On these "slower" machines, I am always a friend of cards that have excellent image-quality and excellent drivers for different operating systems.
If I can equipp the system with an additional 3d-accelerator than my first choice is matrox, my second is ati.

with an additional 3d-accelerator than my first choice is matrox, my second is ati.

Worst choices for slow CPU.

depends

Hmmm I am always puzzled, why people use cards that are so much newer then the processor they are using.
If you use a k6-3 500mhz. Why go higher then a voodoo 3 3000 / a TNT 2 pro or ultra card. In my eyes it is just useless. If you want to play at higher res then 1024x768, why use a k6-3 at all?
Go for a p3 or a amd xp series if you want that.
Only reason i can think of is, because you can?
Or AA?
And the better image quality, I never had a moment of: hmm my current setup has such bad image quality. Or: my new graphics cards has such better image quality on these exact max game settings.

Even a voodoo 2 SLI wont be really maxed out on this cpu.

386SX wrote on 2016-03-19, 22:15:

With the K6-2+ 500 and Radeon 7200 64mb sdr i get 2500 on 3dmark2000.

i have almost equal Score with ATI Rage 128.. just 300 points less.

K6-2/3(+) FPU is the weak Spot..

For 9x Gaming System i would choose at least a PII/PIII 450.

K6 FPU is REALLY!!!! WEAK. The K6-2/3 450 has FPU Performance like a P1-233MMX.
P2 or a Celeron300A are excellent for win9x-retro-gaming.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2021-06-24, 14:36:

K6 FPU is REALLY!!!! WEAK. The K6-2/3 450 has FPU Performance like a P1-233MMX.
P2 or a Celeron300A are excellent for win9x-retro-gaming.

It is weak.....but it isn't nearly that weak. Comparable to say a PII-350 or so.

They are great chips but they don't perform always as people expect. Great for versatility running DOS games and 3D games up to say 98-99, maybe 2000.

That is about it. P-3 is a better choice for those later games, but not nearly as great of a choice for speed sensitive DOS games.

As usual it is best have maybe more than one retro rig, as nothing does it EVERYTHING perfectly. It is perhaps the best all rounder though, honorable mention to VIA c7 of course.

Imho the K6-2/3/+ cpu sure had that FPU weakness but maybe even chipsets might have been faster who knows.. I always thought they were all quite never aimed at fast machines looking at mem benchmarks. I don't have anymore the Radeon 7200 card but I still think it's one of my favourite cards for these systems cause it's really well built and a great compact PCB, it has a powerful R100 full GPU and the T&L should help a bit on bench and some games or even just being there as a helpful additional engine. Too bad the K6-2/3+ lines were notebook oriented cause maybe they should have build a K6-3+ only version as a low end not-Athlon offer and with only higher freqs from 500 to 600Mhz. At that point I suppose costs of the K6 core @ 180nm weren't really high.

Yeah in Integer Calculations a Athlon is even slower then a K6-2+/3 at same Clockspeed hehe.
At least a Bigger Video Card helps to bump up Resolution without Loosing Frames.

and the T&L should help a bit on bench and some games

Sure, if you want to play something like MDK2 with questionable performance. And it's already quite light for a game with T&L support, i.e. no crazy geometry or shadows.

386SX wrote on 2021-07-01, 09:18:

Too bad the K6-2/3+ lines were notebook oriented cause maybe they should have build a K6-3+ only version as a low end not-Athlon offer and with only higher freqs from 500 to 600Mhz. At that point I suppose costs of the K6 core @ 180nm weren't really high.

At almost the same transistor count and die size production cost for one die was probably almost identical. Only K7 had much better yields. The lowest rated Thunderbird cores were 650MHz and would usually overclock to at least 7xxMHz. Almost no K6 plus would reach that speed. Also when the K6 plus CPUs came out Duron was just around the corner and it would overclock like crazy.
I see how the plus versions of the old K6 architecture were developed to keep a low power product with good 2D performance as a stop gap in the mobile/integrated market but on desktop it just appears logical to focus on K7.
Personal opinion.

Durons weren't great overclockers until Applebread.

Not at first, but as the Thunderbirds went into the Ghz, AMD were still knocking out 6 and 700 Durons with their process well tuned, and those little buggers would hit a ghz somewhat reliably. Then there was the halfassed palomino based Morgan, now that used up older spare capacity, so was limited by the process, I think they were using aluminum interconnects instead of copper too. Anyhoo after the first month or two of production, the lower end ones, 1.1 etc, could be got up to around 1.4 ish, but that's about all they had due to process limits. They were pretty decent still though, you'd get XP1500 like oomph out of them for a third the price.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-07-01, 10:56:

and the T&L should help a bit on bench and some games

Sure, if you want to play something like MDK2 with questionable performance. And it's already quite light for a game with T&L support, i.e. no crazy geometry or shadows.

I think to remember there were some early games that did support T&L with quite light geometry but I don't remember the name now.. some sort of colourful palette third person adventure game like in some different planet.. probably one of the first game. Also Quake3 I think had some support for that on OpenGL?
But I suppose the T&L engine of those early GPUs were soon slower than the CPU software T&L considering how fast cpu got back then.

Doornkaat wrote on 2021-07-01, 16:56:

At almost the same transistor count and die size production cost for one die was probably almost identical. Only K7 had much bet […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote on 2021-07-01, 09:18:

Too bad the K6-2/3+ lines were notebook oriented cause maybe they should have build a K6-3+ only version as a low end not-Athlon offer and with only higher freqs from 500 to 600Mhz. At that point I suppose costs of the K6 core @ 180nm weren't really high.

At almost the same transistor count and die size production cost for one die was probably almost identical. Only K7 had much better yields. The lowest rated Thunderbird cores were 650MHz and would usually overclock to at least 7xxMHz. Almost no K6 plus would reach that speed. Also when the K6 plus CPUs came out Duron was just around the corner and it would overclock like crazy.
I see how the plus versions of the old K6 architecture were developed to keep a low power product with good 2D performance as a stop gap in the mobile/integrated market but on desktop it just appears logical to focus on K7.
Personal opinion.

I was thinking too at the transistor count increased with the L2 cache and maybe this was a problem indeed.. sure the Duron core was another planet. Probably the K6 core did what it could but was too much old for those times considering the Celeron an Pentium II cores. Maybe a better marketing for the 3DNow! istructions might have helped a bit but still it lasted longer than it should.

Quake 3 supported transformation part, but not lightning.

sure the Duron core was another planet

Not only that, but Athlon and Duron had minor difference in performance between each other. Yes, Duron had very small L2 cache, but it was slow anyway and K7 depends more on large L1 cache, which both core had 128 Kb.

Doornkaat wrote on 2021-07-01, 16:56:

At almost the same transistor count and die size production cost for one die was probably almost identical. Only K7 had much better yields. The lowest rated Thunderbird cores were 650MHz and would usually overclock to at least 7xxMHz. Almost no K6 plus would reach that speed. Also when the K6 plus CPUs came out Duron was just around the corner and it would overclock like crazy.
I see how the plus versions of the old K6 architecture were developed to keep a low power product with good 2D performance as a stop gap in the mobile/integrated market but on desktop it just appears logical to focus on K7.
Personal opinion.

I had a athlon 650mhz with a goldfinger attached to it and it would easily go up to 900mhz, it was insane. It would even boot on 950mhz, but crashed at 3d apps. The golden orb from thermaltake was insanely loud, but kept the darn thing cool enough.

GeForce 2 seemed to work alright on a k6-2-400

386SX wrote on 2021-07-01, 18:38:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-07-01, 10:56:

and the T&L should help a bit on bench and some games

Sure, if you want to play something like MDK2 with questionable performance. And it's already quite light for a game with T&L support, i.e. no crazy geometry or shadows.

I think to remember there were some early games that did support T&L with quite light geometry but I don't remember the name now.. some sort of colourful palette third person adventure game like in some different planet.. probably one of the first game. Also Quake3 I think had some support for that on OpenGL?
But I suppose the T&L engine of those early GPUs were soon slower than the CPU software T&L considering how fast cpu got back then.

Many early OpenGL games have Hardware T (not L) support. So even in GLQuake, Quake 2 you will get a speed boost wih a GeForce card compared to a TNT2. Of course, you also get a speed boost with Voodoo cards (up to & including Vooodoo 3) in Glide mode… although the image quality is arguably worse and performance drops significantly as you increase the resolution. Voodoo 5 is probably the best of both worlds, but… hehe, nobody would waste it on such a weak platform.

OpenGL had support for Hardware T&L since the early days, due to it being used for the professional/CAD market. However, many games (like GLQuake/Quake 2) had their own lighting engine, so they only benefited from the hardware transform part.

When it comes to SS7, a GeForce 2 MX/MX400 AGP is a great (and much cheaper) alternative to the 3dfx cards (and it only needs 4W of power, so it will work fine even on boards that have poorly designed AGP power delivery). Unfortunately the PCI versions of these cards are rare…

Thanks for the memory refresh about T&L games, I'm trying to remember the name of that Direct3D one I'm quite sure one of the early if not the first one using T&L but I need to search a bit on those period games, I remember the player jumping and running on some sort of yellow/green planet and it was a good well known game I tried the demo back then.
I remember the jump from the K6-2 550 to a Duron 750 on a different chipset (maybe Via can't remember) and it was like night/day in Win usage but also in the same games I was used to play. At the same time I already had switched to a Point of View Geforce2 MX the original and better one imho, and it was amazing.. I didn't overclock the cpu but the gpu could reach 215Mhz easily while the vram couldn't be clocked much higher but the results were great.
I don't know if there're FPU benchmark at the same clocks of both the K6-2/3 FPU and the Athlon/Duron FPU?