You probably don't know this, but leileilol is one of the main contributors/co-creators on OpenArena 😁.

Didn't know but I was not going to argue anyways 😁
I remembered why I noted this game to be potentially interesting, it's because of this : https://openarena.fandom.com/wiki/Legacy_syst … owerVR_Series_1
I also came accross a topic with contributors trying to find a workaround for missing blending modes on the PCX2.
I'll probably try, out of curiosity, with much less expectations though.

JustJulião wrote on 2022-02-28, 00:18:

Not sure if all of the following will work on PCX2, but they do have built-in benchmarks: […]
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Not sure if all of the following will work on PCX2, but they do have built-in benchmarks:

Incoming (demo version also has benchmark)
Forsaken
GLQuake
Dethkarz
Half-Life (Blowout timedemo, requires original HL release)
Descent 3 (this will probably be a really hard on PCX2)
Turok 2
Drakan (I think the benchmark here is just the intro cutscene, so not particularly great)
Unreal (flyby timedemo, used often though I ain't sure it's indicative of real gameplay performance)
Unreal Tournament (flyby and UTBench, insane for PCX2 IMO)
Breakneck (also known as NICE2)

Thank you. I will follow leileilol's suggestion for Nascar Hear and pick one or two from your list.

leileilol wrote on 2022-02-28, 00:23:

Rename the MiniGL to opengl.dll (without the 32) and shove it in Windows\System\, there MDK2 will see it as an "SGI driver" and MDK2 will happily use the PowerVR MiniGL (badly) from there.

Works now, thanks !

It's really the same deal for every idtech3 game when you force it on PCX2 with techland's driver. Nothing will blend, you need vertex lighting to lose the unblended lightmaps (and some games rip that out!) and the texture budget will make the PCX2 skip like, all textures (q3 targeted 16/32mb cards and the licensees went for higher). Lots of shaders using rgb modulation to fade out would break (like railguns, shadows, and scorch marks/ bullet holes). I only try them out of morbid curiosity, if anything. It's more or less the same when you try Techland's S3D driver and/or Techland's MSI driver for ViRGE and Mystique cards respectively.

oa's just a big mess i'd prefer not to think about (and certainly don't wish upon any testers here)

So I've been having trouble with my third card, to sit alongside Matrox M3D. First one I got 2X so wouldn't fit, second one (Radeon 9600) wouldn't play Moon Racer or Revolte without huge glitches.

Now I've got an AGP Inno3D GeForce4 MX440 128MB 8X card and have run into some issues:

1. In Win98SE Direct3D doesn't seem to work, with DxDiag DirectX 9.0a crashing when you try the D3D tests. They work fine in WinXP though, so the card may not be faulty. This is with 45.23 or 71.84 drivers (as thought I'd try some people recommended and later ones). Both driver sets in DxDiag DirectX 9.0a say hardware accelerated DirectX8+ isn't available due to driver not supporting it, and that AGP Texture Acceleration is disabled. I don't know if there's anything in BIOS or Windows98SE that might be causing this; I have no bad items in System Properties.

2. With 45.23 I get flickery menus in Moon Racer but gameplay is fine, with 71.84 gameplay and menus are fine.

3. With 45.23 Ultim@te Race 1 track works fine, with 71.84 the mouse becomes sticky in menus and takes about 10 seconds delay to respond to movement. Eventually tiny glitches start flickering a touch on screen, as though a graphics card is working harder than it should... game demo works though (if you can get to the button to start the demo, at least!)

4. With 45.23 Virtual On for PowerVR is fine, with 71.84 I did notice sometimes textures on the world loaded white. But not in more recent tries.

5. With both 45.23 and 71.84 Revolte is a strobing mess, with no level graphics appearing. Seems to be very sensitive to drivers!

6. Purevex works fine on either driver.

7. Even Johnny Herbert's Grand Prix works with PowerVR (D3D game) as D3D on GeForce seems broken.

So... any thoughts? What might be the best Nvidia Detonator set to go for? Any ideas why Win98SE would be rejecting D3D on the MX440 8X but it's fine in WinXP? Should I reformat Win98SE and try again from scratch?

On the plus side I got CD audio working, by removing my Audigy 2ZS and using motherboard Realtek AC'97 sound, 🤣...

One thing I will try is to use AMD's ATI driver cleaner. I already ran Driver Cleaner to try to remove all ATI drivers from the previous Radeon, maybe that's causing issues?

What CPU are you using with your GeForce 4 MX? I have done extensive testing with NVIDIA drivers and found that different combinations of chipset, CPU, and GPU, can profoundly affect performance, sometimes better, sometimes worse!

The issue is that many if the optimizations that NVIDIA added to their drivers over time did in fact boost performance on leading edge hardware. But these improvements were often made at the expense of older hardware losing certain optimizations or were sent down code paths that they were incapable of running.

For example, drivers after a certain point will cause graphical corruption on the Pentium 3 but only those which are pre-Coppermine. Driver performance for the same video card can triple on a fast Pentium 4 with later drivers but half on a slow Pentium 3.

Unfortunately, there is no good answer for which driver is best even when targeting a single graphics card. The optimal choice depends on the rest of the system and the only way to find the best one is to run lots of tests.

Key driver versions for NVIDIA on Windows 9x are 23.11, 43.45, and 56.64.

The same applies (referring to the above post) to DirectX the further you move away from earlier versions. Games will break with newer versions, of course. The same also applies to drivers. For example, I won’t upgrade Windows 9X to any version of DirectX later than 8.2, normally. But in the case of an ATI installation a few days ago, I wasn’t going above 7.0a in this particular machine. Well, the newer driver needed at least DirectX8, even though there is nothing capable on the hardware of making use of anything better than DirectX6 (except DirectDraw) and caused DXdiag to report the same issues as you. Disabled AGP texture acceleration and Direct3D problems. I backed down the driver to an older version, and everything worked fine afterward. I suspect all of the above applies here, in addition to DirectDraw problems (menu flicking and corruption).

Why are you using DirectX9? Due to the ATI 9600, right? The MX440 is a DirectX7 card on paper. Reinstall Windows 98 and don’t go higher than DirectX7.0a and the requisite drivers. You got rid of the Audigy, so that also freed you from the dependency of DirectX8 and later.

I've got a Pentium 4 3.2GHz Extreme Edition on an Abit IC-7G motherboard. I reformatted and reinstalled Win98SE yesterday, trying some 40.something Nvidia drivers. Still Direct3D test in DxDiag crash (no AGP acceleration option either), with DDHELP causing an exception in the Nvidia drivers VxD (I think, without checking). That's with DirectX 4 or so, but I tried up to late DX9c with same result.

It's true that drivers make a big difference, Moon Racer on PowerVR was butter smooth with 40 drivers but slow and jerky with 71 that I tried before. Unfortunately it locked up a little way into a race with 40, and had flickery menus. But it worked fine on 71.

My main issue though is why doesn't the DxDiag Direct3D test (or D3D generally)work on my Inno3D Geforce4 MX440 8X in Windows 98SE, whilst it works fine in Windows XP on the same system...

Just saw your reply Meatball, maybe I'll try installing DX7 next, but I'm not very optimistic.

Is your GeForce 4 MX 440 AGP 8x 64 or 128-bit? My MX 440 8x is only 64-bit and I'm getting worse performance than a slower MX 420 on PCI, so I haven't done much testing with this card.

For a fast Pentium 4, I found 56.64 to have the best optimizations. Try that one. I would also recommend DirectX 7.0a at a minimum.

Never use anything above 56.64 in Windows 9x. They are all broken.

VirtuaIceMan wrote on 2022-03-03, 09:25:

I've got a Pentium 4 3.2GHz Extreme Edition on an Abit IC-7G motherboard. I reformatted and reinstalled Win98SE yesterday, tryin […]
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I've got a Pentium 4 3.2GHz Extreme Edition on an Abit IC-7G motherboard. I reformatted and reinstalled Win98SE yesterday, trying some 40.something Nvidia drivers. Still Direct3D test in DxDiag crash (no AGP acceleration option either), with DDHELP causing an exception in the Nvidia drivers VxD (I think, without checking). That's with DirectX 4 or so, but I tried up to late DX9c with same result.

It's true that drivers make a big difference, Moon Racer on PowerVR was butter smooth with 40 drivers but slow and jerky with 71 that I tried before. Unfortunately it locked up a little way into a race with 40, and had flickery menus. But it worked fine on 71.

My main issue though is why doesn't the DxDiag Direct3D test (or D3D generally)work on my Inno3D Geforce4 MX440 8X in Windows 98SE, whilst it works fine in Windows XP on the same system...

Just saw your reply Meatball, maybe I'll try installing DX7 next, but I'm not very optimistic.

You’ll have to rebuild the OS first. You could try upgrading the drivers to a later revision before that, though.

For XP I’m presuming it’s a matter of how the drivers were written. And how new is your DirectX 9.0c install on XP? Windows 98 branch stopped being updated in 2006. XP’s last supported release was 2008. I thought it was patched through (June?) 2010, but I could be hallucinating. Either way, XP version is newer.

It's a 128MB card. Someone thought the card might be faulty but if D3D works in XP but not Win98SE it feels like something else. Both can/did at one point run Dx9a, as I think Creative drivers installed that (the games I put on are Dx5 or earlier).

Radeon 9600 worked with D3D in Win98SE but Moon Racer wouldn't work with that card. I also have a Gainward 7800GS+ 512MB AGP, but never had luck getting the hacked drivers to work with it, as I believe it's chips from 7900 on a 7800 board or something else funky.

As I'm on my third graphics card I'm getting a bit frustrated now. I also suspect Revolte might be very sensitive to PowerVR hardware, is it PCX1 only perhaps?!

VirtuaIceMan wrote on 2022-03-03, 09:43:

It's a 128MB card. Someone thought the card might be faulty but if D3D works in XP but not Win98SE it feels like something else. Both can/did at one point run Dx9a, as I think Creative drivers installed that (the games I put on are Dx5 or earlier).

Radeon 9600 worked with D3D in Win98SE but Moon Racer wouldn't work with that card. I also have a Gainward 7800GS+ 512MB AGP, but never had luck getting the hacked drivers to work with it, as I believe it's chips from 7900 on a 7800 board or something else funky.

Radeon 9600 is a DirectX 9 card. Audigy 2, also (it appears). Ditto GeForce 7 series. DirectX version must match the minimum version drivers are expecting or acceleration is not available in most cases.

Ah it's likely Dx9 snuck in with Radeon then. But I've reformatted now and it's DX4 or 5 and still MX440 won't run D3D without crashing. Maybe I should take out the PowerVR card to check there's no weird conflict with that?

At the end of the day, with some driver faffing I can theoretically play the PowerVR games, but I hoped to play some D3D games like Johnny Herbert's Grand Prix, which is highly flaky on WinXP and newer, but without D3D on the MX440 that's a no-go. It does (amusingly) run under PowerVR, but all transparencies are either black (road markings) or missing (chrome effect).

VirtuaIceMan wrote on 2022-03-03, 09:50:

Ah it's likely Dx9 snuck in with Radeon then. But I've reformatted now and it's DX4 or 5 and still MX440 won't run D3D without crashing. Maybe I should take out the PowerVR card to check there's no weird conflict with that?

At the end of the day, with some driver faffing I can theoretically play the PowerVR games, but I hoped to play some D3D games like Johnny Herbert's Grand Prix, which is highly flaky on WinXP and newer, but without D3D on the MX440 that's a no-go. It does (amusingly) run under PowerVR, but all transparencies are either black (road markings) or missing (chrome effect).

Same applies backward as forward. If DirectX version is older than what the drivers require; breakage.

So I think I'll try DX7.0a with 56.64 drivers next, maybe, with PowerVR removed from the equation?

I'm half wondering if the flickery issues in the Virtuality KK games (Revolte/Moon Racer) might be due to the MX440 not working right. Although both flickered with ATi 9600.

I still wish I knew what the best base card was. I see people saying Ti 4200 but they're not that cheap!

You’d probably run into similar issues. It is a DirectX 8.0a card, though.

For the Hebert game, check your CD. What version of DirectX is included? I’m guessing some version of 5 or 6.

It's DX5 on Herbert. But as D3D accelerated tests crash in DxDiag I don't think D3D is working at all on MX440 in Win98SE

Do not use 56.64. It needs DirectX 9. You have to go back further:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/win9x-5664/

I'm on these, from vogonsdrivers at mo, and Moon Racer is fast but locked up mid race: nVidia Detonator/FW Driver v40.72 WHQL Win9X setup

I ran these but Moon Racer had flickery menus: nVidia Detonator/FW Driver v45.23 Win9X setup OR nVidia Detonator/FW Driver v45.23 Win9X (Gf FX)

I tried these and Moon Racer menus fine, but in-game way jerkier than 40.72: nVidia Detonator/FW Driver v71.84 Win9X setup

I see there are 2 modded ones so could switch back to my 7800GS+ and try that with those, but IIRC it just hard locked Win98SE randomly.

If I was to ditch MX440, what would be a "no trouble" basic card? And should I get PCI rather than AGP, in case that's causing issues?

I’ll have to revise my DirectX recommendation. Looking at the INF from 28.42, (when the MX series and 4 are first listed), these are the earliest drivers you could use, and I’m presuming DirectX8 is the earliest you can go. Start there before you spend anymore money.

Otherwise:

Rage 128 Pro 32MB are a dime a dozen. DirectX6 card. AGP 4x. Not good DOS, though.

Voodoo2. Expensive.

Radeon 750o. DirectX 7.0. AGP 4x. Pricey. Not good DOS. LE versions are cheaper, but watch out for cut down 64 bit memory interface versions. LE 64bit MIGHT… MIGHT still be ok in your use case, though.

Voodoo2 is a 3D-only card, it'd be Voodoo3 for 2D/3D. Matrox Millennium might be good idea, as I used before, but I have no idea which I had, as they all have various numbers (from II to G450, G550 etc).

Are there any programs I can use to audit the MX440 to see what's causing the D3D problems, maybe nail that down a bit more?