wrote:I'd have to nominate the Ark PCI card I had in my first Pentium system. It was utterly useless.
2MB of VRAM, no VBE support, unstable drivers for the first year we had it, got very hot for no reason.
I was thinking the Ark was a very good DOS performer?
It may well have been, but I had no end of trouble with it. Even got it replaced under warranty at one stage, thinking it might have just been a dud.
Regardless, the ET6000 was dreamy in comparison.
wrote:It may well have been, but I had no end of trouble with it. Even got it replaced under warranty at one stage, thinking it might have just been a dud.
Regardless, the ET6000 was dreamy in comparison.
It's a shame Tseng decided to sell out rather than bring out a 3d card. It would have been interesting to see after how good the ET6000/ET6100 were.
wrote:wrote:Ok, I got another one...anyone ever tried the Blade 3D?
The Blade series don't qualify as 'worst'. They're better than Rage Pro by far!
Yes, but they are way worse then the GF FX, right?
My point is, what defines "the worst video card"? If we have 10 people with 10 different opinions about what the worst card is, we'll get 10 different answers 😜
Almost any card may be good at something. Are there actually any cards that are not good at anything?
wrote:Almost any card may be good at something. Are there actually any cards that are not good at anything?
I wrote some thoughts defending the FX 5200, but didn't post it. Then I read Tetrium's comment above, and thought I'd post my comments on the FX card -
I'm glad I have a 128-bit Gainward FX 5200. I think it's a good card. The general image quality is very good, it's got good DOS compatibility (I think it's VESA 3.0 compliant), it's completely silent, it overclocks reasonably well, and it plays old games such as Quake 2/3 very fast at maximum settings. Sure, it's no good for its intended purpose and that is to play D3D9 games, but IMHO it's definitely not the "worst card ever". A card such as this would have little or no redeeming qualities. IMHO, there's no compelling reason to play D3D7/8/and above games using old win9x-based hardware because almost all of them play perfectly on Windows XP, and so a 128-bit FX 5200 would be an acceptable choice for a general purpose (non Glide obviously) Windows 98/DOS retro video card.
Some time ago I had a Trident 8900CL (ISA). But the OAK (OTI-067) was even worse. 😁
Intel i7 5960X
Gigabye GA-X99-Gaming 5
8 GB DDR4 (2100)
8 GB GeForce GTX 1070 G1 Gaming (Gigabyte)
There's no denying that the Cirrus Logic Laguna 3D is a worthless product that no one would want to be forced to use for anything. 😁
There was also a card called the Chromatic Research MPACT! that used a custom all-purpose chip that was supposed to do 3D among a bunch of other things. It really was only good at DVD decoding. I knew someone with one of the boards and I remember trying out 3DMark99 and that didn't go very well.
And yeah Trident 8900 boards are pretty terrible for anything beyond 320x200.
Diamond Viper VLB was one of the buggiest video cards ever. Those used a combination of a Oak VGA chip and a Weitek P9000 GUI accelerator. Diamond and Weitek basically refused to support it (typical Diamond) and when Win95 came the drivers were almost unusable. I think they delivered beta level drivers eventually. There was a web page that a user made to help people get these working better.
http://web.archive.org/web/20001025220554/www … iper/index.html
The NeoMagic MagicGraph in my Sony PictureBook C1X was pretty dismal. The chip came out after Windows 98, yet ran horribly in Win98 or above.
I think the GeForce FX 5800's infamous fan would qualify it as well.
nvidia nv1
Guardian of the Sacred Five Terabyte's of Gaming Goodness
Why?
I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...
wrote:nvidia nv1
Can't really say it is the worst.
Things were just starting out for 3D in PCs and there was no real API as a standard. Nvidia tried to push forward quads instead of triangles and their SDK was actually pretty darn good.
The NeoMagic MagicGraph in my Sony PictureBook C1X was pretty dismal.
I suspect the problem was more the 'Sony' part, than the 'Neomagic' part. I have a Dell Latitude with a MagicGraph chip in it, and I've never had any sort of problem with it, even in Win2k or XP.
wrote:I suspect the problem was more the 'Sony' part, than the 'Neomagic' part. I have a Dell Latitude with a MagicGraph chip in it, and I've never had any sort of problem with it, even in Win2k or XP.
I suppose adding the exact chip version would have helped...
Looking them up, the MagicGraph 256 series was apparently competent. The MagicGraph 128, on the other hand...
wrote:The NeoMagic MagicGraph in my Sony PictureBook C1X was pretty dismal.
I suspect the problem was more the 'Sony' part, than the 'Neomagic' part. I have a Dell Latitude with a MagicGraph chip in it, and I've never had any sort of problem with it, even in Win2k or XP.
Even though I like them a lot, a problem with the Rendition 2100 (and 2200) was it's lack of official nt drivers 🙁
I still like the Rendition though 😀
Problem with the Rendition is, theres not really any 'optimum' configuration where I would think "Hey! The Rendition was made for this!" except maybe in older P1 mmx systems.
Well, I never ever tried my hands on any Tridents before, but having read stuff like "Scrolling makes the system crash", it must've been really bad.
Too bad, I got a couple of those slinging around...
The only time a Rendition card is optimal is in a game that has specific support for it through Rredline or Speedy3D. V2x00 is the best card there is for IndyCar Racing 2 and Grand Prix Legends, for example.
The same can be said for some of the other old cards.
How do you define bad video cards?
I guess not all the video cards in the thread are "bad" videocards. I guess that a genuine crap video cards must fit in at least one of those categories:
- Incompatible with some typical hardware (i.e.: those cards that couldn't run in Windows 95 when installed on Intel chipsets).
- Abysmal performance compared with the typical video cards of that price and time. I don't think Trident were that bad... because in my country high performance video cards were rare, most desktops were equipped with Cirrus Logic, Oak and Trident videocards.
- High (or epic) fail rate, like the fail rate of typical Xbox 360.
- Buggy hardware, firmware or drivers (as they were shipped with).
Some cards you've mentioned aren't that bad. Some of them were chipsets for laptops, and when mounted in laptops were at par with other laptops of that time. Some others (nv1) would have been good video cards... if they were backed by the industry.
I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...
What about the Number 9 cards?
The worst video 'card' I've ever seen was a SiS chipset integrated video on a 500 Mhz Compaq K6-2 my parents bought. That was marketed at being 'good for games', since it supported AGP, and the amd chip had 3dNow. But it totally sucked!
The graphics performance was horrible! Try playing a simple accelerated game, like Tomb Raider 2 or 3. Barely playable! But the same game in Software mode: Fairly smooth frame rate.
Graphics accelerator? Hell no, that thing was a graphics decelerator.
That summer I got a job (I was a freshman in high school), and bought a voodoo 3, and then my own baby AT Super Socket 7 board, and gutted out the case for my old 486, dropping in the K6. For less than half what my parents paid for a crap computer, I turned old crap into a computer.
SiS 530 maybe? Yeah only useful for 2D.
SiS 530, yeah, it must have been. I almost wrote SiS 530 because that's the number that popped in my head, but I didn't put it because I wasn't sure.
