I don't think it is about video ram amount. I tried some newer pci cards in an old SS7 system and some worked and some didn't, but if the system posted fine, it also worked fine in windows 98 and dos. There just seems to be some kind of incompatibility with motherboards that have pci 2.1 and some newer cards that use newer pci version. You have to understand though that you can't find win98 driver for such new card, so it only works as vga.

Thanks, I'll try not to panic so much about the video card RAM to system RAM thing. It is a good point on the Win9x drivers; I planned on finding a card that I knew had Win9x drivers for it.

Nvidia last Win9x supported generation was Geforce 6 (as in 6800 Ultra, 6600GT, etc). You should be able to find fx5200 pci, mx440 pci or tnt2 m64 pci cards. Also I noticed that ATI had a lot of "modern" PCI cards, especially Radeon 9200, I had quite a few of them.

What are you doing with that system? With a P200 you won't be able to do much, if you don't want 3d games you could try to find something like S3 Trio or Virge PCI or RageII PCI, maybe Cirrus Logic, etc. Those cards should be easy to find and cheap. But they only have VGA output.

video memory is not an issue for older systems. Issues are more power draw of more modern PCI cards can be a bit much for old systems or incompatibilities based on supported PCI version.

Only way to know for certain is to try and see if it works.

The only relevant thing for video memory vs system memory is that both need to be mapped into the CPU's address space. Any i386 CPU can address 4GB, and I am not aware of any PCI cards coming close to that. With 4GB of RAM and a 32b CPU and/or OS you noticed this, with the video memory being subtracted from system RAM. On an So7 system you can't even come close to that amount of RAM, so non-issue.

The only relevant thing for video memory vs system memory is that both need to be mapped into the CPU's address space.

I've heard that PCI (and presumably PCIe and AGP) cards map their memory into a 256MB window on 32-bit systems, even if the card has more than 256MB on it. So even if you're bumping into the limit of the 4GB address space, having a video card with 1-2GB or more would not be an issue. Can anyone confirm?

I didn't have any problems running 32bit winxp on pc that had 8Gb of ram and gtx 780ti with 3Gb of ram even though it doesn't show all 8Gb of ram.

dionb wrote:

The only relevant thing for video memory vs system memory is that both need to be mapped into the CPU's address space. Any i386 CPU can address 4GB, and I am not aware of any PCI cards coming close to that. With 4GB of RAM and a 32b CPU and/or OS you noticed this, with the video memory being subtracted from system RAM. On an So7 system you can't even come close to that amount of RAM, so non-issue.

Not true! this hasn't been the case since the 286 days... before virtual memory came into play basically. Whats the point of having dedicated VRAM if you have to have everything in RAM? Also you never work with raw addresses of the VRAM, you have to request VRAM from the driver, which handles management for you. Even with asynchronous API's like vulkan, although you have more control (responsibility) for managing this yourself, you are restricted by the size of buffers that the API supports (and traditionally pow2 buffer sizes), so there is no chance of requesting a memory block that would get anywhere near the 32-bit addressable limit.

bakemono wrote:

I've heard that PCI (and presumably PCIe and AGP) cards map their memory into a 256MB window on 32-bit systems, even if the card has more than 256MB on it. So even if you're bumping into the limit of the 4GB address space, having a video card with 1-2GB or more would not be an issue. Can anyone confirm?

There is no 'standard'. The memory consumption in RAM is completely dictated by the driver, which can choose to map anything it likes, but is unlikely to map everything. In fact I would go so far to say that it doesn't map much due to limiting bandwidth between VRAM and RAM (even with AGP 😵). The consumption in host RAM will depend on the what is requested by the application, and how the driver manages the buffers for the context. Bad drivers may do a lot of swapping even when not explicitly requested, good drivers don't.

All texture/data needs to be uploaded to VRAM, and once uploaded can be freed (and should be) from RAM by the application since there is little to no point to keep it in the hosts memory (so VRAM is not, by default, mapped). This is, and has been standard practice by pixel pushing code monkeys since the dawn of abstracted API's. The exception is when an application explicitly requests mapped memory via something like a PBO (Pixel buffer objects), or more recently in DX12/vulkan, 'mapped' as opposed to 'host' or 'device' buffers. In these cases, this is mapped to CPU land and would show in the usage as being owned by the application (since it's protected, and the application has access to it).

In answer to OP. On a P200 with 80MB, you are restricted to hardware of the day or around that time? You would need to find a driver for the OS (not going to happen for newer GPU's), and even if you did fudge one to work, you would be extremely CPU bottlenecked. Take something like TnL, which until the GeForce, had to be done by the CPU, and a P200 isn't going to do much. So it's a catch-22. Either go oldskool-ish and be CPU bottlenecked doing much of what newer graphics hardware would be doing, or go newer and have a heavier driver (even if the GPU is doing the workload) which would still probably be CPU bottlenecked. ymmv... stick with a voodoo or something made for the hardware at the time imo 😀.

bakemono wrote:

The only relevant thing for video memory vs system memory is that both need to be mapped into the CPU's address space.

I've heard that PCI (and presumably PCIe and AGP) cards map their memory into a 256MB window on 32-bit systems, even if the card has more than 256MB on it. So even if you're bumping into the limit of the 4GB address space, having a video card with 1-2GB or more would not be an issue. Can anyone confirm?

I have no deep knowledge about this issue but here is my experience with a Windows 7 32 bit system with 4GB installed RAM:

- Asus GTX 560 Ti 1GB : Usable RAM 3.2 GB

- Asus GTX 770 2GB : Usable RAM 3.5 GB

So, the "window" thing is ofcourse true, but the size of it actually (most probably) depends on the driver and/or the card itself.

Baoran wrote:

I don't think it is about video ram amount. I tried some newer pci cards in an old SS7 system and some worked and some didn't, but if the system posted fine, it also worked fine in windows 98 and dos. There just seems to be some kind of incompatibility with motherboards that have pci 2.1 and some newer cards that use newer pci version. You have to understand though that you can't find win98 driver for such new card, so it only works as vga.

I'm not sure about this. I remember reading some posts (most probably here in vogons) about more than 256MB video RAM creates problems for Windows 98. I never tried anything bigger than 128MB in a W9x system so I can't say anything based on personal experience. The most modern cards that I tried in Windows 98 were a 9250 (PCI) and an All-in-Wonder 9600 (AGP), both with 128MB RAM, both worked.

I also remember reading about FX6xxx cards being used in Windows 98 and some of them have more than 256MB, so this "problems with W9x" thing might also be a false information.

spiroyster wrote:

In answer to OP. On a P200 with 80MB, you are restricted to hardware of the day or around that time? You would need to find a driver for the OS (not going to happen for newer GPU's), and even if you did fudge one to work, you would be extremely CPU bottlenecked. Take something like TnL, which until the GeForce, had to be done by the CPU, and a P200 isn't going to do much. So it's a catch-22. Either go oldskool-ish and be CPU bottlenecked doing much of what newer graphics hardware would be doing, or go newer and have a heavier driver (even if the GPU is doing the workload) which would still probably be CPU bottlenecked. ymmv... stick with a voodoo or something made for the hardware at the time imo 😀.

Mostly I want a really fast Win9x experience, or perhaps even XP, and great DOS compatibility. Also, Age of Empires has been calling my name.

Maybe I should just find a Graphics Blaster XXTreme (4 or 8MB) and go with that. Right now, I'm using a CL5446-based Graphics Blaster MA-202.

Fast w9x experience with good DOS and XP compatibility - P4 2.4-3.2/512MB RAM/Geforce 2-4

board is the Shuttle HOT-541

This board will not recognize any modern GPU beyond GeForce 4 MX and maybe Radeon 9250.