A 3dfx Voodoo Banshee or Voodoo 3 would be great. A TNT2 M64 also works well.

But they are all a bit hard to find or expensive.

I'm not sure if this card would work, but looks like a good price https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/375510519301

The thing about a P233 is the CPU will enormous hamstring any video card you put in there. For example, I just found a benchmark where someone threw a TNT2 in a P233, benchmarked Quake 2, and actually got about the same or worse results than I get with my Riva 128 in mine.

You probably want to go with the oldest card you can find so the driver overhead is minimal. You'd be looking at Voodoo 1 or 2, Riva 128 or Riva TNT. Maybe a G200? Was there ever a PCI version of that?

Matrox G200, voodoo 1, banshee and similar, i wouldn't go with more powerful stuff.

Namrok wrote on 2024-07-17, 12:40:

Maybe a G200? Was there ever a PCI version of that?

Yep, i have one of those.

I think best is also a really relative term. I would start with something cheap and see how it fairs for your use case. I'll add in a Rage Pro or Rage 128 as additional early cards that might be a good, cheap option.

One sticking point here is that the early titles that this CPU will be best suited for tend to skew towards working best with Glide. This is where the Banshee starts making sense as while they are still 4-5 times more expensive than a typical Riva 128, they are "cheap" for 3DFX standards (the same applies to the Velocity which is a Voodoo 3 in everything but name and VRAM capacity).

ATi Rage Pro 8MB PCI is also ok choice, with older drivers you get 3DCIF support, 4MB versions are slower so i would get it with extra RAM module (4MB integrated + 4MB added). I have one original Rage Pro 4+4MB, just with AGP, that is also little faster than PCI version. Latest drivers for 3DCIF is 5.37.x/5.38.x and 5.40.0/5.40.1. Of course they are slower than Voodoo2 or TNT. Rage Pro is at the Voodoo1 level or little better and bit slower than intel 752 (i815 chipset). If you do not care about 3DCIF, then there are these Chinese Rage XL PCI cards that can be also used, but only with newer drivers.

I think Geforce2 MX PCI or Rage128/Rage128 Pro PCI would be nice choice for your P233 MMX.

I hate rage pro due to its inability to filter alpha blended textures. Ugly.

Some other complaints from a review:

"Rage Pro has double the number of gradients over Rage II and it is enough to not be perceived at first look, but still is far from proper filtering. ATI dragged this filter into next gen Rage 128 as well and fortunately for them almost nobody noticed. Another complaint is about reduced amount of texture samples at smaller mip levels, this creates obvious shimmering. The amount is about the same as for Rage II, but this time is less expected since Rage Pro was supposed to have high quality texturing engine and "free" trilinear filter will not compensate for such deficiencies. Also, mip mapping in advanced games like Unreal is still doing wrong mip selections, so I disabled it again. At least sub-pixel accuracy was significantly improved but there are still some polygon gaps to be seen in few games. "

i found ati 7000 can it work on this old compaw motherboard

Radeon 7000 has performance issues with PMMX level of hardware.

Shagittarius wrote on 2024-07-17, 15:24:

I hate rage pro due to its inability to filter alpha blended textures. Ugly.

Some other complaints from a review:

"Rage Pro has double the number of gradients over Rage II and it is enough to not be perceived at first look, but still is far from proper filtering. ATI dragged this filter into next gen Rage 128 as well and fortunately for them almost nobody noticed. Another complaint is about reduced amount of texture samples at smaller mip levels, this creates obvious shimmering. The amount is about the same as for Rage II, but this time is less expected since Rage Pro was supposed to have high quality texturing engine and "free" trilinear filter will not compensate for such deficiencies. Also, mip mapping in advanced games like Unreal is still doing wrong mip selections, so I disabled it again. At least sub-pixel accuracy was significantly improved but there are still some polygon gaps to be seen in few games. "

ATi Rage XL (Rage3) has this: supports video and graphics alpha blending ARGB8888, is this the same thing that you talk about?
https://old.vgamuseum.info/images/stories/doc … tions_dec03.pdf

For sure Rage XL did get transparent textures bilinearly filtered with Rage Pro tehnology that original Rage Pro was not capable.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-07-17, 15:31:

Radeon 7000 has performance issues with PMMX level of hardware.

i see some in forum use it use it what issues have most

Radeon starts to shine with faster CPU, Rage128 Pro can be used better at lower/older PC parts, Rage OpenGL is not that fast as Geforce, but Rage128 Pro can handle 32bit well.

Truthfully, 3d gaming on a 233 MMX is a novelty at best. The more I think about it, and the more I reflect on what I've actually played on my own 233 MMX, I gave Quake 2 and Shogo the old college try at ~30 FPS, but I've mostly stuck with 2D games. DOS games like Doom, Heretic, and Master of Magic, or Windows games like Diablo, Deadlock, and StarCraft. Thinking of giving Might & Magic VI a spin soon, which only has a software renderer.

If cards are expensive, just prioritize good DOS compatibility and 2D image quality, I suspect you'll be spending most of your time there.

You could start with GPU Database at TechPowerUp, which has 92 GPU on PCI cards.

The "ultimate" NVIDIA and ATI cards in PCI were GeForce GT 430 and Radeon HD 5450, respectively, but I assume you would not use those 2010 vintage cards on a Pentium-MMX build where the CPU becomes the bottleneck and you need it to play late DOS and early Win9x games, something those two cards way too new for.

Therefore, you should set your limit to those with Win9x support, namely no later than GeForce 6 or Radeon R300. GeForce FX 5200 and Radeon 9100 were probably the best PCI cards you could acquire with Win9x support, but IMHO they were still too new for your Pentium-MMX.

So you have to look even further: GeForce2 MX 400, Radeon 7000, Matrox Millennium G450, S3 Savage4 (I wonder why TPU has no S3 card in their database), or Voodoo3. The final decision would depend on your personal need (namely which game you want to play), your budget limit, and the availability of those vintage cards.

UPDATE: While writing this reply I found a thread by many VOGONS veterans: Which PCI Graphics Card For Socket 7 430tx/hx Builds?

Here's how various PCI accelerators scale with Pentium Pro: Graphics card for Pentium Pro build (This should apply even better for Pentium MMX)

Here's my thread with GeForce 2 MX vs Voodoo 3 scaling (also Mystique, but it's absolute trash): Intel 430HX L2 256Kb VS Intel 430HX L2 512Kb VS Intel 430TX L2 512Kb - Motherboards comparison

so that is limit of 233mmx average 30 fps with every card ,i will paly most nfs 123 7000 is the esisest to get now for 10 buck maybe i can find vanta or tnt 2 other is rare

zmija1 wrote on 2024-07-17, 10:53:

is it possible some hdmi card to work drom 2004

You can find PCI Radeon 7000 cards with DVI output that will run fine on a 486 - but as The Serpent Rider said, the Win9x drivers aren't particularly well-optimised for a PMMX.

Also Pentium Pro benchmarks were done in 1024x768 resolution. Some cards like Savage 4 scale much better in lower resolutions, while Radeon 7000 does not. And even in 1024x768, when it dips - it dips hard (see Turok performance).

7500 and 9200/9250 always seems to work pretty good in pentium era pci

Pentium MMX 233 aiming for the stars!

Rage Pro PCI, Riva 128 PCI, Voodoo 1 or Banshee.