I do remember that I never got FF7 and FF8 8-bit paletted textures test to pass in winxp with my radeon 9700 pro back then. That is why I am surprised by people talking now about them working in winxp.

Baoran wrote on 2020-03-12, 07:23:

I do remember that I never got FF7 and FF8 8-bit paletted textures test to pass in winxp with my radeon 9700 pro back then. That is why I am surprised by people talking now about them working in winxp.

Initially, the 8-bit textures and table fog were disabled in both Win9x and XP. Later drivers enabled them, but only under XP. I'm not sure what the first driver was to support this for XP.

swaaye wrote on 2020-03-12, 05:11:

My trusty Radeon 6950 died about a year ago. Started to sporadically come up on boot and eventually stopped working altogether. I thought it was the motherboard at first. Apparently not unheard of for the Cayman cards.

I wanted a 8800 Ultra around but yeah I suppose it could fail. G80 is one of the most interesting GPUs to me though and they have been quite cheap.

Radeon 6000 series cards have a habit of dying, I killed two 6800 series card by just using them. AMD were pushing TeraScale hard at the time. The Radoen 7000 series are built like a rock though, never had a single card of that generation die on me. The 7770 in particular is a perf/watt champion.

The Radoen 7000 series are built like a rock though, never had a single card of that generation die on me.

They BGA fail just as mush as any modern hot chip. It's not certain, like with GeForce 8800 series, but still very possible.

The day I take my final breath...I will remember...having benchmarked my 5900u (or was it a 5950u?) in FEAR and I will never forget the slideshow it presented to me xD
It did run kinda in 320x240 or something, the GF6800 I replaced with it was wayyyy faster 😜

It was really surprising to see the huge difference in performance. GF6 was pretty awesome anyway though.

Radeon 9x00 seemed to be all the rage back then (the R9600 I had back then was pretty good for what it was), but these seem to have been dying even years ago, it seemed hard to find a working one and I did see a lot of dead ones floating around.

Geforce FX ? Haha. 🤣
Sorry, this brings back so many memories! Personally, I mostly think of the Geforce 5200 then.
Its driver were quite buggy, but it had 2D engine still and could do Aero Glass In Vista/7.
(Edit: It was also very sought after for OS X 10.4/5 on Power Macs, because it could do OGL 2 and more 3D effects.)

Other people likely think of its bigger brothers with their incredible loud fans each.

If you do speak German, have a look -err- listen at these retro reviews:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v97nv2IHB0Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJXzxEObFrA

Edit: Here's a real gem, too. In English, even.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCN3LbNZ0xY

Tetrium wrote on 2020-03-12, 12:21:

The day I take my final breath...I will remember...having benchmarked my 5900u (or was it a 5950u?) in FEAR and I will never forget the slideshow it presented to me xD
It did run kinda in 320x240 or something, the GF6800 I replaced with it was wayyyy faster 😜

Yeah I've done that too. FEAR is one of the games with a Direct3D 8 option in the settings menu, probably specifically for the GeForce FX cards. It runs alright with that enabled. The game is certainly hopeless for a 5900U if you don't enable that though.

swaaye wrote on 2020-03-12, 17:19:

Tetrium wrote on 2020-03-12, 12:21:

The day I take my final breath...I will remember...having benchmarked my 5900u (or was it a 5950u?) in FEAR and I will never forget the slideshow it presented to me xD
It did run kinda in 320x240 or something, the GF6800 I replaced with it was wayyyy faster 😜

Yeah I've done that too. FEAR is one of the games with a Direct3D 8 option in the settings menu, probably specifically for the GeForce FX cards. It runs alright with that enabled. The game is certainly hopeless for a 5900U if you don't enable that though.

Then I probably should have enabled that 🤣!
I was probably testing using a not updated version of FEAR (fresh off of the disk) but despite its woeful performance, I really enjoyed all the benchmarking etc 😜

My favorite stutterfest for a 5900U is probably Oblivion. It stutters along at a few fps. Can hear the vrm circuitry at work so it's like you can hear it crank out each frame 🤣. A Radeon 9600 is several times faster.

Just play Doom3 on it and be impressed with how well it can run a game basically designed for the NV3X.

Fortunately Oblivion also was adapted for Shader Model 1.4.

Oldblivion mod? It works pretty well. I tried it with Radeon 8500 once. I don't remember if it is entirely free of problems though...

I was asking again about games that still use 8-bit palletized texture and table fog would this work in XP with radeon 9600 and 9800?
Had to confirm for sure as I didn't heard of this like that before.

Thanks and cheers,

There are no Radeons with official 8-bit pallettized texture or table fog support.

It was possible to get table fog from some early Radeons with registry tweaks but I don't know where that ends. Maybe Radeon 8500.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2020-03-12, 20:43:

I was asking again about games that still use 8-bit palletized texture and table fog would this work in XP with radeon 9600 and 9800?
Had to confirm for sure as I didn't heard of this like that before.

Definitely not. I think Radeon dropped support for that even prior to the 9600, not sure exactly when though. This is why the 9800 smashes the FX5900 for DX9, but the FX smashes the Radeon for DX8 and below. And for retro gamers, only the latter is of any interest now.

the FX didn't "smash" Radeons on DX8 and bellow, plenty of tests of the time would show the cards competing with the Radeons often ahead.

I mean smash including compatibility not just performance.

Compatibility is at least there - not with many DX9 stuff though. Some GLSL/SM2 shaders break on it, ironic for having a better shader model on paper than the competing R300s.

FX's more valued here for the after-the-fact it-works poor-mans-geforce2 homage-to-3dFx-VooDoo!! part, but in 2002-03 people definitely weren't looking at these for paletted textures and fog...

I suppose the biggest disappointment would have been trying to run 2005+ games on the FX cards because most games from 2003 and 2004 were tailored to run pretty well on them. The DirectX 8.1 paths of those games usually aren't a big drop in quality compared to the DirectX 9 path. If it's even perceptible.

Naturally if you were in-the-know and looked at screenshot comparisons and followed the general sentiment online, you might have felt a bit more robbed. 😀