How's it run, any good?

texterted wrote on 2021-02-09, 16:19:

How's it run, any good?

I hope Quake III runs well on OP's setup . AFAICR it worked great on my Geforce FX 5700 "equivalent" Quadro FX 1100 even up to 1600x1200 .

RetroSpector78 wrote on 2021-02-09, 13:40:

In this case it was a driver issue ... there are so many nvidia driver versions and I've been told it's always best to use the o […]
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darry wrote on 2021-02-08, 19:12:

I once had a defective Quadro FX1100 (essentially aQuadro equivalent of an FX 5700) that produced no artefacts but quickly and regularly crashed the system when 3D was in use. Another identical FX1100 looking (including same vBIOS) worked fine in the same system . Not saying this is necessarily the case here, but it's possible .

EDIT: It might be a power supply issue . The FX 5700 does draw more than an FX 5200 .
EDIT2: Corrected obvious typo .

In this case it was a driver issue ... there are so many nvidia driver versions and I've been told it's always best to use the oldest one possible for these old machines.i

In my case for the FX5700 the v53.04 works while the v56.64 and higher no longer work. But the latest v81.98 also works.
Sometimes difficult to find logic.

Glad you got it working .

I agree that here are way too many variables and as several threads, including recently, have shown :
- Earlier (especially Win 9x) Nvidia drivers were often a lottery .
- VIA 4-in-1 driver releases could also be a lottery .
It's almost as if neither of these companies was either aware of or maybe interested in any kind of regression testing .

Combine the 2 and there's lots of trial and error fun to be had . 😉

My last VIA chipset board was KT133 based and ran fine with a Geforce 3 in XP and possibly Windows 98 SE, so it seems that I missed out on a lot of these issues (except the 686B/SB Live! latency ones) . I still find it hard to believe both that the situation was this bad for users of later VIA chipsets and Nvidia cards (and Radeon 9700 ones too) and that I managed to not hear about it from friends or others until I started reading about it on Vogons .

Cheers!

The main issue in the OP's case, is the fact that the FX 5700 is used on a very old platform (P3 550). Even worse, as I understand, it's on an old VIA chipset (but even 440BX is known to have many problems with the GeForce FX series, particularly when using newer drivers).
FX 5700 (and all other FX cards) will work just fine with basically any driver, including 5x.xx, 6x.xx, 7x.xx, when used on a newer motherboard/platform (Athlon XP, Pentium 4, Athlon 64, Core 2 Duo, etc). Although, whenever possible, it's still recommended to stick to earlier drivers like 45.23 (for compatibility reasons).

My personal preference for these early P3 CPUs is to use either a Voodoo 3 or a GeForce 2 MX400 / GeForce 2 GTS. Anything newer, like the GeForce 3, GeForce 4 Ti can already be considered extreme overkill for this CPU, but they do allow you to play at very high resolutions + having the ability to activate image quality enhancements (Anisotropic Filtering, Antialiasing, etc).
Also, another personal preference in Windows 98 is to avoid using any driver newer than 30.82 (when possible). Not sure if this is a general issue, but in my particular case (with my monitor), I can't select resolutions such as 1600 x 1200 or 1920 x 1440 on drivers newer than 30.82. (I even tried adding custom resolutions on 45.23 with various tools, but was unsuccessful). So, with very few exceptions, I usually don't go with anything newer than a GeForce 4 Ti 4200/4400/4600 (the initial AGP 4x versions - the AGP 8X versions DON'T work with driver version 30.82, even if forcing the installation).

texterted wrote on 2021-02-09, 16:19:

How's it run, any good?

It's running .... Still in investigating some stuff.

On this PC, with the FX5700 I'm getting more or less the same performance as the MX400 and FX5200. I guess performance is capped by the Pentium 3 550MHz

• Unreal Tournament cityintro 1024x768 : 33fps
• Quake 3 demo001 1024x768 : 50fps
• Expendable 1024 : 25 fps (44fps on the mx400 / tnt2 m64)

Noticed that Expendable runs really bad on the FX series ...
With 3DMark99Max I'm seeing bad scores for the MX400 / FX5200 and FX5700 : 3200-3400 range. With the TNT2 M64 I'm getting a 4500 score.
I'm guessing 3DMark doesn't play well with these newer cards

Perhaps the FX cards scale better at higher resolutions, but my LCD panel on the P3 only does 1024x768 😀

So far my conclusions would be (based on the excellent input receiver here (thanks a lot for that) :

• Pentium 3 550MHz is a limiting factor here. Newer video cards like the FX series will not reach their potential
• As this is a 1999 build, its best to stick with cards from that era : Voodoo 3 / TNT2 / Geforce 2
• If you're on a GPU budget, I think it's best to forget Voodoo 3 / TNT2 (too expensive)
• If you don't want high-res gaming and you're on a budget MX400, and TNT2 M64 can be had for around 10 USD, and will run fine with early drivers

Haven't really looked at ATI yet, but I'm guessing Radeon 9000 are also pretty cheap and readily available and should do the job.

Well, at least your up and running! 😀

I've not had much experience with the FX cards. Although, I do have a couple. An FX5600 and a 5200, probably the weakest cards of a pretty weak series.

The MX440 and sometimes the 460 cards can be found for reasonable money, pretty much a GF-3 really.

You're getting into P4 and Athlon XP territory really. In my BX days I had an ATi Rage pro and a pair of Voodoo 2's!