I like the fx 5200 card but it was always a budget card, there are later and more potent agp cards out there especially for win2k (and xp)

however i played Unreal Tournament 2003 on an athlon xp2400 with an fx 5200 at 1600x900 with a reasonable level of detail and it was fine

also played SoF2 on an athlon 1400 with fx 5200 at 1280x1024 and it looked and played really well

unless you simply must have max everything and min 60fps this card is a pretty good all rounder, but its around that time (2003/04) that games come around that should really have better and later cards for good performance so it's on the border. probably better with a geforce 6200 for instance, or a later model in ati's range

Thanks, as I mentioned, no XP, just Win98/Win2K.

About ~ thirteen years ago, I bought a Geforce FX 5200 PCI - because it was the cheapest card supporting Aero Glass of Windows Vista.
And I must say, it's support for Pixel Shader 2.0 was adequate.

For gaming.. Um.. Well.. I encountered a few issues, even with older titles from the late 90s.
But that maybe was due to bad drivers or Vista.

FX5200 is only good as a backup card as FX5500 costs the same. They both cost peanuts nowadays. Occasionally you can also find very cheap FX5600. It will be bottlenecked by the CPU therefore FPS will be the same at 640x480x16bit and 1024x768x32bit.

The 5500 prices are definitely higher than 5200, and besides the 5500 only have fans (which I am not found of). Would a 128MB vs 256MB DDR on a 5200 makes that much of a difference?
Again, my main target FPS games on Win98/Win2K are no later than 2001/2002ish, at 800x600 resolution even!

Depends. At least some of the 128MB ones only have a 64-bit bus for the RAM while all the 256MB ones have 128-bit bus for the RAM.
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?genera … sort=generation

The new "generic" FX5500 cards pretty mush all have 256MB but are really just clocked up FX5200 cards which is fine since the FX5500 is just a higher clocked FX5200.

Then there is the FX5200 Ultra which has specs in between the FX5600 and FX5600 Ultra.

I ended up getting a FX 5200 (128bit model) as a cheap backup in case my Voodoo 3 dies catastrophically and it takes a while to find a new one at reasonable (tolerable) price.

Here's a large benchmark with few FX 5200 models along many others: http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/over2003/index.html
Also after digging around here, people have recommended drivers 43.45 and 45.23 the most if you end up getting one. Notice these do not yet include support for FX 5500 if I recall correctly, you would need to use newer drivers with that.

Compatible, but slow. Not recommended. FX5600/5700 if you need DX9, Geforce 4 Ti4200/FX5700 if you don't.

C0deHunter wrote on 2021-09-25, 19:17:

I have heard these are most powerful yet most compatible (drivers) for Win9X / Win2K. My plan is to play FPS games up to 2003~2004 (no later than that). (Unreal Tournament 2003, Soldier of Fortune 2, etc.)

Thank you.

Now that I've had my morning coffee and can actually brain, I see I should mention I too wouldn't recommend FX 5200 for UT2003 and for 2003/2004 games, I guess it's ok if you play on 800x600 but not for larger resolutions. Though if that signature of yours is correct you already have one? Also you could use those nvidia 4x.xx drivers with FX 5800/5900 and those are way faster than FX 5200.

Geforce 4 Ti 4200 would probably still be the one I would recommend though that 800MHz P3 is going to bottleneck it quite a lot.

Sombrero wrote on 2021-09-28, 06:53:

C0deHunter wrote on 2021-09-25, 19:17:

I have heard these are most powerful yet most compatible (drivers) for Win9X / Win2K. My plan is to play FPS games up to 2003~2004 (no later than that). (Unreal Tournament 2003, Soldier of Fortune 2, etc.)

Thank you.

Now that I've had my morning coffee and can actually brain, I see I should mention I too wouldn't recommend FX 5200 for UT2003 and for 2003/2004 games, I guess it's ok if you play on 800x600 but not for larger resolutions. Though if that signature of yours is correct you already have one? Also you could use those nvidia 4x.xx drivers with FX 5800/5900 and those are way faster than FX 5200.

Geforce 4 Ti 4200 would probably still be the one I would recommend though that 800MHz P3 is going to bottleneck it quite a lot.

if i am reading the table you posted earlier right then that set up with UT2003 at 1024x768 and fx5200 is giving 25fps at the lowest, but 35+ for other models, not bad - but interestingly radeon 9000 pro, fx5600 and quite a few other low price alternatives are giving 40-60 fps range. Lots of choices for OP but an fx5200 might suffice after all