Back in early 2005 I upgraded from a Ti 4200 128 megabyte card to a Radeon 9800 Pro, and it was a significant change for the better (when playing Il2 Stormovik, maps with snow on the ground immediately had more detail) . I don't think you're going to see as big of a difference with the 9800 SE, especially if it's the 128 bit card rather than the 256, but it should still be noticeably stronger. And you cannot beat that price. Be sure to remove the heatsink and reapply the thermal paste, and remove the shim if it's still there.
Here's a review of a Powercolor 9800 SE: https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/powerc … r-radeon-9800se

9800 SE AIW is cut down from the 9800, as denoted by the "SE". AIW cards usually aren't cut down much from their original cards, if at all. I've been using a 7500 AIW as a Radeon DDR stand-in since "radeon ddr" is impossible eBay search terms and the core and clock are identical. However, the 9800 SE AIW is an AIW version of the 9800SE, not the 9800.

9800 SE AIW is actually faster than the 9800 SE as a result of having 8 ROPs instead of 4. That and the fact some 9800SE variants have 256 bit memory instead of 128 are the only differences, the 256-bit 9800SE cards would be faster than the 9800SE AIW, which seems to be only 128 bit.

It would probably be an okay upgrade over a Ti4200, if the memory bandwidth and the fact it's newer are anything to go by. Compatibility in DOS titles will be weaker but if you're just in Windows that's no problem.

In terms of speed, it's an upgrade.

But in terms of compatibility, you lose support for palletized textures and table fog. This can be relevant if you're playing certain older DirectX 5 games which need those features. See here: Table Fog & 8-bit Paletted Textures

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-05-31, 00:46:

In terms of speed, it's an upgrade.

But in terms of compatibility, you lose support for palletized textures and table fog. This can be relevant if you're playing certain older DirectX 5 games which need those features. See here: Table Fog & 8-bit Paletted Textures

Wow that's actually a pretty big deal, I play homeworld alot and it seems it needs palletized textures.

Does anyone reading this know if the 9800 SE softmod can be done with Win98? I'd like to try it with my 9800, but from what I've found the Omega drivers that can unlock the four pipelines are for 2k/XP only.

Tom's VGA Charts III suggest that the 9800 is substantially better than the 4200 Ti.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/vga-char … -iii,730-5.html

If you've got your 4200TI ripping along at 4600 and above speeds then maybe the upgrade wouldn't be so noticeable but stock to stock you'll get some improved framerates and better visuals as the AA doesn't take such a hit on ATis as it does on GF4. However there's always those titles that ATis barf on for unknown reasons and your 4200 might still be quicker in, can be the other way round too, something that really makes your 4200 struggle and the 9800 makes it look like you could go up another couple of resolution notches.

I play homeworld alot and it seems it needs palletized textures.

It doesn't need it, but apparently texture quality may degrade, due to texture format conversion. Usually they can be converted to RGB on the fly without any loss.

adreamcasted98 wrote on 2021-05-30, 23:55:

Hey folks I have an opportunity to get an ATI card from a friend for free, is the AIW a cut down version of the regular 9800 to make up for extra features? Is this a decent upgrade to my 4200ti?

What’s the rest of your hardware configuration?
Depending on the CPU, you might not see any difference at all, not even with a Radeon 9800XT (except for higher resolutions and when cranking up the antialiasing/anisotropic filtering settings).

Not sure how the Radeon 9800SE AIW performs, but judging from the specs, it seems to be A LOT weaker than the PRO/XT versions.

A GeForce 4TI 4200 is generally more than enough for any Windows 98 game (with a fast CPU, many games run at 100+ FPS even at 1600x1200) and it’s also extremely compatible. I would not replace it with a cut-down version of a Radeon 9800.
I do like the Radeon 9800PRO/9800XT cards for Windows 98 ultra-overkill performance PCs (but you also need an overkill CPU for that, at least an Athlon 64 4000+ or even better, a Core 2 Duo).

I had an Club 3D All in Wonder 9800SE 128MB card in 2005. The first one, that came to me from eshop, was unwrapped and made artifacts after unlocking all pipelines. I returned it and asked for it to be unpacked - the second was unopened and worked perfectly when unlocked. Here You can see the performance comparison http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/over2003/index.html

bloodem wrote on 2021-05-31, 04:58:

adreamcasted98 wrote on 2021-05-30, 23:55:

Hey folks I have an opportunity to get an ATI card from a friend for free, is the AIW a cut down version of the regular 9800 to make up for extra features? Is this a decent upgrade to my 4200ti?

What’s the rest of your hardware configuration?
Depending on the CPU, you might not see any difference at all, not even with a Radeon 9800XT (except for higher resolutions and when cranking up the antialiasing/anisotropic filtering settings).

Pentium 4 @2.4ghz
256mb ram
Biostar U8798 pro motherboard
Evga power supply 500 watt

I'm mostly interested in getting a dx9 capable card for nglide

I believe that early Radeons did not provide a good upgrade path -- at least not in the beginning, when you consider that dropping the Radeon down to 16-bit color provided no performance gain (a limitation of the hardware) like it did with other cards.

That means to say that if you were playing a game at a higher resolution (say more than 1024x768), you could drop to 16-bit color with a TNT or GeForce and gain quite a bit of performance, enough gain that when considering the fact that it was unplayable at 32-bit, made it well worth the trade-off which amounted to a decrease in image quality.

To put things into real life perspective - if you upgraded from say a Riva TNT to a Radeon 7200 to play Counterstrike or Team Fortress (arguably the two most popular multiplayer games of the time), you would essentially be paying around $300 back in the day for what would only amount to the benefit of being able to run the aformentioned gaming scenario in 32-bit.

On the other hand, if you went from a TNT to a Geforce, you could now run things at 1600x1200x16bpp reasonably well (certainly at least over 40fps).

Was 32-bit color for games of that era worth the $300 "upgrade", no.