I managed to snag a HIS Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition (AGP) for 17 EUR from my local classifieds. Very happy with this purchase! I temporarily put the card in this system to test it out, and it seems to be working fine. It hasn't been stored properly, so there's some minor corrosion on the VGA and DVI ports, and the cooler is somewhat dirty. Otherwise, the card is doing great. I'll post a pic in a few days when I have some time to clean it up and change the thermal paste.

A couple of observations. First, the card doesn't display anything on the DVI port during boot. Meaning, the screen simply remains black until Windows loads and the drivers kick in. In contrast, the VGA port works fine during boot time. I've googled this, and it appears to be a somewhat common issue on X800 cards. There's even a thread on this forum where someone is describing a similar problem.

Second, this card adds a new panel to the Catalyst Control Center called "Overdrive":

Never seen this before. I'm guessing it's some factory overclock thing? This card is plenty fast for Win9x even at stock clocks, so I doubt I'll be using "Overdrive", but I'm curious if other people had any experience with this feature.

I vaguely remember seeing something along the lines on a HIS X1950 Pro, and it's basically an OC feature, from the looks of it.

As for DVI: what adapter (or cable) are you using? I have a similar issue with DVI2HDMI adapters, but classic DVI2VGA will show POST fine - this happens on almost anything pre HD-series cards - 9000,9200,9550, 9600, 9700 and even my broken 9800SE AIW.

PcBytes wrote on 2024-03-01, 14:27:

As for DVI: what adapter (or cable) are you using? I have a similar issue with DVI2HDMI adapters, but classic DVI2VGA will show POST fine - this happens on almost anything pre HD-series cards - 9000,9200,9550, 9600, 9700 and even my broken 9800SE AIW.

In this case, I'm using a DVI cable connected straight to the DVI port of my Samsung SyncMaster S24B420BW. This monitor has a native DVI port, no adapters needed.

I suppose I could try a few other monitors and see if it makes a difference.

OP would you test vampire bloodlines for me? i'm trying to find (purely as a challenge at this point) the perfect setup from 2004\5 that can run the game at least 30\40 fps stable (with frame limiter)
I used multiple P4 but never an extreme one and the athlon 64 is pretty much the superior choice for the time, if you can test it with the x800XT it would be a perfect bench.

iraito wrote on 2024-06-06, 14:15:

OP would you test vampire bloodlines for me? i'm trying to find (purely as a challenge at this point) the perfect setup from 2004\5 that can run the game at least 30\40 fps stable (with frame limiter)
I used multiple P4 but never an extreme one and the athlon 64 is pretty much the superior choice for the time, if you can test it with the x800XT it would be a perfect bench.

Sure thing, but it may take some time, since my X800 XT is currently in storage.

On that note, I had a very similar system back in 2005. It was an Athlon 64 3000+ with a GeForce 6600 GT. And I vaguely remember VTM: Bloodlines stuttering even on that rig, especially in areas with lots of water effects like the sewers. From what I recall, it was playable, but not very enjoyable at that level of performance.

Great game though, aside from the performance issues. I revisited it last year, and it still holds up quite well. It was a joy to play it on my i5 + GTX 970 rig, at 1600x1200, all settings maxed out including AA+AF, and still getting a locked 60 FPS.

Oh sure thing take your time, one of my previous builds a P4 3.0 + gf 6800 GS gave me the same performances you are describing, hell I got the same results on an athlon XP 2800+ and 9800 XXL.
Now I'm planning to change the P4 with an athlon 64 3700, I want at least to get 30 fps minimum.

iraito wrote on 2024-06-06, 14:39:

Oh sure thing take your time, one of my previous builds a P4 3.0 + gf 6800 GS gave me the same performances you are describing, hell I got the same results on an athlon XP 2800+ and 9800 XXL.
Now I'm planning to change the P4 with an athlon 64 3700, I want at least to get 30 fps minimum.

I had some time to spare today, so I took my X800 XT out of storage and tested VTM Bloodlines on this system. I'm using the retail CD version + latest official patch version 1.2. No mods or third party fixes. This is under WinME, using Catalyst 6.2 with VSync disabled in the driver panel. Otherwise, all driver settings are at default (no AA/AF). All results are at 1600x1200 with the console command cl_showfps 1 being used to measure the frame rate. All in-game graphical settings are maxed out.

Indoors (i.e. inside the player's apartment) I get around 90 FPS on average. Outdoors, while walking around the Santa Monica streets, I get between 28-40 FPS. When entering the sewers via the manholes, I get 24-35 FPS. The game stutters a bit whenever I first enter an area, so it's pretty much as I remember it from back in the day. The frame rate stabilizes after that initial stutter and stays close to 30 FPS from that point onward.

And here's a pic of my cleaned and freshly re-pasted X800 XT:

I really like the cooling solution on this card. It's not too loud, though you can still hear a slight (non-intrusive) hum from the fan, even when the card is idle. Just the price of using a high-end GPU from that time, I suppose. It did get better after I cleaned all the caked dust, changed the thermal paste and lubricated the fan. As with all Radeon X800 series cards, it's a great choice for fully maxing out Win9x games at 1600x1200 with AA and AF cranked up as desired. Also, the VGA output of this card is remarkably sharp, even at 1600x1200.

The results are really promising, with a P4 3.0 and gf 6800 I get 50fps but go down as much as 23 or even 19fps in those struggling areas, I take it that an athlon 64 3700 should push the game to 30 stable if frame limited.

Thank you a lot man! I'm planning to open a thread where I will review (with video gameplay) the performances of the games I play on my old machines but as a reviewer from the early 2000, so it's gonna be more about feeling how it runs instead of metrics, I feel like there's not a schematically accessible way to check how those old games ran at the time and it might be good for people interested to check the comparisons for their own build etc.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-06-08, 11:03:

And here's a pic of my cleaned and freshly re-pasted X800 XT:

X800XT.jpg

I really like the cooling solution on this card. It's not too loud, though you can still hear a slight (non-intrusive) hum from the fan, even when the card is idle. Just the price of using a high-end GPU from that time, I suppose. It did get better after I cleaned all the caked dust, changed the thermal paste and lubricated the fan. As with all Radeon X800 series cards, it's a great choice for fully maxing out Win9x games at 1600x1200 with AA and AF cranked up as desired. Also, the VGA output of this card is remarkably sharp, even at 1600x1200.

The cooling looks like something from the NV silencer series, it's usually really silent and keeps the card cool.
I use something like that for my V3 2000.

iraito wrote on 2024-06-08, 11:41:

I use something like that for my V3 2000.

I want to see a photo of AC silencer installed on V3.

Bruno128 wrote on 2024-06-08, 13:39:

iraito wrote on 2024-06-08, 11:41:

I use something like that for my V3 2000.

I want to see a photo of AC silencer installed on V3.

Dude I did a lot of modding on all my GPUs, I even have a V5 with a double zalman copper cooler.

This was before screwing the plastic shroud.

This is the end result.

Got this Sapphire Radeon 9600XT for just 4 EUR from my local classifieds:

It was listed as "Not Working" but it looked fine visually, so I took the risk. For such a low price, I figured it might at least be good for some spare parts. After it arrived, I inspected the card a bit more closely and noticed that there was some rust and grime underneath the metal bracket. Looks like water may have gotten in there at some point. After removing the bracket, I cleaned the grime using isopropyl alcohol, though some rusty spots remained. Thankfully, they are mostly around the TV Out connector, which I don't plan on using. The VGA and DVI connectors are in reasonably good condition. I'll need to sand down those rusty spots with some fine grit sandpaper and paint over the area at some point.

The stock cooler was also full of dust and grime. I didn't bother with cleaning it for now, since it's fairly small and probably quite noisy. Instead, I replaced it with a DeepCool V50 VGA cooler and added some fresh thermal paste. I did have to remove the plastic housing from the fan header since it was too small for the DeepCool fan connector, but otherwise, everything fits perfectly. After all that, I finally decided to test the card in this rig. To my surprise, the system started normally, without displaying any artifacts at boot. After installing Catalyst 6.2 under WinME, everything still looked normal. I fired up Quake 2, ran the timedemo, and it rendered correctly. Afterwards, I ran 3DMark 2001 and all the tests completed successfully. I should also mention that the image quality over VGA is very good. Looks like I got lucky with this purchase!

P.S.

I was a bit disappointed that this issue with Gothic 1 icons occurs even on the Radeon 9600XT. I tried older Catalyst versions like 4.9 but it didn't help. For reference, this bug started occurring with Nvidia FX cards and apparently Radeon 9000 (R300) series cards.

Patch 1.08k solves issues with ATI drivers but maybe there's some old fix available too.

iraito wrote on 2024-06-13, 11:57:

Patch 1.08k solves issues with ATI drivers but maybe there's some old fix available too.

Yeah, I had to apply that patch first, otherwise the game would crash at launch on Radeons and GeForce 3 cards.

Unfortunately, there is no fix for the Gothic 1 icon issue, aside from installing the latest fan-made patches and playing it on a modern system. On real retro hardware, a GeForce 4 Ti is as high as you can go before encountering the distorted icons.

You know, i played those games all at release date at the time, i was also highly active in the italian community for those games and i remember watching people posting screens on forums, nobody had the icons working right 🤣.
I think historically very few people got them working right.

I've been benchmarking the new Radeon 9600XT against the old GeForce FX 5900XT on this system under WinME. The results were quite interesting:

GeForce FX 5900XT

• 3DMark 99: 22403 (52347 CPU marks)
• 3DMark 2000: 18110
• 3DMark 2001SE: 15594

Radeon 9600XT

• 3DMark 99: 19932 (52301 CPU marks)
• 3DMark 2000: 16893
• 3DMark 2001SE: 12541

The Radeon isn't that far behind, considering that it has a 128-bit memory bus and lower memory clocks. It does however have a higher core clock, which might account for some performance gains. I was particularly surprised at the Drakan results and the Quake 2 software benchmarks. That's a pretty good showing for the Radeon.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-06-13, 16:04:

The Radeon isn't that far behind, considering that it has a 128-bit memory bus and lower memory clocks.

Well the 9600 variants were very popular for a reason, they were good deals. Nobody worried about table fog and dos compatibility back then. And it was a real DX9 path card.