me to think there are multiple versions of Rialto.
I tend to see a lot less complaining about HSI equipped cards (for whatever that's worth), and I know back in the day nVidia tended to receive more praise for HSI than ATi did for Rialto. One issue with any of these cards, however, is that ignoring the driver hack that candle_86 mentioned, they generally aren't an option for Windows 9x. The only bridged card that's officially supported in 9x would be the 6600GT (GF6 is supported in 9x). GeForce 7 has been added via modified drivers, and Radeon X is supposed to be supported unofficially in the final 9x driver build from ATi. Stuff like HD 4350 or 3850 or whatever else is not going to work though. Also, even with GeForce 6 or 7 or other "late AGP cards" you will be much more limited on drivers than with something like GeForce 4, which may be a compatibility issue for some games.
Something else to keep in mind, the most complaints I tend to see about HSI/Rialto are people trying to use them in early AGP boards that may not have the best compatibility to begin with. I've never personally tested it, but it seems to be a lot lower probability of success than with a later AGP board like Intel 865/875 or VIA PT880 based.
In terms of "native AGP cards" the 6800 series is the latest and greatest, but they're not universal AGP (e.g. no 3.3V); for that, you want GeForce FX 5900 series. There are some Radeon 9 cards that have universal keying, and some that don't, but if you have a universal Radeon 9 that's also an option.
