predator_085 wrote on 2023-08-18, 08:43:

It seems that I am going to start my second rig project much faster than expected. […]
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It seems that I am going to start my second rig project much faster than expected.

I got the unexpected offer for 2 systems including a Voodoo 3 2000 agp card.

The first system is MSI K7T266 Pro plus Athlon Thunderbird 1400 MHZ , 512 mb ram and the Voodoo 3 2000 agp.

The second system would be socket 370

Asus CUV4X-CME plus a Pentium 3 800mhz EB and 128mb of PC133 ram and again plus the Voodoo 3

My goal is to get one the best glide systems for 98 and 99. the System also should have some steam left to play games from the year 2000 in an acceptable quality.

That system is going to be glide only

For direct 3d and opengl gaming I can use my first rig

Athlon xp 1600+ with a Asrock K7S8XE motherboard and a Ati Radeon 9600.

which of these 2 systems would guys chose.

Both systems are already overkill for a Voodoo 3, but I'd probably pick the P3-option just because it's a little closer in spec to era for Windows 9x and the types of games one might play with said video card. The Athlon will beg you to upgrade the video card so it can be more useful...

Both systems are fine for that card.

There are a couple of late Glide games from the turn of he century which could benefit from a faster CPU. Notable examples would be Diablo 2 and Deus Ex. But those are exceptions, not the norm.

leonardo wrote on 2023-08-18, 08:49:

predator_085 wrote on 2023-08-18, 08:43:

It seems that I am going to start my second rig project much faster than expected. […]
Show full quote

It seems that I am going to start my second rig project much faster than expected.

I got the unexpected offer for 2 systems including a Voodoo 3 2000 agp card.

The first system is MSI K7T266 Pro plus Athlon Thunderbird 1400 MHZ , 512 mb ram and the Voodoo 3 2000 agp.

The second system would be socket 370

Asus CUV4X-CME plus a Pentium 3 800mhz EB and 128mb of PC133 ram and again plus the Voodoo 3

My goal is to get one the best glide systems for 98 and 99. the System also should have some steam left to play games from the year 2000 in an acceptable quality.

That system is going to be glide only

For direct 3d and opengl gaming I can use my first rig

Athlon xp 1600+ with a Asrock K7S8XE motherboard and a Ati Radeon 9600.

which of these 2 systems would guys chose.

Both systems are already overkill for a Voodoo 3, but I'd probably pick the P3-option just because it's a little closer in spec to era for Windows 9x and the types of games one might play with said video card. The Athlon will beg you to upgrade the video card so it can be more useful...

Thanks for sharing your thoughs. You certainly have a point. Both systems are overkill for the V3 from a historical point of view. But that point for me. In order to get out the most of the card you cannot have too much CPU power.

But it is a valid question how much cpu power the Voodoo 3 really needs to show it's full potential.

Have read some where else that the perfect cpu speed for a Voodoo 3 would be between 700 and 800mhz. Everything beyond that is not going to improve anything.

If 800mhz is really the limit going with the pentium 3 system would be the better choice. A P3 800mhEB should be decent cpu for late 90s gaming I think?

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-08-18, 09:35:

Both systems are fine for that card.

There are a couple of late Glide games from the turn of the century which could benefit from a faster CPU. Notable examples would be Diablo 2 and Deus Ex. But those are exceptions, not the norm.

Thx for the info. That's very valid information. I am a bit surprised though that Diablo 2 is among these super-demanding games. I am not surprised that Deus Ex is among these games though.

it is also funny that I want to play both games. So I must first research if Diablo 2 and Deus Ex would run well on a P3.

My gut feeling points me towards the Pentium 3 System since I already have Athlon System and having Pentium 3 system in my collection would be neat.

But if the faster Athlon 1400 is required to speed up certain games the Athlon is the only logical choice.

I will dig deeper into that topic before I make my final decision.

The point of using Glide at the time was lower CPU utilization thus better FPS, sometimes also better picture quality compared to Nvidia early 16bit implementations (128/TNT did a bad job). Voodoo3 offered performance on the cheap, but almost never the best way to experience a game. Diablo 2 might be an exception with special Glide mode https://simonschreibt.de/gat/dont-starve-diablo-parallax-7/
Nowadays playing in Glide mode does disservice to most multi API games, you can do much better using never setup and maxed out resolution/settings. Even Diablo 2 works best with a wrapper https://imgur.com/a/iewj5mM

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-08-19, 01:03:

Nowadays playing in Glide mode does disservice to most multi API games, you can do much better using never setup and maxed out resolution/settings.

While this is generally true, there are some edge cases where Glide still offers better visuals than Direct3D/OpenGL on period appropriate hardware and without using fan-made patches or wrappers. Examples include Need for Speed 3, Carmageddon 2 (comparison pics here), Unreal (shown here) as well as Diablo 2 which you've already mentioned.

Additionally, games which only support 16-bit rendering like Thief 1&2, System Shock 2 and Kiss: Psycho Circus will look slightly better on a Voodoo 3 than on contemporary Nvidia/ATi/Matrox cards. Lastly, some games only offer 3D acceleration through Glide, and don't support Direct3D and OpenGL at all.

The point about higher resolutions does stand though, and you'll likely be able to push games to 1600x1200 and beyond using wrappers or fan-made patches and renderers. With a real Voodoo 3, you're usually stuck at 1024x768 or below, since performance in most games tanks when going any higher on that card. Also, Voodoo 3 is limited to 256x256 texture size, while even a TNT2 could use textures up to 2048x2048. The difference becomes evident in later games.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-08-19, 03:29:

While this is generally true, there are some edge cases where Glide still offers better visuals than Direct3D/OpenGL on period a […]
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rasz_pl wrote on 2023-08-19, 01:03:

Nowadays playing in Glide mode does disservice to most multi API games, you can do much better using never setup and maxed out resolution/settings.

While this is generally true, there are some edge cases where Glide still offers better visuals than Direct3D/OpenGL on period appropriate hardware and without using fan-made patches or wrappers. Examples include Need for Speed 3, Carmageddon 2 (comparison pics here), Unreal (shown here) as well as Diablo 2 which you've already mentioned.

Additionally, games which only support 16-bit rendering like Thief 1&2, System Shock 2 and Kiss: Psycho Circus will look slightly better on a Voodoo 3 than on contemporary Nvidia/ATi/Matrox cards. Lastly, some games only offer 3D acceleration through Glide, and don't support Direct3D and OpenGL at all.

The point about higher resolutions does stand though, and you'll likely be able to push games to 1600x1200 and beyond using wrappers or fan-made patches and renderers. With a real Voodoo 3, you're usually stuck at 1024x768 or below, since performance in most games tanks when going any higher on that card. Also, Voodoo 3 is limited to 256x256 texture size, while even a TNT2 could use textures up to 2048x2048. The difference becomes evident in later games.

Thanks for the further info.I am fully aware of the shortcomings of the V3 card. But being stuck with resolutions of 1024x768 and bellow plus the lower texture resolution does not bother me at all. I am interested in experiencing original Voodoo 3 experience. I always wanted to do that was not able to get V3 back then.

And all things considered the system plus the Voodoo 3 is a bargain. Sometimes even the card alone costs more than the complete system.

But n case i am not happy with the Voodoo 3 I can still replace it with another contemporary card of the Voodoo 3 like one of the Riva Cards or the Matrox g400.

which of the V3 contemporaries would you guys recommend?

Happy Pentium 3 800mhz EB user here and I can say nothing bad bat that cpu. It works well for my purposes.

You should take my impressions with a grain of salt. It is my first retro rig so I have no means to compare it with other Intel P3 or AMD systems. In general, I would say that the socket 370 system is a good starting point. If you do not like the p3 800 MHz you can upgrade to the 1 GHz model. That's a thing I am going to do rather soon.

But if I am not mistaking the p3 system you could get the Asus CUV4X-CME uses a via chipset. My rig on the other hand has a Intel 815 motherboard. When researching for my system I found out that the Appolo pro 133 chipset has quite a mixed reputation. Some people say it s a good alternative to the Intel 815 others say it is inferior.

Make with that info whatever you want and do your research. I have no opinion about it because I am not experienced enough to judge the situation properly. I thought it was just worth mentioning.

About your other question. I have no experience with 3dfx cards I am just using a Riva TNT 2 card and again I can just say that I like it.

Leaves nothing to desire when playing my favorite late 90s games.

retep_110 wrote on 2023-08-19, 08:13:

Happy Pentium 3 800mhz EB user here and I can say nothing bad bat that cpu. It works well for my purposes. […]
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Happy Pentium 3 800mhz EB user here and I can say nothing bad bat that cpu. It works well for my purposes.

You should take my impressions with a grain of salt. It is my first retro rig so I have no means to compare it with other Intel P3 or AMD systems. In general, I would say that the socket 370 system is a good starting point. If you do not like the p3 800 MHz you can upgrade to the 1 GHz model. That's a thing I am going to do rather soon.

But if I am not mistaking the p3 system you could get the Asus CUV4X-CME uses a via chipset. My rig on the other hand has a Intel 815 motherboard. When researching for my system I found out that the Appolo pro 133 chipset has quite a mixed reputation. Some people say it s a good alternative to the Intel 815 others say it is inferior.

Make with that info whatever you want and do your research. I have no opinion about it because I am not experienced enough to judge the situation properly. I thought it was just worth mentioning.

About your other question. I have no experience with 3dfx cards I am just using a Riva TNT 2 card and again I can just say that I like it.

Leaves nothing to desire when playing my favorite late 90s games.

Thanks for the info. To be honest I was not aware of the potential problems a socket 370 motherboard with a Via Chipset can have compared to the intel815 motherborads. I will start reseaching about that topic asap.

predator_085 wrote on 2023-08-19, 11:40:

retep_110 wrote on 2023-08-19, 08:13:

Happy Pentium 3 800mhz EB user here and I can say nothing bad bat that cpu. It works well for my purposes. […]
Show full quote

Happy Pentium 3 800mhz EB user here and I can say nothing bad bat that cpu. It works well for my purposes.

You should take my impressions with a grain of salt. It is my first retro rig so I have no means to compare it with other Intel P3 or AMD systems. In general, I would say that the socket 370 system is a good starting point. If you do not like the p3 800 MHz you can upgrade to the 1 GHz model. That's a thing I am going to do rather soon.

But if I am not mistaking the p3 system you could get the Asus CUV4X-CME uses a via chipset. My rig on the other hand has a Intel 815 motherboard. When researching for my system I found out that the Appolo pro 133 chipset has quite a mixed reputation. Some people say it s a good alternative to the Intel 815 others say it is inferior.

Make with that info whatever you want and do your research. I have no opinion about it because I am not experienced enough to judge the situation properly. I thought it was just worth mentioning.

About your other question. I have no experience with 3dfx cards I am just using a Riva TNT 2 card and again I can just say that I like it.

Leaves nothing to desire when playing my favorite late 90s games.

Thanks for the info. To be honest I was not aware of the potential problems a socket 370 motherboard with a Via Chipset can have compared to the intel815 motherborads. I will start reseaching about that topic asap.

You are welcome. And yes you should research about that matter I am not sure though if is real issue or if some people just overblow the potential issues.

Good luck with your search.

retep_110 wrote on 2023-08-20, 20:19:

predator_085 wrote on 2023-08-19, 11:40:

retep_110 wrote on 2023-08-19, 08:13:

Happy Pentium 3 800mhz EB user here and I can say nothing bad bat that cpu. It works well for my purposes. […]
Show full quote

Happy Pentium 3 800mhz EB user here and I can say nothing bad bat that cpu. It works well for my purposes.

You should take my impressions with a grain of salt. It is my first retro rig so I have no means to compare it with other Intel P3 or AMD systems. In general, I would say that the socket 370 system is a good starting point. If you do not like the p3 800 MHz you can upgrade to the 1 GHz model. That's a thing I am going to do rather soon.

But if I am not mistaking the p3 system you could get the Asus CUV4X-CME uses a via chipset. My rig on the other hand has a Intel 815 motherboard. When researching for my system I found out that the Appolo pro 133 chipset has quite a mixed reputation. Some people say it s a good alternative to the Intel 815 others say it is inferior.

Make with that info whatever you want and do your research. I have no opinion about it because I am not experienced enough to judge the situation properly. I thought it was just worth mentioning.

About your other question. I have no experience with 3dfx cards I am just using a Riva TNT 2 card and again I can just say that I like it.

Leaves nothing to desire when playing my favorite late 90s games.

Thanks for the info. To be honest I was not aware of the potential problems a socket 370 motherboard with a Via Chipset can have compared to the intel815 motherborads. I will start reseaching about that topic asap.

You are welcome. And yes you should research about that matter I am not sure though if is real issue or if some people just overblow the potential issues.

Good luck with your search.

I think there are a lot of people, myself included, who had a very negative opinion of Via chipsets back in the day. Just... stability issues... e.g. when I was in university over 20 years ago, there was a fellow on my floor who had an Athlon box, Via ... KT266 non-A maybe..., and his system seemed to eat its operating system (any operating system he tried) every few weeks. It almost became a running joke to walk by his room and see him reformatting his system and installing another OS. And forums were full of reports of compatibility issues, issues of buggy Via 4-in-1 drivers, that kind of thing. Doesn't help that the late 1990s, early 2000s was the era of rock-solid Intel chipsets like the 440BX. Really, I would tell you that for a long time, the biggest reason some people didn't want to touch AMD (even around 2005 when the X2 3800+ was humiliating the whole hotburst Intel lineup) was the fact that you couldn't get a first-party chipset for most AMD processors.

That being said, does any of that matter for a retro system presumably used only for gaming? I would think stability expectations would be much less... (e.g. my rule since Win2000 has been that any system that requires a reboot between monthly Windows patches gets a date with the screwdriver to replace the unreliable part. But I wouldn't apply that rigorous standard to a retro system...)

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-20, 22:05:

I think there are a lot of people, myself included, who had a very negative opinion of Via chipsets back in the day. Just... stability issues... e.g. when I was in university over 20 years ago, there was a fellow on my floor who had an Athlon box, Via ... KT266 non-A maybe..., and his system seemed to eat its operating system (any operating system he tried) every few weeks. It almost became a running joke to walk by his room and see him reformatting his system and installing another OS. And forums were full of reports of compatibility issues, issues of buggy Via 4-in-1 drivers, that kind of thing. Doesn't help that the late 1990s, early 2000s was the era of rock-solid Intel chipsets like the 440BX. Really, I would tell you that for a long time, the biggest reason some people didn't want to touch AMD (even around 2005 when the X2 3800+ was humiliating the whole hotburst Intel lineup) was the fact that you couldn't get a first-party chipset for most AMD processors.

That being said, does any of that matter for a retro system presumably used only for gaming? I would think stability expectations would be much less... (e.g. my rule since Win2000 has been that any system that requires a reboot between monthly Windows patches gets a date with the screwdriver to replace the unreliable part. But I wouldn't apply that rigorous standard to a retro system...)

My 1st non intel system was my ASUS A7M266 and I didnt go back to intel until they released their 1st i7 system the 950.

All the AMD systems I ever had were rock steady - one was AMD chipset, one was VIA chipset and one was Nvidia chipset. I still own them except the VIA chipset one (I gave to a friend) I remember I did because he wanted a good stable system and it was.

I remember on my old Intel systems even with rock steady chipsets Win95 would corrupt itself every few months and require a new install, that problem didnt go away until Win2k for me.

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-20, 22:05:

retep_110 wrote on 2023-08-20, 20:19:

predator_085 wrote on 2023-08-19, 11:40:

Thanks for the info. To be honest I was not aware of the potential problems a socket 370 motherboard with a Via Chipset can have compared to the intel815 motherborads. I will start reseaching about that topic asap.

You are welcome. And yes you should research about that matter I am not sure though if is real issue or if some people just overblow the potential issues.

Good luck with your search.

I think there are a lot of people, myself included, who had a very negative opinion of Via chipsets back in the day. Just... stability issues... e.g. when I was in university over 20 years ago, there was a fellow on my floor who had an Athlon box, Via ... KT266 non-A maybe..., and his system seemed to eat its operating system (any operating system he tried) every few weeks. It almost became a running joke to walk by his room and see him reformatting his system and installing another OS. And forums were full of reports of compatibility issues, issues of buggy Via 4-in-1 drivers, that kind of thing. Doesn't help that the late 1990s, early 2000s was the era of rock-solid Intel chipsets like the 440BX. Really, I would tell you that for a long time, the biggest reason some people didn't want to touch AMD (even around 2005 when the X2 3800+ was humiliating the whole hotburst Intel lineup) was the fact that you couldn't get a first-party chipset for most AMD processors.

That being said, does any of that matter for a retro system presumably used only for gaming? I would think stability expectations would be much less... (e.g. my rule since Win2000 has been that any system that requires a reboot between monthly Windows patches gets a date with the screwdriver to replace the unreliable part. But I wouldn't apply that rigorous standard to a retro system...)

Thanks a lot for sharing your impressions. I have just read about the potential issues when researching for my own rig. I have never experiencend the problems for myself.

Back then I was intel guy only. The first own computer I got was a pentium 2 233 mhz with a intel mainboard. and same ati graphics card. I had that kind of pc for many years until I got Pentium 4 with geforce 2 and again a intel mainboard.

I just wanted to inform the op that via chipsets could be problematic. But it is just Hearsay from my point of view.

retep_110 wrote on 2023-08-21, 05:51:

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-20, 22:05:

retep_110 wrote on 2023-08-20, 20:19:

...I am not sure though if is real issue or if some people just overblow the potential issues...

I think there are a lot of people, myself included, who had a very negative opinion of Via chipsets back in the day...

Thanks a lot for sharing your impressions. I have just read about the potential issues when researching for my own rig. I have never experiencend the problems for myself...
I just wanted to inform the op that via chipsets could be problematic. But it is just Hearsay from my point of view.

I would just like to point out that while it was very common for people to have all sorts of issues with their VIA-based motherboards, a good chunk of those can be blamed on Windows. Windows is a terrible OS at the best of times, and in many instances people took the experiences they were having and chalked them up to the hardware, when it was the drivers/software that was failing them. I had a VIA KT333-based AthlonXP system with Windows XP and when I switched to Linux, what was a somewhat problematic install became completely different. The system became rock-solid, dependable, and it was *fast* and could multitask in a real way. This was back when 1 GB of RAM was a lot and spinning disks were still the norm. Back then one wouldn't necessarily game on a Linux system, but I had one direct comparison I could make: DooM 3. In Windows, the game would occasionally stutter while running at Medium detail and a 800x600 resolution (yes, the game required oomph then) - on Linux I could run the same game without stutter and at 1024x768. Same hardware.

"You are not using it right." they would say to me always. Maybe... but after XP I was out, and have not looked back since (except when I have fun with my old Win95-retroboxes)...

leonardo wrote on 2023-08-21, 07:40:

I would just like to point out that while it was very common for people to have all sorts of issues with their VIA-based motherboards, a good chunk of those can be blamed on Windows. Windows is a terrible OS at the best of times, and in many instances people took the experiences they were having and chalked them up to the hardware, when it was the drivers/software that was failing them. I had a VIA KT333-based AthlonXP system with Windows XP and when I switched to Linux, what was a somewhat problematic install became completely different. The system became rock-solid, dependable, and it was *fast* and could multitask in a real way.

But if VIA's Windows drivers are problematic, doesn't that somewhat prove the point? If 99.9% of people buying their hardware are going to run it on Windows and their Windows drivers are buggy junk, that's on VIA, not Microsoft. The fact that someone else managed to make the hardware work reliably under Linux, if anything, further proves the incompetence of the team that wrote the Windows drivers.

I don't think I have had any Windows-related stability issues since, oh, Windows 2000 running on Intel stuff that wasn't caused by bad hardware (e.g. I had a graphics card that would cause blue screens in early Vista... and in games when I went back to XP. Card got RMAed, replacement worked fine. Had a flakey SATA cable at one point; let's just say Windows is not happy if a drive falls off the motherboard. Etc.). Post-SP1 versions of basically any NT-based OS, on good hardware with good drivers, are quite stable.

Now, pre-Win2000 versions of Windows, I don't know. I never ran them on hardware that, with the benefit of hindsight, I would consider 'good'.

It's funny, after being burned by IBM recovery CDs that require wiping your whole partition on a machine that loved to eat its Win95 installs, I had adopted a practice of having an OS + apps partition and a documents partition, later I switched to doing it with two separate drives. That way you could blow up the OS + apps partition when the OS imploded without disrupting your data. Stopped doing that at some point because, well, the OSes hadn't eaten themselves in over a decade.

I have very good experience running V3 3000 with Geode NX1750 on SIS chipset (DDR).
CPU is cool (1.25V), SSE equipped and very fast at 1.4GHz. (I usually run it at 800 or 1000MHz, 1.4GHz causes various speed issues in some games).

Thanks for the very interesting dicussion about the via chipsets. It was very intruiging.

I decided to go with the more powerful Athlon System in the end. The p3 800 mhz system was snatched by an another person that was interested in it. And there were also other people that were into the MSI system as well. So had to pull te trigger right away. I will get the msi system in 10 to 14 days. Looking forward to it already.

leonardo wrote on 2023-08-21, 07:40:

retep_110 wrote on 2023-08-21, 05:51:

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-20, 22:05:

I think there are a lot of people, myself included, who had a very negative opinion of Via chipsets back in the day...

Thanks a lot for sharing your impressions. I have just read about the potential issues when researching for my own rig. I have never experiencend the problems for myself...
I just wanted to inform the op that via chipsets could be problematic. But it is just Hearsay from my point of view.

I would just like to point out that while it was very common for people to have all sorts of issues with their VIA-based motherboards, a good chunk of those can be blamed on Windows. Windows is a terrible OS at the best of times, and in many instances people took the experiences they were having and chalked them up to the hardware, when it was the drivers/software that was failing them. I had a VIA KT333-based AthlonXP system with Windows XP and when I switched to Linux, what was a somewhat problematic install became completely different. The system became rock-solid, dependable, and it was *fast* and could multitask in a real way. This was back when 1 GB of RAM was a lot and spinning disks were still the norm. Back then one wouldn't necessarily game on a Linux system, but I had one direct comparison I could make: DooM 3. In Windows, the game would occasionally stutter while running at Medium detail and a 800x600 resolution (yes, the game required oomph then) - on Linux I could run the same game without stutter and at 1024x768. Same hardware.

"You are not using it right." they would say to me always. Maybe... but after XP I was out, and have not looked back since (except when I have fun with my old Win95-retroboxes)...

Sorry for the late reply. Well that is a very interesting take on that matter. Have never seen it this way but you have no point. Windows is far away from being perfect. And maybe windows contributes to the bad rep the VIA chipsets had back then.

VivienM wrote on 2023-08-22, 01:29:

But if VIA's Windows drivers are problematic, doesn't that somewhat prove the point? If 99.9% of people buying their hardware ar […]
Show full quote

leonardo wrote on 2023-08-21, 07:40:

I would just like to point out that while it was very common for people to have all sorts of issues with their VIA-based motherboards, a good chunk of those can be blamed on Windows. Windows is a terrible OS at the best of times, and in many instances people took the experiences they were having and chalked them up to the hardware, when it was the drivers/software that was failing them. I had a VIA KT333-based AthlonXP system with Windows XP and when I switched to Linux, what was a somewhat problematic install became completely different. The system became rock-solid, dependable, and it was *fast* and could multitask in a real way.

But if VIA's Windows drivers are problematic, doesn't that somewhat prove the point? If 99.9% of people buying their hardware are going to run it on Windows and their Windows drivers are buggy junk, that's on VIA, not Microsoft. The fact that someone else managed to make the hardware work reliably under Linux, if anything, further proves the incompetence of the team that wrote the Windows drivers.

I don't think I have had any Windows-related stability issues since, oh, Windows 2000 running on Intel stuff that wasn't caused by bad hardware (e.g. I had a graphics card that would cause blue screens in early Vista... and in games when I went back to XP. Card got RMAed, replacement worked fine. Had a flakey SATA cable at one point; let's just say Windows is not happy if a drive falls off the motherboard. Etc.). Post-SP1 versions of basically any NT-based OS, on good hardware with good drivers, are quite stable.

Now, pre-Win2000 versions of Windows, I don't know. I never ran them on hardware that, with the benefit of hindsight, I would consider 'good'.

It's funny, after being burned by IBM recovery CDs that require wiping your whole partition on a machine that loved to eat its Win95 installs, I had adopted a practice of having an OS + apps partition and a documents partition, later I switched to doing it with two separate drives. That way you could blow up the OS + apps partition when the OS imploded without disrupting your data. Stopped doing that at some point because, well, the OSes hadn't eaten themselves in over a decade.

I think you have a fair counterpoint - some, if not most, of the blame for crappy support has to be the result of the third parties themselves. My take is based on years of subjective experience where you take "crappy hardware", install Linux on it, and suddenly it seems to not be so crappy any more. This has happened with enough consistency that at some point I began to question the other side. Why are drivers on Linux for most hardware inherently so much better? Especially since a lot of them are put together with volunteer effort? Surely the hardware vendor should have the strongest incentive to get their drivers right for paying customers for their primary target platform?

Anyway, in VIA's case a lot of the trouble wasn't the drivers themselves but the strange rain dance installation method you had to do with Windows so many times for things to start working properly. Did you update your 4in1 after you already had a video card driver installed? Boohoo, you did it wrong, you need to reformat and start over. Maybe you didn't install video card drivers yet, but installed some update and didn't reboot? Boohoo, you did it wrong, time to reformat and start again. You did everything in the right order but are still getting terrible performance or lock-ups? Boohoo, you were supposed to first select 'regular AGP-mode' during install and not 'AGP Turbo (4x) mode', then install your video card drivers and then do a registry hack to enable AGP 4x after 4in1 is installed and then it should work... and so on and forth.

Maybe VIA sucked at designing their drivers, but maybe, just maybe, Microsoft also sucked at documenting the proper process for how things are supposed happen in their OS because installation on practically every system is/was such a crapshoot.

retep_110 wrote on 2023-08-24, 06:17:

Sorry for the late reply. Well that is a very interesting take on that matter. Have never seen it this way but you have no point. Windows is far away from being perfect. And maybe windows contributes to the bad rep the VIA chipsets had back then.

As VivienM pointed out earlier, my logic is not infallible here. I was just relaying something from experience. People attribute many things based on experience, and a lot of the times this is incorrect. Especially early versions of Windows had few safeguards against "doing things the wrong way" so no doubt a lot of the negative experiences people had with VIA and other third party hardware/drivers had to do with not knowing how to properly set up their systems for optimum performance... and my contention is that Windows is a very easy OS to set up incorrectly and that is Microsoft's fault. 😀

leonardo wrote on 2023-08-24, 09:53:

I think you have a fair counterpoint - some, if not most, of the blame for crappy support has to be the result of the third parties themselves. My take is based on years of subjective experience where you take "crappy hardware", install Linux on it, and suddenly it seems to not be so crappy any more. This has happened with enough consistency that at some point I began to question the other side. Why are drivers on Linux for most hardware inherently so much better? Especially since a lot of them are put together with volunteer effort? Surely the hardware vendor should have the strongest incentive to get their drivers right for paying customers for their primary target platform?

One big difference is that by-and-large, in Linux, the drivers are built into the kernel (or modules) and when you boot up, the kernel looks to see what hardware it's running on and loads those drivers into memory and off you go. This is why you can take a Linux hard drive, especially one without a custom kernel (and while compiling custom kernels made you cool 20-25 years ago, I don't know if it still does), plonk it in any system, and it will generally boot. (GUI stuff, at least in the old days, would be a different story and you'd need to edit some config files. I don't know if that's still the case with recent versions of Xorg though.)

Meanwhile, on Windows, drivers are actually installed, then you have all kinds of stuff in the registry referencing the drivers, you update the drivers separately, etc, so it starts to be very easy to install things out of order, for an upgrade to leave some references to the old version behind, etc. And the buggier the drivers, the more you update them, which means the more stuff accumulates and the higher the likelihood of problems. Take a Windows hard drive from system A to a completely different system B, and there's an overwhelming chance it will BSOD on boot as it tries to load all the drivers for system A's components - I think the newer versions are better at this, but certainly XP and before, you were in deep trouble.

Hell, just switching a SATA controller from legacy to AHCI or the other way around is enough to brick many versions of Windows, whereas Linux will just laugh it off (unless your fstab breaks because you switch from hdX to sdX, but even that is easier to fix if you know what you're doing than trying to revive a Windows install after switching SATA modes). Let's not talk about taking, say, an AMD system with an AMD/nvidia/VIA chipset and trying to boot that system's Windows on an Intel chipset or vice versa.

Put another way, if you have Ubuntu 23.04 and I have Ubuntu 23.04 with the same updates, and we have the same hardware, the exact same stuff will load in memory on both our systems. If we both start off with Windows, any version of Windows, there's all kinds of possibilities where we may install things in different orders, we may install different versions of drivers (e.g. if I plugged my system into a network earlier than you did yours, mine might have downloaded a driver from Windows Update first, whereas if you kept your system offline until installing a specific driver from a CD or flash drive, your system won't have traces of the Windows Update driver), etc, and as a result, a week later, when you boot your Windows install and I boot mine, different code is actually loading at different times and giving different results.

The other thing I would probably guess is that the Linux stuff is managed by a much smaller group of people and there is much less potential conflicts. The driver for thing X only needs to play nicely with the drivers for thing Y and the rest of the OS in the particular kernel build where both are included. Meanwhile, in Windows, the driver for thing X needs to play with a range of Windows versions and has no guarantee about the drivers for thing Y. If someone changes the driver for X and that requires a change to the driver for Y, in Linux, the maintainers just need to make sure that the two changes go into the kernel at the same time (or as closely as the problem is discovered); in Windows, well, good luck trying to reach the author of the driver for thing Y, then getting them to fix their code, then making sure that people who install the new driver for X also have the new driver for Y.

Also, another final point - in Linux, you have the distro vendors in the middle. Mr. Torvalds and his team of maintainers may release a new kernel with new drivers and new bugs for stuff next week, but Ubuntu or Debian won't be giving you that kernel the week after. They'll backport some urgent things to their stable kernel, but otherwise, they'll sit back for a few months and see what happens. So if something got broken in one kernel update... well, there's a good chance it gets detected and fixed long before that kernel makes it to the major distros. The flip side of that, of course, is that if AMD releases revolutionary thing X in September, who knows whether the kernel used in Ubuntu 23.10 will have support for it (in which case you might be waiting until 24.04 or later), whereas if you're running Windows, you can just download the driver from their web site and off you go.