It's more that some drivers work better with some games. With drivers beyond 45.23, some games will break on GeForce FX for example. I think NOLF is such a game. Of course you also typically don't want to run drivers older than a game because the driver won't have any bug fixes or optimizations for that game.

Also newer drivers tends to be more CPU hungry. Not so long ago I was experimenting with retro PC for my favourite game - Rally Championship. Here are some numbers:

P4 1.4 @ 1.7 GHz, Abit TH7, 512MB RDRAM, win98 SE

Quadro 2 Pro @ 44.03 = 70 fps
GF4 Ti 4600 @ 44.03 = 60 fps
Quadro FX 1100 (almost like GF FX 5700) @ 71.84 = 35 fps
GF FX 5900 @ 71.84 = 35 fps
Radeon 9600 TX @ Cat 6.2 = 40 fps

Of course if you have very fast CPU, driver overhead is not important... but for period-correct machines driver version might be crucial.

I have a GeForce 4 MX440, and the best performance I get are on the 44.03, but not every game runs with this version. (like NFS:MW on Win98, yes, I'm that of a freak)
With 45.23 I have very slight performance decrease, but every game works flawlessly.
With 81.98 I have graphical artefacts when playing at 1024x768 and low performance.

So I would recommend 45.23.

FX5200 is similar to MX440, both are overmanufacted OEM pieces of junk that were put to every very low budget PC back in the day. At least they are good for old games.

For games around 6- 12 months after whatever game you're playing. You can study the release notes for specifics too.

For benchmarking I don't think it matters that much. At least I find the relative performance between cards much more interesting than absolute performance.

For me it was 61.76. Around 66.xx it'll artifact like crazy on the Win98 side, though XP is fine. but no matter what there's no miracle driver for the FX5200 that'll make it OMG BEST CARD 2002 THE WAY ITS MEANT TO bE PLAYED SUCK IT ATI as some had firmly believed.

I use the latest for my FX 5500 (81.98) with Windows 98 and the games that I have run just fine on it. I think a general guideline may be that if it doesn't work, downgrade the driver until you find one that does work. (though I forget if you can actually uninstall the 81.98 driver, wasn't that one bugged?)

If it's possible, I always install drivers via *.inf file, never though a setup program. If you want to remove a driver, just remove it from the Device Manager, and delete the backup *.inf from Windows\Inf\Other, so it won't reinstall it on next reboot.
Rinse and repeat. That way you'll avoid all setup uninstall problems.

Thanks for the feedback on the FX 5200. What about the ATI 9800 Pro? Catalyst 6.2 fine?

Probably depends on the game again. No Radeon supports palletized textures or table fog so they are poor for D3D 5 and older games. They are also troublesome for Bioware OpenGL games like NWN and KOTOR for various reasons. Catalyst 4.2 is the best choice for KOTOR with a Radeon 8000/9000.

Agent of the BSoD wrote:

I use the latest for my FX 5500 (81.98) with Windows 98 and the games that I have run just fine on it. I think a general guideline may be that if it doesn't work, downgrade the driver until you find one that does work. (though I forget if you can actually uninstall the 81.98 driver, wasn't that one bugged?)

Yep. Uninstall crashes every time. I just manually change the driver to VGA, shut down, pull the card and replace. Then use msconfig to disable the startup entries.

I did confirm on Win98SE, the FX 5200 is "fast enough" (~40ish fps) for the games I tested at 1024x768 with 4X AA, 8X AF. Still much slower than the 9800 Pro, which can max out at 6X AA/16X AF with hardly any slowdown.

Testbed was a P4 2.53Ghz with 512MB ram.

Does this FX5200 have a 64-bit or 128-bit memory bus?

128-bit.
LE version has 64-bit (God forbid!)

alexanrs wrote:

Does this FX5200 have a 64-bit or 128-bit memory bus?

I'm assuming 128, but how do you tell?

edit: It's an eGeForce FX 5200, 256MB DDR, DVI, TV-Out. I came up with this, which is accurate, except for the fact the photo of the card does not look like my card:
http://www.evga.com/products/pdf/n307.pdf

The PDF says it's 128-bit.

Okay, here is the exact card. The first photo. It is 128-bit:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16814130165
For some reason Newegg has photos from two different looking cards. Mine is the one with the square heatsink and memory chips along the outer edge (furthest from the VGA connectors)

Yeah the 64-bit version of that card would have a row of unpopulated RAM chip pads.

Oh, so its 128-bit. Which means its the better one (the 64-bit ones are known to be horribly slow).