ODwilly wrote on 2022-04-24, 06:39:
Just a note it seems like 256mb 6200 cards appear to be compatible with older drivers than the later gen 512mb+ chips. Also really early cards can be unlocked to a Geforce 6600 apparently.
Edit: A2 chips are unlockable and A4 chips are hardware locked.
I don't remember well the 6200 early GPU version if they were higher end GPUs like the early Radeon 9500 Pro situation was, but in any case I'd have problem on a 30W limited PCI bus to unlock anything that surpass that limit and looking at the various 6200 heatsinks I suppose they might be already close to 25W or similar power demand. 😉
But it's an interesting choice. Of these old card on a modern o.s. environment I tested the FX 5200 256MB 128bit PCI and it wasn't bad (well.. it's a PCI FX 5200... not many expectations anyway), it has WDDM1.0 drivers (only 32bit version worked the 64bit beta didn't in modern W8.1 o.s.) and the open linux driver with OpenGL 1.5 support. Not bad but the card is quite old and demand more power than the mainboard and cpu itself but at least had a native AGP chip that I suppose had less problems talking to a PCI bus instead of the PCI-EX GPUs with their complex IC bridges that results in a more complex communication task. I suppose the less things get translated on the already bridged PCI mainboard bus the better might be (as read in the past also old PCI bus were bridged but I suppose the chipset supported PCI in a faster more native way than latest mainboards maybe using it as a retro options and there's nothing to tweak, drivers are standard in any o.s. and the only thing is the PCI release time in the bios).
So the idea was to test a sort of low power still somehow installable PCI card that has less possible overhead while mantaining some feature that would be usable accelerations, in the GUI, video.. talking about basic low end features of course. To get as far as possible in the past I'm waiting for these Rage XL PCI to start from it as a first real PCI compatible native not-bridged chip to see if this improve the latency introduced in more modern solutions.