bloodem wrote on 2022-07-29, 09:23:

I'm not entirely convinced that this is a universal bug. It might still be a combination of platform + nVIDIA Detonator version. Can anybody else test their GeForce FX card on other platforms and see if you get the same behavior in NFS5?

I've played NFS 5 a lot in my childhood on GeForce FX5700. Competed it fully 2 or 3 times. I've got only small issues: well known cpu speed related bug (it wasn't too annoing for me). Some fonts were weird but still readable. Ah, and also game crashed often in one place of one race of all game (i don't know why, but i replayed it some amount of times until successfully run it through).
My build back then was:
- Asus motherboard with socket 478 and Intel i865g chipset
- Intel Celeron D 2.8 GHz
- Asus GeForce FX5700 128 Mb
- 2 x 512 Gb DDR 400 RAM @ 333 MHz (because of limitation of CPU bus)
- Windows XP SP2
- DirectX 9.0c
- I don't remember GeForce driver version but it was the latest for mid-2000's

UPDATE: So, I've made some progress. I've now tried updating DirectX from version 8.1 to 9.0C, and this actually improved things considerably (but the issue is still not completely fixed)!
With DirectX 8.1 and driver version 45.23, I was NEVER able to finish a race (the keyboard would stop responding after less than 1 - 2 minutes into the game). With DirectX 9.0c, I was actually able to finish a few races.

Unfortunately, I still experienced a mouse/keyboard freeze twice, when accessing the game menu during a race, but it's definitely a lot better. So, as I suspected, there are multiple factors involved.

Kruton 9000 wrote on 2022-07-29, 10:53:

I've played NFS 5 a lot in my childhood on GeForce FX5700. Competed it fully 2 or 3 times. I've got only small issues: well know […]
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I've played NFS 5 a lot in my childhood on GeForce FX5700. Competed it fully 2 or 3 times. I've got only small issues: well known cpu speed related bug (it wasn't too annoing for me). Some fonts were weird but still readable. Ah, and also game crashed often in one place of one race of all game (i don't know why, but i replayed it some amount of times until successfully run it through).
My build back then was:
- Asus motherboard with socket 478 and Intel i865g chipset
- Intel Celeron D 2.8 GHz
- Asus GeForce FX5700 128 Mb
- 2 x 512 Gb DDR 400 RAM @ 333 MHz (because of limitation of CPU bus)
- Windows XP SP2
- DirectX 9.0c
- I don't remember GeForce driver version but it was the latest for mid-2000's

I'm sure on WinXP there are methods and drivers to make it work properly. 😀 Even on Windows 10 the game can be modified to run perfectly fine.
This discussion refers to Win98 specifically, where usable drivers are extremely limited (basically, anything newer than 5x.xx is unusable, since on Win98 they break a lot of stuff).

Yes, I know about the CPU speed/texture bug.
Interesting thing about the fonts, though: they only look weird on the GeForce FX. When I switched to GeForce 2 MX, using the same driver, fonts looked as they should.

bloodem wrote on 2022-07-29, 12:33:

I'm sure on WinXP there are methods and drivers to make it work properly. :-) Even on Windows 10 the game can be modified to ru […]
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I'm sure on WinXP there are methods and drivers to make it work properly. 😀 Even on Windows 10 the game can be modified to run perfectly fine.
This discussion refers to Win98 specifically, where usable drivers are extremely limited (basically, anything newer than 5x.xx is unusable, since on Win98 they break a lot of stuff).

Yes, I know about the CPU speed/texture bug.
Interesting thing about the fonts, though: they only look weird on the GeForce FX. When I switched to GeForce 2 MX, using the same driver, fonts looked as they should.

I just want to say that your problems are not videocard hardware related.
Usually old games works better with older OSes and drivers. NFS5 was maden before Windows XP release.
I remember that fonts looked also nicely on Intel GMA 950 + Win XP + last drivers.

Kruton 9000 wrote on 2022-07-29, 13:03:

I just want to say that your problems are not videocard hardware related.

I know it's not. The first clue was that the GeForce 2 MX had the same issue when using the same drivers. 😀
So, yeah, this is clearly (mostly) a software issue where multiple factors are involved (one of them being the drivers, the other being the DirectX version, apparently). There could also be a hardware component (namely, the actual platform), but this has not been proven yet, I'd need to test this card on many other platforms to have a definitive answer (which, truthfully, I'm very lazy and probably won't do). 😁 That's why I hope others that already have other platforms on their test benches could see how NFS Porsche behaves in a similar scenario.

Kruton 9000 wrote on 2022-07-29, 13:03:

Usually old games works better with older OSes and drivers. NFS5 was maden before Windows XP release.

Well, yeah, but - again - not the point of this investigation which specifically involves the following:
- Win98
- fast/overkill platform (one where you would want to use a faster card like the GeForce 59xx series)
- a fast card, suitable for said overkill platform (when it comes to nVIDIA, the fastest cards that are truly usable in Win98 is the FX series).
- fastest/most compatible GPU drivers

The GeForce FX series are regarded as being the last (and fastest) nVIDIA cards that still preserve a very good Win98 compatibility (because they work with older drivers, which were known to be ideal for Win98).
However, there are a lot of unknowns in this area, and there are definitely games that have issues with these cards. So far, for me personally, based on the games that I play, the Radeon X800XT/X850XT are not only a LOT faster, but more compatible. Of all the games I tested with these late Radeon cards, I haven't found a single game breaking bug. Sure, fog might be missing here and there, but that's barely noticeable. What is definitely noticeable (to me) is how NFS 5 Porsche (one of my favorite racing games of all time) is freezing with the FX 5900. 😀
Of course, this doesn't mean that the Radeon cards don't also have issues with some other games (which I'm sure they do!). And if those games mean a lot to a certain group of people, the Radeon will not be a good choice for them.
So, what I'm trying to say is that... "it's all relative", and declaring that certain cards are better than others as an axiom is very misleading. After testing hundreds of cards, I can safely say that they all have their strenghts and weaknesses and, just like with sound cards, the perfect GPU does not exist. 😀

bloodem wrote on 2022-07-29, 10:32:

I tried it now and the demo fails in a different manner (the game crashes after clicking the "Race" button). So this one has other older bugs as well (possibly also related to the video driver itself, or to things like the DirectX version - I'm using DirectX 8.1).

I just tried the demo on my Athlon64 + GeForce4 Ti4200 system. It crashes when I press the "Race" button with 30.82, 45.23 and 56.64 drivers.

Sometimes it would produce a "Ddhelp error", other times just crash to desktop with no error message. I'm using WinME and DirectX 9.0c, so maybe it doesn't like one of those.

bloodem wrote on 2022-07-29, 12:33:

UPDATE: So, I've made some progress. I've now tried updating DirectX from version 8.1 to 9.0C, and this actually improved things […]
Show full quote

UPDATE: So, I've made some progress. I've now tried updating DirectX from version 8.1 to 9.0C, and this actually improved things considerably (but the issue is still not completely fixed)!
With DirectX 8.1 and driver version 45.23, I was NEVER able to finish a race (the keyboard would stop responding after less than 1 - 2 minutes into the game). With DirectX 9.0c, I was actually able to finish a few races.

Unfortunately, I still experienced a mouse/keyboard freeze twice, when accessing the game menu during a race, but it's definitely a lot better. So, as I suspected, there are multiple factors involved.

Kruton 9000 wrote on 2022-07-29, 10:53:

I've played NFS 5 a lot in my childhood on GeForce FX5700. Competed it fully 2 or 3 times. I've got only small issues: well know […]
Show full quote

I've played NFS 5 a lot in my childhood on GeForce FX5700. Competed it fully 2 or 3 times. I've got only small issues: well known cpu speed related bug (it wasn't too annoing for me). Some fonts were weird but still readable. Ah, and also game crashed often in one place of one race of all game (i don't know why, but i replayed it some amount of times until successfully run it through).
My build back then was:
- Asus motherboard with socket 478 and Intel i865g chipset
- Intel Celeron D 2.8 GHz
- Asus GeForce FX5700 128 Mb
- 2 x 512 Gb DDR 400 RAM @ 333 MHz (because of limitation of CPU bus)
- Windows XP SP2
- DirectX 9.0c
- I don't remember GeForce driver version but it was the latest for mid-2000's

I'm sure on WinXP there are methods and drivers to make it work properly. 😀 Even on Windows 10 the game can be modified to run perfectly fine.
This discussion refers to Win98 specifically, where usable drivers are extremely limited (basically, anything newer than 5x.xx is unusable, since on Win98 they break a lot of stuff).

Yes, I know about the CPU speed/texture bug.
Interesting thing about the fonts, though: they only look weird on the GeForce FX. When I switched to GeForce 2 MX, using the same driver, fonts looked as they should.

It stands to reason as 45.23 was released like a year after directx 9.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-07-29, 14:52:

I just tried the demo on my Athlon64 + GeForce4 Ti4200 system. It crashes when I press the "Race" button with 30.82, 45.23 and 56.64 drivers.

Sometimes it would produce a "Ddhelp error", other times just crash to desktop with no error message. I'm using WinME and DirectX 9.0c, so maybe it doesn't like one of those.

Yeah, same behavior (Ddhelp error) on Win98 with DirectX 8.1 or DirectX 9.0c. It's normal, I guess, since the demo does not have any of the patches that the final game had. So it probably only works with VERY period correct (translated: very limited) hardware and drivers.

ptr1ck wrote on 2022-07-29, 16:27:

It stands to reason as 45.23 was released like a year after directx 9.

Yes, but many people are using this driver even with DirectX 7.0 and it mostly works fine (mostly!). But it's clear that not everything is fine. 😀

I'm using it with Dx 8.2 myself, but don't have much time to play with it.

I do think there's value in "aligning" drivers and such. For example, I have an Asus VGA Driver CD v305 from 2003 which contains driver 44.03, DirectX 9 and VIA drivers (relevant to me) 4.45. It's reasonable to assume that the developers were working with them as a package instead of developing 44.03 while using DirectX 7.

bloodem wrote on 2022-07-29, 12:33:

UPDATE: So, I've made some progress. I've now tried updating DirectX from version 8.1 to 9.0C, and this actually improved things considerably (but the issue is still not completely fixed)!
With DirectX 8.1 and driver version 45.23, I was NEVER able to finish a race (the keyboard would stop responding after less than 1 - 2 minutes into the game). With DirectX 9.0c, I was actually able to finish a few races.

Unfortunately, I still experienced a mouse/keyboard freeze twice, when accessing the game menu during a race, but it's definitely a lot better. So, as I suspected, there are multiple factors involved.

UPDATE 2: The issue is definitely still present, it's just less frequent than with DirectX 8.1. Once every few races, the keyboard / mouse will freeze (either during gameplay or in the game menu), at which point the only solution is to forcefully reboot the PC, nothing else works.

I've been playing around with the integrated VIA/S3 UniChrome Pro IGP on my Asus K8V-MX motherboard, so I decided to test its legacy capabilities. All tests were performed under WindowsME with DirectX 9.0c.

Graphics cards tested:

• Nvidia GeForce4 Ti4200 using Nvidia reference drivers version 45.23
• S3 UniChrome Pro IGP using reference drivers version 4.14.10.0057

Games tested:

• Final Fantasy VIII Demo - you can download the free demo from here
• Thief II: The Metal Age - retail CD version with the latest official patch 1.18 applied

Final Fantasy VIII configuration program

The S3 UniChrome fails the paletted texture check. The GeForce4 is used for reference purposes.

Final Fantasy VIII options menu

Te S3 UniChrome displays the menu with washed out colors, confirming the lack of paletted texture support. Once again, the GeForce4 is used for reference purposes.

Thief II Mission 11: Precious Cargo

The S3 UniChrome does not render table fog in Thief 2. This is somewhat surprising since their older Savage4 card had this capability. I'm guessing that S3 implemented some cost saving measures and removed these legacy features from the IGP.

bloodem wrote on 2022-07-29, 12:33:

UPDATE: So, I've made some progress. I've now tried updating DirectX from version 8.1 to 9.0C, and this actually improved things considerably (but the issue is still not completely fixed)!
With DirectX 8.1 and driver version 45.23, I was NEVER able to finish a race (the keyboard would stop responding after less than 1 - 2 minutes into the game). With DirectX 9.0c, I was actually able to finish a few races.

Unfortunately, I still experienced a mouse/keyboard freeze twice, when accessing the game menu during a race, but it's definitely a lot better. So, as I suspected, there are multiple factors involved.

UPDATE2: I've now tested NFS Porsche with a completely different platform (Athlon 64 build) + a different GeForce FX 5900XT (+ different keyboard & different mouse), and the behavior with drivers 45.23 /56.64 is the same: less than 5 minutes (usually less than 1 minute) after starting a race, the keyboard/mouse will freeze and the car will just go wherever it wants to go. As before, the only "solution" is to forcefully reboot the system.

So, at least in my book, this is a solid +10 points for the ATI Radeon 9700/9800/X800/X850 series of cards. You might get missing fog here and there, but I have yet to see a popular game (and one that's very important for me) being completely unplayable with them.

bloodem wrote on 2022-08-11, 06:00:

So, at least in my book, this is a solid +10 points for the ATI Radeon 9700/9800/X800/X850 series of cards. You might get missing fog here and there, but I have yet to see a popular game (and one that's very important for me) being completely unplayable with them.

Yeah, basically it comes down to which games you play. There are also other rendering problems (unrelated to table fog and paletted textures) which occur on Nvidia GeForce cards but don't affect ATi Radeons (or Matrox cards for that matter).

The stars in Thief 2 are one prominent example, but I've seen visual glitches (e.g. stray lines, spots and such) in some other games like Dino Crisis and Final Fantasy 8 which only appear on GeForce cards (even on a MX400 using the oldest drivers) while rendering just fine on Radeons.

I haven't tested Incoming on a Radeon card, but would be interesting to see if the GeForce bug which Phil frequently demonstrates in his videos is present or not.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-08-11, 06:12:

Yeah, basically it comes down to which games you play. There are also other rendering problems (unrelated to table fog and paletted textures) which occur on Nvidia GeForce cards but don't affect ATi Radeons (or Matrox cards for that matter).

The stars in Thief 2 are one prominent example, but I've seen visual glitches (e.g. stray lines, spots and such) in some other games like Dino Crisis and Final Fantasy 8 which only appear on GeForce cards (even on a MX400 using the oldest drivers) while rendering just fine on Radeons.

Indeed!

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-08-11, 06:12:

I haven't tested Incoming on a Radeon card, but would be interesting to see if the GeForce bug which Phil frequently demonstrates in his videos is present or not.

Again, further proof that it all comes down to which games you play. 😀
I have tested Incoming on Radeon cards (latest one being an X850XT) and it's much worse than with GeForce cards. The game runs at a solid 3 FPS (but, hey, at least there's no radar corruption!). 😁
But it just so happens that Incoming is one of those games that I knew about (even back in the day), but never got past the second level. This is why I never even bothered to try and find a solution to this problem (maybe there is one).

I got a Matrox Millennium II (MGA-2164W) today and wanted to test its capabilities. Since this is an early 3D accelerator, my expectations were fairly low. However, the card did surprise me in one aspect, as you will see below. All tests were performed under Windows 98SE with DirectX 9.0c.

Graphics cards tested:

• 3DFX Voodoo3 2000, using 3DFX reference drivers version 1.07.00
• Matrox Millennium II, using Matrox reference drivers version 4.33.045

Games tested:

• Final Fantasy VIII Demo - you can download the free demo from here
• Forsaken - retail CD version with the latest official patch 1.1 applied
• Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire - retail CD version with the latest official patch 1.1 applied

Final Fantasy VIII configuration program

Interestingly, the Millennium II passes the palleted texture check, while failing some others. The Voodoo3 is used for reference purposes.

Final Fantasy VIII options menu

The Millennium II does correctly display the menu colors, confirming that paletted textures are indeed supported. The Voodoo3 is used for reference purposes.

Forsaken options menu

I wanted to double check the paletted texture support, so I started up Forsaken. And sure enough, the Millennium II can use paletted textures in that game as well. The Voodoo3 is used for reference purposes.

Shadows of the Empire Mission 2: Escape from Echo base

As expected, the Millennium II doesn't support table fog. It's also missing some other features required by this game, so the UI elements aren't fully rendered. The Voodoo3 is used for reference purposes. All in all, quite an interesting showing from an early 3D accelerator. I wouldn't use the Millennium II for any serious 3D gaming, but its feature set is certainly unique.

The February of 1997 issue of PC Mag (available on Google books) has an interesting Matrox Mystique ad:

The feature sidebar indicates that the Mystique supports paletted textures, just like the Millennium II which I recently tested.

btw. Matrox G550 AGP supports FOG in SOTE but no 8BitPal-Textures.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2022-08-25, 06:49:

btw. Matrox G550 AGP supports FOG in SOTE but no 8BitPal-Textures.

Thanks! Same as the G4xx cards then.

EDIT - I just found table fog support listed in the G550 datasheet. Updated the Vogons wiki with the references.

Some G550 pics.

Some G550 pics. Part2

I recently discovered a game named Xarlor Infinite Expanse has support for both Table Fog and Vertex Fog. The HW I tested it with Win98 was very weak and used Vertex Fog automatically.

On modern windows, it forces Table Fog although it is not supported and causes issues when this games' asteroid are 10000-15000 units away from the ship. Can you try this game with a Table Fog compatible chip and see how the game reacts to distance (and and relevant screenshots for proper visible fog which I didn't find in vertex one).