Okay I'll wait a bit longer for more results and suggestions 😀

If anyone else has any thoughts, please chip in.

I haven't tried a radeon better than an All-In-Wonder 7500 for a PCX2 pairing many years ago. The 7500 was fine

It seems to be just those 2 games. Annoyingly I bought a real copy of Moon Racer, so am keen to be able to play it 😀

So, JustJulião, it sounds like Intel i740 runs pretty well, but that's AGP 2X which won't fit my AGP 4x/8x motherboard 😁

It's a can of worms out there... I'm half tempted to go for Nvidia hardware as then it takes over Direct3D so I know other Win9x only games will run well, as long as I can get Moon Racer working on it!

VirtuaIceMan wrote on 2022-02-21, 13:15:

So, JustJulião, it sounds like Intel i740 runs pretty well, but that's AGP 2X which won't fit my AGP 4x/8x motherboard 😁

It's a can of worms out there... I'm half tempted to go for Nvidia hardware as then it takes over Direct3D so I know other Win9x only games will run well, as long as I can get Moon Racer working on it!

Hi, I made two very short videos with a Ti4200.
I might make others with even cheaper cards (Geforce2 MX, TNT2 M64).
I think there are better options than nvidia considering its known limitations, but here there are.
Moon Racer
Turok Benchmark
Turok Benchmark video is supposed to give you an idea of how it performs. The number on the left is the average FPS for the current session of tests. The centered one is the average FPS of the last full session of test (the one to be compared with numbers already given in my posts here for the i740 and the ET6000). The last one is the current FPS.

It was my very first attempt to capture VGA and I was in a hurry. That's why it is so short and not fullscreen.
I plan to make public videos of my tests, it will be much better obviously.

EDIT : well, Ti4200s are not that cheap, I'm sorry. It raised recently I think.
I also have a FX5200. I'll test it.

I'm not even sure what Nvidia would be good. I looked at 6800 maybe.

I have read in some places that a 7800GS (that I have) might work with BFG drivers, but mine is a Gainward 7800GS+ (essentially 7900 on a 7800 board with 512MB RAM, which Win98 isn't a fan if either!).

I don't think I have anything newer than the 5200FX on AGP or PCI. It's really cheap. If you don't mind the D3D take over, it might be the right choice. It's fully compatible with Win98 AFAIK. Will test it either today or on friday.
Personally, I'm not excited by primary cards much newer/exceeding the PCX2's capacities by a lot, I'm testing only for knowledge's sake (and to help you out).
For my own taste, I try to be "period correct" for the primary card (more or less 1 year) especially since it appears to not penalise the PCX2 performance wise, even compared to much newer chips.

So, if i had to pick between Nvidia 5200 FX, Intel i740 or SiS 6326, which would you go for?

I think I'll have to rule out Intel i740 as it looks like 2X and my AGP has 4x/8x (connector the other way around).

Actually, there's only one SiS 6326 on eBay with an AGP connector that would fit mine, the rest are 2X... bit weird. Or there are PCI ones that'd work. The 5200 FX looks fine though.

VirtuaIceMan wrote on 2022-02-22, 00:40:

So, if i had to pick between Nvidia 5200 FX, Intel i740 or SiS 6326, which would you go for?

I think I'll have to rule out Intel i740 as it looks like 2X and my AGP has 4x/8x (connector the other way around).

Actually, there's only one SiS 6326 on eBay with an AGP connector that would fit mine, the rest are 2X... bit weird. Or there are PCI ones that'd work. The 5200 FX looks fine though.

For my own taste, and because I'd like to be able to switch for D3D, the i740. It's the fastest I tested for now and very compatible. I only noticed an issue with Final Reality's filling test (some black areas on the screen). That's much better than Voodoo 3 cards on that regard, for example.
Matrox (with its sharp output) and S3 cards are worth testing, it might be temporary statement. unfortunately, I don't have a Verite card to test it.
If money isn't a problem, the ET6000. Sharp picture, most compatible, was associated with the PVR on the 5D card, fast,and even how it looks (mine is small just like the PCX2). The only issue with this one is that it has only 2mb of vram (some games will refuse to run, others only with Z buffer off). But there are 4mb or upgradable versions.

Without caring about D3D switching, compatible with your mb and cheap, I would say the 5200FX if it performs like my 4200Ti. It's under 20$.

I saw this comparison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBgEW5cZ_9o which suggests the FX 5200 isn't the greatest, and even the GeForce4 MX440 will outperform it (apart from Doom 3 and I can run that on my Win10 machine!).

Are there other period-correct Nvidia products (older or newer but cheap!) that might be better for non-PowerVR Direct3D titles of the era?

VirtuaIceMan wrote on 2022-02-22, 10:39:

I saw this comparison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBgEW5cZ_9o which suggests the FX 5200 isn't the greatest, and even the GeForce4 MX440 will outperform it (apart from Doom 3 and I can run that on my Win10 machine!).

Are there other period-correct Nvidia products (older or newer but cheap!) that might be better for non-PowerVR Direct3D titles of the era?

Performance as a standalone card wasn't a topic for me, I know it's slow for its time.
A period correct card isn't compatible with your platform anyways, right ? I don't have a Riva 128, maybe I have the first TNT somewhere.

Yeah I need a 4X/8X card, just wondered if 440MX might run better than FX 5200 for other games. Though I believe FX 5200 gains anti aliasing maybe?

VirtuaIceMan wrote on 2022-02-22, 13:46:

Yeah I need a 4X/8X card, just wondered if 440MX might run better than FX 5200 for other games. Though I believe FX 5200 gains anti aliasing maybe?

Anti aliasing is old, maybe performance is less affected though. I probably have an MX400 somewhere. Won't test it before friday though.

After watching a couple of videos on YouTube about why the FX 5200 is the worst graphics card, I decided to go for something a bit different and ordered an Inno3D Geforce4 MX440 128MB 8X AGP, as the MX440 appears to outperform the FX 5200 in older games.

That is also the case when you compare gf3 to gf4. there are older games that run much better on gf3 than gf4 with less glitches also.
some game/engines are optimized of the hardware like memory bandwith and shaders-ps/vs-units.

I also found that older drivers are often faster than newer ones, for older games.

I'm running D3D/GL games on PCX2 again. no shots but.....

Works suprisingly nicely:
The Labyrinth

"Works" with missing blending and/or glitches:
Flying Heroes
Evolva
Laser Arena (PowerVR Extreme inverts the lightmaps)
NASCAR Heat
NFL Blitz 2000
Redline
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2

"Works" without any textures at all:
The House of the Dead 2

Non starters (i've tried my best and they'd never work):
Anachronox
Clusterball
Codename Eagle
Crazy Taxi
Cube
Dino Crisis
Doom 3
Driver
Eduke32
Final Fantasy VIII
Genesis GTest
Gore Ultimate Soldier
Grand Theft Auto Vice City
Hydro Thunder
Melty Blood
Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid 2
NFL Blitz
Oni
Phantasy Star Online
Redline Racer
Sega Rally 2
Sonic Heroes
Star Wars Episode I Racer
Summoner
Tread Marks
Tribes
Tribes 2
Unreal Tournament 2003

leileilol wrote on 2022-02-26, 09:59:

I'm running D3D/GL games on PCX2 again. no shots but..... […]
Show full quote

I'm running D3D/GL games on PCX2 again. no shots but.....

Works suprisingly nicely:
The Labyrinth

"Works" with missing blending and/or glitches:
Flying Heroes
Evolva
Laser Arena (PowerVR Extreme inverts the lightmaps)
NASCAR Heat
NFL Blitz 2000
Redline
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2

"Works" without any textures at all:
The House of the Dead 2

Non starters (i've tried my best and they'd never work):
Anachronox
Clusterball
Codename Eagle
Crazy Taxi
Cube
Dino Crisis
Doom 3
Driver
Eduke32
Final Fantasy VIII
Genesis GTest
Gore Ultimate Soldier
Grand Theft Auto Vice City
Hydro Thunder
Melty Blood
Metal Gear Solid
Metal Gear Solid 2
NFL Blitz
Oni
Phantasy Star Online
Redline Racer
Sega Rally 2
Sonic Heroes
Star Wars Episode I Racer
Summoner
Tread Marks
Tribes
Tribes 2
Unreal Tournament 2003

Good to know ! I'm watching your YT channel.

I'm trying to run MDK2 with techland's minigl but it's very, very slow. 1/2 fps on average. Even menus are extremely slow.
It's on a PIII 500, other games work fine (including Crime Cities).
I tried three different primary cards (i740, 3Dimage 9750, Laguna3D).
I'll try an early 2000's card soon but in case it's not related, do you have any idea ?

Also, If you are searching for games to test, I suggest OpenArena (with Techland's miniGL). 0.8.8 version of the game is likely to work. Couldn't try it yet but I'm confident. https://www.moddb.com/games/openarena/downloa … 88-full-version

One more question : Can you suggest a game with built-in benchmark ? I'm already benching with Expendable, Quake II (vanilla timedemo), and Turok. What should I add ?
My goal is to evaluate primary cards' impact on performance. For now, my results are very different from Gona's bench with TR (also if you know a way to bench TR reliably...).

JustJulião wrote on 2022-02-28, 00:18:

I'm trying to run MDK2 with techland's minigl but it's very, very slow. 1/2 fps on average

Rename the MiniGL to opengl.dll (without the 32) and shove it in Windows\System\, there MDK2 will see it as an "SGI driver" and MDK2 will happily use the PowerVR MiniGL (badly) from there.

JustJulião wrote on 2022-02-28, 00:18:

Also, If you are searching for games to test, I suggest OpenArena

nothing will blend. too many texels. too poly dense (PCX1/2 will skip drawing too many polygons in a tile). it will suck.

My focus right now is throwing as many 98-02 games as I can that may/maynot (really leaning on maynot) have had PCX2 support just to see what would happen, hopefully finding miracles like Labyrinth. I'd rather not open the scope to the world of indie OpenGL games at this time (which would often likely break as it's the world of compiledvertexarrays, multitexturing, and nothing less than RGBA8888, 512x512x24+, and most importantly, the likely lack of careful considerate technical artistry). The best luck that would happen there would be all the Kenta Cho shmups as they're mostly textureless and lines.

JustJulião wrote on 2022-02-28, 00:18:

One more question : Can you suggest a game with built-in benchmark ?

Of the games i've posted in that post, NASCAR Heat does have a benchmark, despite not blending properly well, along with some questionably-calculated statistics.

JustJulião wrote on 2022-02-28, 00:18:

Also, If you are searching for games to test, I suggest OpenArena (with Techland's miniGL). 0.8.8 version of the game is likely to work.

You probably don't know this, but leileilol is one of the main contributors/co-creators on OpenArena 😁.

JustJulião wrote on 2022-02-28, 00:18:

One more question : Can you suggest a game with built-in benchmark ? I'm already benching with Expendable, Quake II (vanilla timedemo), and Turok. What should I add ?
My goal is to evaluate primary cards' impact on performance. For now, my results are very different from Gona's bench with TR (also if you know a way to bench TR reliably...).

Not sure if all of the following will work on PCX2, but they do have built-in benchmarks:

Incoming (demo version also has benchmark)
Forsaken
GLQuake
Dethkarz
Half-Life (Blowout timedemo, requires original HL release)
Descent 3 (this will probably be a really hard on PCX2)
Turok 2
Drakan (I think the benchmark here is just the intro cutscene, so not particularly great)
Unreal (flyby timedemo, used often though I ain't sure it's indicative of real gameplay performance)
Unreal Tournament (flyby and UTBench, insane for PCX2 IMO)
Breakneck (also known as NICE2)