tomcattech wrote on 2021-05-26, 14:36:

Doing some overall upgrades on my DX8 Win98SE rig and I'm wondering if there is any reason to go from GeForce2 to 3 or 4. […]
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Doing some overall upgrades on my DX8 Win98SE rig and I'm wondering if there is any reason to go from GeForce2 to 3 or 4.

My current 98 games run great on my GeForce2 GTS\32 and I have a Pro\64 inbound.

No driver issues, incompatibilities, jaggies, weird graphics.... pretty much the sweet spot.

However, I'm wondering if I'm missing some horsepower on the GPU side and am wondering how much of a dice roll I'm making by going to GeForce 3 or 4 with new architecture, unknown drivers, etc....

Any thoughts?

If you are happy then leave it as is, especially as you have no problems at all

I have a 98se machine (Duron 800) with geforce 4 mx440, newer but in practice about the same performance and it does all i want on that machine - it may be worth considering if you had a 3 or 4 Ti or something notably more powerful

I suppose you could always test it and then go back to the trusty gts if not happy

most compatible what i test are 3dfx boards. The GeForce 2,3.. gives me some hardware conflicts (my setup). So i run a Geforce 256 for any up to year 2000 games. Anyway i would say a 1GHz P3 system with a Voodoo5500 if you want max out Win98se on one way, sure there other options..

Please put exact rig specifications so we all know what you are talking about! The most powerful 98Se GPU with native support would be a geforce 6800 ultra/radeon X850 XT PE but those are stupidly expensive! Recommended only if you want to play at 1600*1200 max settings when a geforce2 ultra would choke!
In my testing with Windows 9X games I found that the sweet-spot is something along the lines of a Pentium 3 + geforce 3/4 combo however I have limited experience with 9X!

System Specs
Win 98 SE
Pentium III Socket 370 1000MHz Coppermine \ 133 MHz FSB \ 256k Cache
512 MBytes SDRAM
Motherboard: Tyan S2507T \ Tiger 230T
NVidia GEForce2 GTS / 4x AGP - Soon to be GeForce2 Pro / 4x AGP

As I understand you got a dual CPU system! I would use Windows 2000 on that machine because 98SE can only use 1 CPU!
I also have several dual CPU systems: On my Abit VP6 with Pentium 3 1000mhz and 2gb of ram I use geforce3 ti 500 and i t runs just fine; all 2000 -2001 games run at the highest settings, only the resolution needs to drop down in order to achieve 60 fps - this proves that the CPU is not limiting the video card!
I should mention that I also use the same video card on my Tualatin 1400/Abit ST6/512mb/Windows ME and it is perfectly suited for 2000-2001 games - performance is again limited by the video card and not by the CPU!
However because it is considered a collector's item geforce3 ti 500 is very expensive if you manage to find one! I would recommend a geforce4 ti 4200 - cheap, easy to find and better performance than ti 500.