Reply 20 of 153, by dirkmirk
ATi X800 PRO, Although I havent had a chance to test it yet, theoritcially should be very fast
ATi X800 PRO, Although I havent had a chance to test it yet, theoritcially should be very fast
Well, I have even faster card - ATi X850 PE AGp. But the main trouble with the ATi is - drivers.
D3d compatibility isn't excellent, OpenGL compatibility is even worse.
As the example, ePSXe + OGL plugin = substrate blending issues - my hate-o-meter is going to the red area...
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wrote:Yeah bro, no arguments there. I wish my 4600 ti didn't die. Now that was the perfect win98 card for me- so damn powerful and compatible with everything I play. But used ones are just too much off the 'bay... let's see though, it wouldn't be the first time I gave in to easy temptation.
i understand but let it be man, most ti4600 cards suffer from short life expectancy due to high clock and the heat generated, its very common so you have to live with it.
ti4200 has lower clock and therefore slower but also less prone to heat deaths.
I have seen GF4Ti cards with bulging capacitors so that may be the most common reason for dying. They were made during capacitor plague era, after all.
wrote:Well, I have even faster card - ATi X850 PE AGp. But the main trouble with the ATi is - drivers.
D3d compatibility isn't excellent, OpenGL compatibility is even worse.
As the example, ePSXe + OGL plugin = substrate blending issues - my hate-o-meter is going to the red area...
ATI cards definitely have limited usefulness for retro. Bad DOS support and 3D drivers that are iffy, but also the simple fact that some game companies pretended ATI didn't exist and did poor verification on ATI hardware. This was a problem ATI created for themselves because of their terrible support for Rage and early Radeons, and an apparent inability to maintain relations like NV does.
There are also games that rely on NV proprietary OpenGL extensions (eg Bioware) for speed or some effects. This is almost like the Glide issue of years before. It's fast, it works, NV has the majority and ATI drivers were a mess.
hmmm... I ran an ATI 9700 Pro in the 2001-04 time period and had a terrific experience. I updated the drivers regularly and don't recall many or sever compatibility/performance issues. The card was more stable than the 2x EVGA 7800GT SLI I followed it up with - new drivers always broke a few games and I ended up rolling back to an early set to cure the compatibility problems. I later discovered others with the same card often did too.
SLI was dodgy at best when it was starting out. That's probably why you got all those problems.
wrote:hmmm... I ran an ATI 9700 Pro in the 2001-04 time period and had a terrific experience.
I don't mean to say that Radeon 9700 wasn't amazing, because it was for D3D7-9 games. But it is not the ideal card for a retro machine that is going to run pre-DirectX 7 games, or for old non-Quake-based OpenGL games.
-DOS VESA support is iffy. Radeon is the only card I've seen TIE Fighter SVGA lock up on.
-No D3D5 table fog. This makes some games look awful. It is sometimes possible to get it working with registry tweaks and older drivers but NVIDIA officially supports this up to GeForce 7.
-And if you like Bioware's NWN or KOTOR, you don't want these cards because the renderers are truly NVIDIA optimized. KOTOR works pretty well with Catalyst 4.2 though (you can even enable soft shadows).
Which AGP card would be best for a CPU for example a 1200MHz tualatin? OS is Win98.
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Geforce2 and 3 are good options and more period correct. Geforce4 is the best option as it is the quickest and gets you ''free AA'' compared to the others and also because it is a bit bottlenecked by that cpu without AA.
So ti4400 it is.
Cool it well, they get pretty hot and therefor die more often than ti4200.
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The two fastest cards I have tried, that still retained the best compatibillity, are both Medion branded.
One is the GF4-ti4200 and the other is a Radeon9800-XXL. The worst card amoung highend that I have
tried, are the FX-5XXX range of GF cards. They are compatibility wise inferriour to GF4's.
Now...
There are some things to consider, regarding these two cards. Though the 9800-XXL pumps out
a bit more than the 4200. The 9800-XXL is not a card I recommend.
The 9800-XXL runs extremely hot. So hot that I have a feeling that it will melt or something.
So in order to run that card, it need a bigger and better cooler.
The other thing about it, are that it lacks some technology, making early 98 games rendered
wrong. What exactly, I can not really remember. So it is reserved for late-98 gaming.
The 4200 on the other hand. Yet slower than the 9800, still fast enough. Runs cold.
This making it a good card for long time useage.
Yes it can be overclocked to a 4400 or faster, wich I would not recommend.
On the positive side. The 4200 is more compatible than the 9800-XXL.
On the other hand, the 9800-XXL has better control for AA and AF in both D3D and OpenGL.
However. Both cards will make you need to patch games for the latest version.
As both cards makes GFX quirks in early Win98 games. UT99 and Porche2000 to name a few.
Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....
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wrote:Which AGP card would be best for a CPU for example a 1200MHz tualatin? OS is Win98. […]
Which AGP card would be best for a CPU for example a 1200MHz tualatin? OS is Win98.
- - GF 2 Ti
- GF 3 Ti200
- GF 4 Ti4400 / 4800SE
- GF FX5700
'Best' is kinda hard to say, it's also a matter of taste and of what one is wanting personally.
It also depends on what you have available.
But personally I'd pick the GF3 Ti200. I used a Medion one in my Tualatin 1400 and it seemed a good fit. That Medion GF3 was passive too, though I did give case cooling a little bit more attention in this build 😀
Sure, it's a matter of taste. I have all these cards already. Only want to say, it's not easy to decide sometimes when you have several possibilities.
Cause the PIII tualatin are relativly expensive and i was searching for a cheap CPU, i have now a Tualeron (celeron 1000A). I think overclocking to 1.4Ghz should be no problem,
and my research & calculations have shown that it should be fast as an PIII 1200-tualatin (even with data-prefech considered).
Regarding correct time maching of this hardware i can see:
Celeron 1000A (release Jan. 2002)
GF 2 Ti (release Oct. 2001)
GF 3 Ti200 (release Oct. 2001)
GF 4 Ti4400 / 4800SE (release Feb. 2002 for the 4400, Jan. 2003 for the 4800SE)
GF FX5700 (release Oct. 2003)
#1 K6-2/500, #2 Athlon1200, #3 Celeron1000A, #4 A64-3700, #5 P4HT-3200, #6 P4-2800, #7 Am486DX2-66
This is a broad question. There's no such thing as "best windows 98 agp card". If you want to know what the fastest AGP video card with win98 drivers is, that would be the X850XT - but there's more to it than that.
For every machine, there's an appropriate video card. If the video card is too new, it will cause compatibility problem at a driver level (in some cases even at a hardware level) - for example using a GF 6800 in a pentium 3. You loose about 3/4 of the card's performance because the CPU and AGP interface are too slow to cope. Here's a few good examples of balanced builds:
- Skt 939 Athlon 64 (3800+ or faster) single core or a fast LGA775 P4 like the 660 or 670 + Radeon X850XT or GF 6800 ultra - this is the fastest you can go with win98.
- Skt 478 P4 (3GHz+) or Athlon XP 3200+ with a GF FX 5900XT or Radeon 9800
- Skt 478 P4 (2.4GHz+) or an Athon XP (2400+) with a Gefroce 4 Titanium 4600 or a Radeon 9700 PRO
- PIII 1.4GHz or Athlon (non-XP, 1333Mhz) + Geforce 4 Ti4200
- PIII 1GHz or Duron/Athlon + Radeon 8500 / Gerforce 3 Ti500
It all depends on what you want to play.
I am fortunate enough to have a 3dfx Voodoo3 3500TV that I brought when PC World was "firesaling" them in November 2000. Where does that fit in with all of this? Considering this is not my "main pc" by any means, and I have an XP box as well. Should I use it for that wonderful GLIDE functionality, or be looking at a more recent card in the ~2002 era as you guys are discussing?
I currently use a GF6200-AGP passive 64Bit in my P4/1,6 Ghz (38TDP!). It is a very good card, even for 64Bit. I can run the early Radeon8500 up to 9700 radeon demos, and the matrox-reef-demo (3d-analyze). The GF4 demos do not run good, don't know why, the (older)Games I tested so far are very good in terms of visual quality and performance. I am currently thinking about testing an other card, but which DX9/win98/agp4x 1,5volt card is silent and only uses a single slot? (and is better then my gf6200)
Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines
For me its the FX5950 ultra, but the voodoo5500 and ati 9250 are good picks too.
the fastest card would be a 7800.
Isn't a 7950GT faster than a 7800?
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Was the 7950gt made with agp?
Yes, at least Xfx made one, other brands may exist, Galaxy maybe?