Minutemanqvs wrote on 2023-05-03, 20:28:
Kahenraz wrote on 2023-05-03, 20:23:My opinion I think is very skewed as a result of this testing I did in the past: […]
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My opinion I think is very skewed as a result of this testing I did in the past:
NVIDIA GeForce FX driver testing on an Intel 440EX summary and report
I later concluded that a lot of the driver instability was due pairing the newer drivers with older CPUs without newer SSE instructions. And since that 7600 GS is already keyed for 1.5V, that means a Pentium 4 at a minimum. So it might actually work just fine in Windows 9x (with minor compatibility exceptions).
I stand corrected.
In summary, PCIe NVIDIA cards never work with Windows 9x (in my experience), or I have never found a chipset where it did, and newer drivers don't work well with pre-Prentium 4 CPUs. But pair later drivers with a Pentium 4 and AGP, it might work fine for most use cases.
About the SSE thing I came to the same conclusion on my side a couple of years ago but I also had the impression that installing very recent versions of DirctX 9 cause the same issue for the same reasons. With 2005-2006 versions I didn’t see such instabilities.
I've heard this before, but I've never seen a reproducible test for this. A similar issue with DirectX 6 vs 6.1 was mentioned here:
dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-04-20, 20:32:
DX 6.1 has no benefits on that machine and there was a compatibility issue...but I can't remember yet.
Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-05-03, 20:36:
Ah, yeah it is probably pretty dependent on the system it's being put into. I don't think there's much point in using anything faster than a Geforce 4 Ti or higher end FX series in a 440BX board, and even those are going to be overkill that will just let you run at higher resolutions and AA\AF without much performance hit due to the CPU bottleneck. Cramming a Tualatin in a 440BX will help to a degree. If you're playing any games made in 2000 or later they will run much better on an Athlon XP or P4 (or even Athlon 64 or Core 2 depending on what is being run) and those systems will likely be much happier with these later AGP cards.
For reference... My 98SE test bench with a 440BX and an 850Mhz PIII only gets used for cards up to the Geforce 2 series. Anything Geforce 3 or later (even Geforce 4 MX) gets tested in my faster Nforce 2 system with a 2Ghz Athlon XP.
I also feel that any GeForce 2 (including the MX) is "good enough" for Windows 98. If you're getting into games that use pixel shaders, then they will be DirectX 8 or 9 and probably play just fine on XP. My preferred 98 experience is from a simpler time. The GeForce 2 simply ticks all the boxes of excellent DirectX/OpenGL compatibility, Hardware T&L, multi-monitor, quiet and passive (MX), and very fast for anything contemporary. Anything that comes after that, GeForce 4 Ti for performance, GeForce 4 MX for an alternative DirectX 7 GPU, or a GeForce 5200 FX for DirectX 9 (I've never had a use case for this, but it's cool); it's all just a different flavor of icing after the GeForce 2.
The only exception is that GeForce cards after the TNT series all have minor bugs with texel alignment and texture filtering in DirectX 5 games, but this can be mitigated to a certain degree:
Mipmap settings that fix Incoming (DirectX 5) on the GeForce FX