Not per se. Video cards continue to get better by the year. Image quality, speed, reliability, features and drivers continue to get better for the most part (there's always an exception or two). Most computers run Windows but that doesn't stop computer and chip companies from trying to make a product that runs it better than the competition's offerings.

However, I do see your point. With DirectX being the defacto standard, there's one less area of competition and thus, less innovation so having DirectX alone might not be the best thing to happen but not from a hardware standpoint.

That's what stupid overly snobby slogans are for. "The way it's meant to be played" for example 😀

LMAO! Everytime I saw that logo on my games, I wanted to punch a puppy and kick a kitten and nunchuk a nun. Can you believe they pulled that crap just a month after I shelled out almost $200 for a brand new Radeon!?

batracio wrote:

GeForces & Radeons, GeForces & Radeons everywhere. Is anyone interested in Kyro II vs Voodoo5 vs Ati Rage Fury MAXX benchmarks? Suggestions are welcome.

That would be nice. 😀

Tetrium wrote:

We most certainly do!!! :D […]
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SquallStrife wrote:

We like Tualatins too, don't we?

We most certainly do!!! 😁

They are, imo, the best cpu's available at their particular speed and "processing power" 😉

They produce little heat, support SSE and are cheap (though somewhat it's harder to get the boards). Only drawback is it's memory bandwidth, Tualatins only work with SDRAM (or on the odd VIA DDR s370 boards, and we sure love VIA, don't we!! 😜)

Put a 1.4ghz Thunderbird Athlon or a 1.33 ghz Palomino Athlon XP against a 1.4ghz Tualatin and see who wins. 😏

I'd even put a 1.4ghz Duron against it.

sliderider wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

We most certainly do!!! :D […]
Show full quote

SquallStrife wrote:

We like Tualatins too, don't we?

We most certainly do!!! 😁

They are, imo, the best cpu's available at their particular speed and "processing power" 😉

They produce little heat, support SSE and are cheap (though somewhat it's harder to get the boards). Only drawback is it's memory bandwidth, Tualatins only work with SDRAM (or on the odd VIA DDR s370 boards, and we sure love VIA, don't we!! 😜)

Put a 1.4ghz Thunderbird Athlon or a 1.33 ghz Palomino Athlon XP against a 1.4ghz Tualatin and see who wins. 😏

I'd even put a 1.4ghz Duron against it.

Even though Tualatin-s might be a little bit slower (which is probably not the case in many situations), it'll run twice as cool, which makes system building easier (the system requires less cooling). It's kinda touch keeping an Athlon XP with a high end graphics card cool with just 1 80mm exhaust fan and most of my cases are kinda crappy 😅

I had a Palomino 2000+ rig for about a year or so and it was a LOT faster then my 1Ghz Coppermine (which was my secondary rig at the time), but also ran a lot hotter, the stock XP 3200+ HSF had difficulty keeping Palomino's temps below 60c while the Coppermine stayed below 40 with just a crummy aluminium HSF.
The Palomino rig got decommissioned when it's deathstar harddrive died 🤣

Palomino 2000+ is a ~70W CPU whereas Coppermine and Tualatin are ~30W. A lot of heat to dissipate there.

Actually the sub 3GHz Willamette and Northwood P4s are around 70W too.

swaaye wrote:

Actually the sub 3GHz Willamette and Northwood P4s are around 70W too.

Actually, it was the posts here that convinced me that Northwood wasn't such a bad CPU after all, and Willamette is interesting when it's a s423 one. But Preshot...it's hotter and slower then Northwood! But Cedar Mill does sound interesting in a way, their heat dissipation is quite manageable. Course Conroe still beats the crap out of any netburst CPU 😜

It's too bad no Northwoods were made for s775, at least I think none were made?

Gah, I want to build sooo many rigs but my attic's a mess right now! Will continue tomorrow when I build up the big workbench 😁

Tetrium wrote:

Actually, it was the posts here that convinced me that Northwood wasn't such a bad CPU after all, and Willamette is interesting […]
Show full quote

swaaye wrote:

Actually the sub 3GHz Willamette and Northwood P4s are around 70W too.

Actually, it was the posts here that convinced me that Northwood wasn't such a bad CPU after all, and Willamette is interesting when it's a s423 one. But Preshot...it's hotter and slower then Northwood! But Cedar Mill does sound interesting in a way, their heat dissipation is quite manageable. Course Conroe still beats the crap out of any netburst CPU 😜

It's too bad no Northwoods were made for s775, at least I think none were made?

Gah, I want to build sooo many rigs but my attic's a mess right now! Will continue tomorrow when I build up the big workbench 😁

I wouldn't bother with Willamette. At the same clock speed a Tualatin is faster and the Tualatin can be overclocked to be competitive with the highest clock speed Willamettes from 1.7 to 2.0 ghz.

Out of curiosity, where would the Number Nine Ticket to Ride fit in the lineup of cards in the first post?

Maybe around a G200. They are rather buggy and best avoided for 3D.
http://www.imagebam.com/image/61642730710449

sliderider wrote:

Out of curiosity, where would the Number Nine Ticket to Ride fit in the lineup of cards in the first post?

Ticket to Ride (T2R) or Ticket to Ride IV (T2R4)? I do have a #9 Revolution 3D 8 Mb PCI (T2R) and it's not even close to G200. It never received an OpenGL ICD and sucks a lot at Direct3D. Its fillrate was ~36 Mtexels/sec, same as Permedia 2. Both are among the slowest 3D cards I've ever had, second only to S3 Virge, but Permedia 2 at least had an OpenGL ICD. G200 fillrate was ~72 Mtexels/sec, by the way. Revolution 3D was supposed to be a great 2D performer, but some driver bugs make it fail miserably even at 2D. No Windows 95 driver will install under Windows 98 without a hack, and the only available driver for Windows 98 didn't support 16-bit color icons, making desktop look like crap, and crashing my system at shutdown.

Ticket to Ride IV may be closer to G200, though, but I've never seen one.

Well that would be faster than Verite V1000. 😉 And all Virge cards. But they were definitely behind the times.

I just registered to post a big "Thank You" to swaaye for opening this thread. Very inspiring!

some comparing reviews
http://www.3dgaming.com/reviews/

A curious question, with all the talk about the Nvidia 6200 being the best PCI graphics card to support Win9x, why did it not make the benchmark charts? Were you CPU limited at some point, whereby the more advanced graphic card scores saturated? It seems you've already answered affirmative to this on page 11.

I didn't see the Voodoo 3 3000 PCI on the chart, but this gentleman did a nice quick comparison,
http://www.barefeats.com/v3e.html

I was stunned by the huge leap in performance from the Matrox G200 to the G400 without a transition card in between. It would be interesting to see how a G400 AGP compares to a G400 PCI card (aka G450).

Yeah a little bit of benchmarking several cards gives one a nice perspective on the work the hardware reviewers put in.

How about 28 CPUs and 23 benchmark programs per CPU? I'm surprised I'm still married.

One final note, fantastic graphics comparison -- and completed on the same system! I bet you don't want to do that again.

I don't have a PCI 6200. That's why it's not on the chart. 😀

Millennium G200 vs. Millennium G400 Max
pixel rate
84 MHz 1px/clk
150 MHz 2px/clk
+257% pixel fillrate

memory bandwidth
112 MHz 64-bit bus
200 MHz 128-bit bus
+257% bandwidth

Also I'm sure they improved the overall design of G400 to make it more efficient.

Any idea which card would be faster, a Matrox G400 Max or a Matrox G550? The G400 Max seems to be clocked faster and uses a wider memory bus, but the G550 has some architectural advancements. From reading the Wiki article on the G400, I'm guessing the G400 Max is better than the G550.

In which areas might the G550 dominate, and in which areas might the G400 Max lead the race? I suppose this is primarily a 2D/3D gaming vs. web browsing question.

I'm building a Cyrix Socket 7 rig at the moment and am having trouble deciding between the two cards. The G550 has the added advantage of a DVI port, but that may not be necessary as Matrox RGB images have always been clear.

It seems the P-series is for AGP 4/8x only systems and the cards are keyed such that I can't use them with AGP 2x motherboard. While it is true that some Nvidia cards would probably be sufficient, or improve upon the Matrox pieces selected, I sorta have this crush on Matrox and insist on using them. I have the same little crush on Cyrix, so this will definately be a Cyrix/Matrox S7 rig.

I'm not sure there are any tangible benefits over G400 Max unless you want to use that ridiculous headcasting software. G550 is slower for 3D and 2D was already pretty much maxed out from a tangible perspective with G400. G550 still lacks full DVD decode.

Parhelia was supposed to be the next big jump. G550 and Parhelia both seemed to suffer greatly from Matrox downsizing/losing R&D and essentially giving up on competing with ATI and NV. A lot of engineers left the company during those years. G550 was probably a bit of a bastard child of the abandoned G800 project.

What command did you use to run your Quake II timedemo? I downloaded the free Quake II demo found online, ran the game, entered the console, and typed:

timedemo 1 [Enter]
map demo1.dm2 [Enter]

Quake then says that it cannot find demo1.dm2 and doesn't go through the motions of the demo like Quake1 does. It seems I need the file demo1.dm2, and am confused why the installer didn't come with it. I do get a frames per second count with Quake2, though it spits out the fps without going through the demo. Is that normal? Any help is much appreciated.

I grabbed the Quake II installer from,
http://www.fileplanet.com/6584/0/fileinfo/Quake-2-Demo-v3.14