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best windows 98 agp card

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First post, by sgt76

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What's the best possible card for windows 98 gaming? Not neccesarily the fastest as i think that would be the 6800 ultra but also most compatible. i'm looking from the perspective of plonking it in my 1.6ghz tualatin rig and playing games up to about 2003 or so. currently i have a geforce 3 ti200 in there..

Reply 1 of 153, by Malik

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For me, the first choice will be the 6800 Ultra if possible, and will settle for a plain 6800 if not. But NOT those newer 6800 GT, GS or XT ones.

Second choice will be Radeon 9800XT.

Third will be a Geforce 4 Ti 4800. <---- Because I had very good experience in terms of compatibility with this baby.

5476332566_7480a12517_t.jpgSB Dos Drivers

Reply 2 of 153, by sgt76

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I've had great experience before with a 4600 Ti too, but unfortunately the card went to the great GPU up in the sky sometime back.

My experience with GF6 cards and Win98 has not been as positive. The two don't seem to play well- very buggy and lotsa crashes. Does this have something to do with later revisions as your post seems to indicate?

How do the Radeon 9500/9700/9800 play with Win98? Are the Win98 drivers any good for games from about 1998- 2003? As problem free as a Geforce 3/4?

How would a 9600 Pro/ XT compare in all this?

Or an FX series card- like a 5800/5900? I know they suck at DX9, but I'm gonna use it for DX7/8 mostly. And I'm hoping Win98 support on them is better than the otherwise superior GF6 series.

I would like something more powerful than my Ti200 so that I can max out all the oldies with AA/ AF.

Reply 3 of 153, by noshutdown

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tualatin is quite a slow cpu so you don't really need a very fast video card. i guess a ti4200 would do, its somehow a lot faster than ti200 and more stable than the ti4600 due to its lower clock and less heat.
and i agree that geforce6 is not a good choice for win98, i guess its drivers has grown too complicated for win98 to run.

Reply 4 of 153, by Putas

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Radeons 9k got solid drivers. For your timeframe 9600 Pro/XT can catchup with Geforce 4 Ti and allow bit of eye candy for resolution up to 1280. 9700/9800 and FX5800/5900 will double-triple the speed of Ti 200 and play games of 2003 well up to 1600x1200, with optional AA.

Reply 5 of 153, by sgt76

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I really want a Radeon 9600/9700/9800 or a high-end FX, but am afraid the Win98 drivers may be as shitty as GF6 Win98 drivers. I want the same peace of mind as my Ti200 in running the old games, but with more power.

Also, I can get the 9600 Pro/ XT easily and cheaply where I am. The FX5800/5900 and Radeon 9800 not impossible and costs a bit more, but doable. Reckon they'd fit what I'm looking for, anyone?

Reply 6 of 153, by Mau1wurf1977

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Ti500 maybe?

When I built a gaming PC around a Radeon 9800 in 2003/2004 everyone was using Windows XP. SP1 just came out.

Or because you had good experience, just hunt for more ti4200 cards. They were very popular, so shouldn't be hard to find!

My website with reviews, demos, drivers, tutorials and more...
My YouTube channel

Reply 7 of 153, by swaaye

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I've said it many times - don't pick any Radeon if you want to play D3D 3-5 or OPENGL games that aren't Quake-based.

From experience, I favor GF 5xxx and 6xxx. Older Geforce cards don't have any advantages as far as I'm aware. They just get slower and suck a lot more at stuff like anti aliasing and trilinear/anisotropic filtering.

If we're going to discuss nostalgic feelings about older cards though then the sky is the limit I guess. I have an inexplicable affinity for Radeon 8500 🤣 even though it is rather awful. I need to catalog the hardware/software quirks someday...

Reply 8 of 153, by Jolaes76

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This card has to be an nvidia for sure. Up to the Geforce FX they have table fog support, and with many DirectX tools available for Detonator and early Forceware drivers, you can tweak a lot on problematic games both bug-wise and speedwise.

If DOS gaming is still concerned as well, nvidia wins hands down again. You will have VBE 3.0 and good support for CRT monitors.

The fastest nvidia card I had in my Win98Se-2Me rig was a 7900GT AGP (some RAM desoldered and BIOS modded, cutting it from 512MB to 256MB. Theoretical upper limit must be around 384 MB). You will need an unoffical driver but that works quite well. Only downside is that windows shutdown breaks AFAICR.

Remember though, that last win9x OPTIMIZED drivers were meant for the GF4 family. That was the pinnacle of win9x gaming with nvidia.

"Ita in vita ut in lusu alae pessima iactura arte corrigenda est."

Reply 9 of 153, by swaaye

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I wouldn't say NV Win9x drivers are only GF4 optimized. There are many releases specifically for GF5 and 6. But the last release, 81.98, which you probably have hacked for GF7, is a mess. It breaks shutdown as you said, and it also can't be properly uninstalled because the uninstaller crashes.

I use 77.72 for GF5 and 6 because they don't have the above problems, and release 75+ have OpenGL triple buffering support according to the release notes (you need to use Rivatuner to enable it in 9x though).

Reply 10 of 153, by bestemor

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Malik wrote:

For me, the first choice will be the 6800 Ultra if possible, and will settle for a plain 6800 if not. But NOT those newer 6800 GT, GS or XT ones.

Second choice will be Radeon 9800XT.

Third will be a Geforce 4 Ti 4800. <---- Because I had very good experience in terms of compatibility with this baby.

What's wrong with the GT or GS models ? 😕

Reply 11 of 153, by sliderider

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bestemor wrote:
Malik wrote:

For me, the first choice will be the 6800 Ultra if possible, and will settle for a plain 6800 if not. But NOT those newer 6800 GT, GS or XT ones.

Second choice will be Radeon 9800XT.

Third will be a Geforce 4 Ti 4800. <---- Because I had very good experience in terms of compatibility with this baby.

What's wrong with the GT or GS models ? 😕

6800 Ultra cards are cheap and more powerful so why settle for budget models?

Reply 12 of 153, by Gamecollector

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Interesting. Is there any game with Shader Model 3.0 and Win9x support?
If not - I don't see the point to use GF6xxx in the Win98/ME only PC.

Asus P4P800 SE/Pentium4 3.2E/2 Gb DDR400B,
Radeon HD3850 Agp (Sapphire), Catalyst 14.4 (XpProSp3).
Voodoo2 12 MB SLI, Win2k drivers 1.02.00 (XpProSp3).

Reply 13 of 153, by Putas

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Gamecollector wrote:

Interesting. Is there any game with Shader Model 3.0 and Win9x support?

Of course, or at least they can be run with little effort. But they are few years younger, demanding, and GeForce 6 was not particularly fast in sm3.0. Still it allows lot more eye candy than FX.
6800 GS was sometimes close to Ultra and easier to feed and cool. What about some Radeon X800? Even if the drivers are not so smooth it should brute force 2003 games easily.

Reply 14 of 153, by Gamecollector

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I have the X850 PE Agp in my WinME PC. But the ATi Win9x drivers (Catalyst 6.2) are too bugged for me. I want to massacre all Catalyst programmers...
By the way, there are SM 3.0 games with Win9x support. Far Cry as the example. So, it looks like GF6800U is the best choice.

Last edited by Gamecollector on 2012-08-28, 08:18. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 15 of 153, by Filosofia

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I've installed yesterday a Ti4200 on my Win98 dream machine and it is magnificent , even with the drivers that came in CD.
Bare in mind I have only a 17'' CRT.

BGWG as in Boogie Woogie.

Reply 16 of 153, by sgt76

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Thanks for the views and suggestions folks- great info on hardware n drivers there! Looks like Nvidia is still the way to go. Im gonna try to score either an fx5700 or 6600gt cheaply. Ti4200 is great, but good ones getting a bit scarce now. Plus i have my ti200 at nearly ti500 speeds, so i doubt i'll see much improvement.

Reply 17 of 153, by noshutdown

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sgt76 wrote:

Thanks for the views and suggestions folks- great info on hardware n drivers there! Looks like Nvidia is still the way to go. Im gonna try to score either an fx5700 or 6600gt cheaply. Ti4200 is great, but good ones getting a bit scarce now. Plus i have my ti200 at nearly ti500 speeds, so i doubt i'll see much improvement.

ti4200 is still a lot faster than ti500. while they run at similar clocks, ti4200 has two vertex shaders while ti500 has only one, and ti4200 has improved memory controller too.

Reply 18 of 153, by sgt76

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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.

Reply 19 of 153, by swaaye

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I had a GeForce 3 die slowly die of RAM failure. I thought it might be solder so I tried the baking trick but that didn't help.

Practically though, I haven't seen a reason to worry about owning a GeForce below a FX 5700 for actual gaming. The compatibility seems the same.