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ATI 9600 Pro vs. FX5600 full screen / resolution issues on Win98

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First post, by DeadnightWarrior

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Hi all, I hope you can help with this annoying issue I'm having.
My retro rig currently consists of:
- AMD Athlon 2800+
- Via K8M800 based motherboard
- 2Gb DDR ram (running fine with 1Gb using himemx under Win98SE)
- 80Gb IDE HDD
- IDE DVD drive
- Terratec 128i ESS Solo-1 PCI sound card

I also have an HDMI / USB KVM switch, hooked to my main Ryzen system and 1080p display with pure HDMI, and to my retro rig with a DVI to HDMI cable. It seems to be working fine, all things considered.

I'm actually alternating a Sparkle GeForce FX5600 256Mb and a Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro 128Mb and can't decide which one is best suited.
While having the FX5600 I tried a bunch of very old games (Hexen II, Heretic II, Tomb Raider, Jedi Knight) and all of them gave me some headache: for example, the Quake engine based games would look corrupted in full screen with certain driver versions and work fine with others. Then another glitch came with Windows desktop resolution: the FX could NOT handle most 16:9 resolutions, resulting in freezes or blank screen if I tried to choose 1080p or lower not-so-standard resolutions.

I then swapped the FX with the Radeon: much better color quality, I have to say! Windows works fine in FullHD and 72op as well! Nice!
I'm using the Catalyst 6.2 drivers.
So I load Jedi Knight, works great in 3D accelerated mode but... no full screen! The highest resolution would be 1280x960 but it's displayed in the upper right corner of the screen and for the life of me, I couldn't find a way to stretch it to full screen.

Oh, and I should say I'm dual booting Windows XP and there are no issues whatsoever in that environment.

Any advice?
Should I downgrade to an earlier driver?

Reply 1 of 4, by BushLin

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Try the 45.23 driver having uninstalled the old one first, generally regarded as the best performing under Win98 too.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/win9x-4523/

Screw period correct; I wanted a faster system back then. I choose no dropped frames, super fast loading, fully compatible and quiet operation.

Reply 2 of 4, by DeadnightWarrior

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BushLin wrote on 2020-08-15, 10:00:

Try the 45.23 driver having uninstalled the old one first, generally regarded as the best performing under Win98 too.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/win9x-4523/

That was the first one I tried.
I also installed 61.76, 53.04 and 56.64 for sure, can't remember if I tried with 71.84 as well.
Later versions would totally corrupt the likes of Hexen II and Heretic II but managed to handle a 16:9 desktop resolution. Earlier ones would work fine with said games but gave me a lot of trouble when switching to desktop or attempting to change resolution.
Maybe it's true that the FX line isn't the best for 98, I don't really know...

Reply 3 of 4, by BushLin

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DeadnightWarrior wrote on 2020-08-15, 11:24:
That was the first one I tried. I also installed 61.76, 53.04 and 56.64 for sure, can't remember if I tried with 71.84 as well. […]
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BushLin wrote on 2020-08-15, 10:00:

Try the 45.23 driver having uninstalled the old one first, generally regarded as the best performing under Win98 too.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/win9x-4523/

That was the first one I tried.
I also installed 61.76, 53.04 and 56.64 for sure, can't remember if I tried with 71.84 as well.
Later versions would totally corrupt the likes of Hexen II and Heretic II but managed to handle a 16:9 desktop resolution. Earlier ones would work fine with said games but gave me a lot of trouble when switching to desktop or attempting to change resolution.
Maybe it's true that the FX line isn't the best for 98, I don't really know...

Perhaps your problems are your monitor not liking the resolutions and refresh rates being thrown at it, if you have the option of choosing a refresh rate then experiment with that. Would also suggest removing your KVM switch from the setup while troubleshooting or just finding a nice CRT.
I've not found any problems with Geforce FX cards under Win98 personally.

Screw period correct; I wanted a faster system back then. I choose no dropped frames, super fast loading, fully compatible and quiet operation.

Reply 4 of 4, by auron

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the hexen ii nvidia issue could be the old opengl extension string overflow problem. check for an option to limit the extension string with newer drivers, modern (as in, for current nvidia cards) drivers even have this baked in for that number of problematic games.

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