I doubt this would be of any significant use unfortunately. Like you said, Nvidia dropped support for Win9x after the 6xxx series. There are some hacked drivers to allow some 7xxx cards to work, although I don't know any specifics, I haven't tried it myself. I don't think you can run 8xxx though.

So, this would only be useful if you had a fast machine, that supports VT-d and has a specific 7xxx card which is around 9 years old by now. You see where the problem lies? Now, Windows XP on the other hand... That could be pretty useful 😀.

I admit that there are some culprits with the idea. I plan to get some VT-d hardware within a few months. I will post the results as soon as I have some.
A major culprit for a lot of games is lack of 8 bit palettized textures on any hardware that might be used in this setup.

Virtual WinXP + 3D is already advanced enough for a majority of games if you have a decent machine. But I can imagine some uses for this setup.

HW accelerated x86 virtualization does not work on pre-NT kernels such as DOS and Win9x where 16-bit code thunking happens all the time.

Does that include passthrough PCIe devices, or does it just concern the CPU?
Win9x runs pretty smooth on VMware and Parallels. I can't tell if it's accelerated or not.

VT-x/VT-d or AMD-V equivalent will never work with legacy 16-bit x86 code, which is rampant with pre-NT kernels. This includes PCIe passthrough if it is meant to be accelerated through IO virtualization.

You can run CPU benchmarks on raw computation to find out the speed of underlying CPU emulation. I typically use the benchmark feature in 7-Zip 9.20.

Just passed my Audigy 2 ZS to a FreeDOS 1.1 guest and it's working fine with Mpxplay.

I'm running VMware ESXI 5.0. Passing through a VGA-card is a different story as I can't disable VMware's VGA-adapter, maybe KVM or XEN allows passing a physical VGA adapter to a DOS guest. AMD/ATI cards works in Windows XP/7 and Ubuntu (using Catalyst) or in Ubuntu (using FOSS drivers) with a modified kernel that loads the VGA bios from the harddrive.

Does the ATI R423 (Radeon X800 XT PCIe) have Windows 98 drivers?

Kamerat wrote:

Does the ATI R423 (Radeon X800 XT PCIe) have Windows 98 drivers?

R3xx was the last to do Win9x from ATi, based on their documentation/site. I'm not sure if anyone has hacked the RV370/380 X cards to work with the 9 series drivers (and even if they had, that likely wouldn't include X800XT), but I think nVidia was the only one to officially implement PCIe cards in Win98, with the GeForce PCX and 6 series. As far as I know the PCIe 3DLabs and S3 cards will not work in 98. There might be some Matrox card that can also do it (I'm vaguely remembering a bridged PCIe G400 or something odd like that being a real thing).