x73rmin8r wrote on 2024-09-19, 12:08:

So if you didn't know much about 3d cards and walked into a computer store around Christmas 2001 and asked the guy what a decent card for quake III era games would be, what would you probably have walked out with?

Some sort of Radeon 7000? A GeForce 3? Something leftover from 2000?

Since it sounds like it lasted up through halflife-2, sounds like you got something 1/2 decent.

Maybe a GeForce 3 ($350) or a Radeon 8500 ($250), but most likely a Geforce 2 MX400 ($150)

How much money would your father have spent of your gifts? Do you remember fussing with buggy drivers?

GeForce3 is possible, but Geforce2 was still popular at the time. Could be a Geforce2 GTS/Pro/Ti as well. And don't forget the MX.

Do you remember the processor / resolution / framerate it had? 😜

He wouldn't have got the top tier ones, he'd probably have aimed for a mid tier one that would do the job without being overkill. There's some sort of vague association I have with him mentioning Radeon, but I'm not sure. Could have been when I was talking with him about parts years later. Radeon would have been the more "budget" option at the time, right?

I think I was able to get up to 1024x768, at least for some things. Iirc, I think both elite force and Jedi outcast. Definitely no issues at 800x600 for anything.

Framerates always felt "fine", but it never occured to me to test them, or ever really think about them. And it was the early 2000s, I bet iffy framerates were more acceptable. Nothing ever felt noticably choppy though.

I remember load times were painful for most everything compared to my current retro stuff, but that's because it was a real hard drive loading off a normie tier optical drive and not CF cards and stuff I'm using now. Heh.

Warmest I can get on the WayBackMachine, December 4th page of their promoted items in "upgrades" showing a GF2MX400 for $99
https://web.archive.org/web/20011204174954/ht … category_id=454

There are other pages in early 2002 where the likes of Radeon 7500 etc are coming up. Maybe there's more to dig out with a bit of clicking around.

Many games kept a DX7 path open for a few years as the GF2 core continued as the GF4MX for budget. So wouldn't surprise me if GF2 was still playing most stuff for a few years, albeit at lower detail/feature level.

edit:
Ah yeah can see some radeons here at end of October, Radeon SDR PCI might have been a candidate if PCI required...
https://web.archive.org/web/20011030082034/ht … srch_type=catg2
unfortunately seeming that you can't see rest of list.

editII:
We can see a few more cards at the bottom in the following Feb, MX64 PCI there ...
https://web.archive.org/web/20020201225251/ht … srch_type=catg2

Nice! That's awesome. I'll have to get lost in the wayback machine a bit and look around.

Geforce 2 MX was like the most longtime card. Played everything pre 2004. Pre Crysis/Doom3/Half-Life. Never understood need for ultra resolutions, all post 640x480 was ok. As long as the framerate was acceptable.

I pulled a really dumb move and killed my Pine PCI 32 meg TNT2 in October of 2001, and went to a local computer store in desperate search of a GPU; my only back up was a one megabyte S3 Trio. I had the TNT2 because I had upgraded an Asus P55T2P4 with a K6-2+, but since that time I had upgraded to a KT7A, so I now had an AGP slot. I had stayed with the TNT2 because it worked and I was broke, but I killed it by overclocking it. The GPU they had that fit my price/performance niche was a GeForce 2 Ti 64 meg which came to about $160.00 out the door. The difference in performance was dramatic. I remember one of the computers in their showroom was setup to run 3D Mark 2001 in an endless loop.

My guess was a GF2 with a pretty recent CPU that year. The right combo probably could have gone a while. I got a GF2 around then.

x73rmin8r wrote on 2024-09-19, 12:08:

I think the computer was still AT with the physical power switch, probably some sort of high clock amd k6 or something.

It could still be a Socket 370 or Slot-1 platform. Back then I had one with a 900MHz Coppermine. You needed that kind of power if it carried you into the mid-00's.

x73rmin8r wrote on 2024-09-19, 12:08:

So if you didn't know much about 3d cards and walked into a computer store around Christmas 2001 and asked the guy what a decent card for quake III era games would be, what would you probably have walked out with?

Some sort of Radeon 7000? A GeForce 3? Something leftover from 2000?

Without knowing the budget? I'd expect a Geforce 2. A GF3 is a big maybe, I doubt I'd be recommended to buy the most recent generation for an older PC.
A 128bit MX400 with low expectations and not knowing better could have gone a long way. I've seen GTA San Andreas running on a 600MHz Celeron and MX200.

At the turn of the millennium, I was running Voodoo3 on 430TX with a K6-2@450, and I was failing to launch game demos by about 2003, some still worked, but it seemed I "ran out of" GPU before I ran out of CPU. Don't even think anything required SSE for quite a few years. Also RAM requirements climbed to 128 or 256 before minimum CPU had gone past 400 it seemed like. Anyway, until the later 00s charge up the gigahertz numbers, it didn't seem to move very quick. I think it was 07ish it started to race, you needed 2ghz, then 3ghz, then 64bit then dual core real quick year on year.

Anyway, was looking at box/packaging images, they were willing to recommend an S3 Savage 4, but no mention of a Radeon, it was all TnT and Geforce 2 on the nVidia side. Other materials said Rage 128 worked though... If we assume good old Pop took the game with him or wrote down those off the box, he seems more likely to have ignored the Radeon.

Ergo, something not too far from 500mhz, and something not too far from a Gf2 probably would have been good at "at least runs it" for a long period, even if it was less than modern expectations for every single feature turned on at max resolution and still expecting better than 60fps minimum.

https://huguesjohnson.com/scans/EBXmas2001/

Remember when GameStop sold GPUs? I don't.

Everybody seems to be on the same page that it was most likely some sort of GeForce 2, that definitely makes sense. The $100-$150 prices, $177-$266 now, seem like probably the limit.

For some reason there's something telling me it wasn't an Nvidia, but I don't know what I'm basing that on. The 7200 was $100, that might have been it.

Kyro II then? (i.e. Hercules 3D Prophet 4500)
Radeon DDR? (Later renamed to Radeon 7200)

I don't remember people desiring ATI until the R300 came out. And that is also around when complaints about the drivers were really going around. So there was some unknowns about ATI, for a little bit for me. And the R300 was later than this, and then I saw those that adopted ATI, did have some problems, which probably all got resolved. Also back in 2001, I remember ATI being pricier for their cards when I was looking. Looking at the compusa web page, the Radeon 7200 might be a possibility, but looks like it was out of stock at the time online. And the next better one, the Radeon 7500 (RV200?) was more money than the GF2MX and GF2TI. And there is a note on the webpage "best sellers" you can see saying it's a GF2MX for $100. So it's just the probability is higher for the GF2 I think. I guess it might have been which was on sale, but still, the chance is higher with GF2.

The Kyro cards were available at the time and had a lot of discounts at that point. 😀
It's absolutely fine for Quake3 type games for the time, though the lack of depth buffers to read would destroy the flares in Elite Force and Jedi Academy.

x73rmin8r wrote on 2024-09-19, 19:15:

For some reason there's something telling me it wasn't an Nvidia, but I don't know what I'm basing that on. The 7200 was $100, that might have been it.

Could it be TV functionalities? ATI was better than Nvidia on this regard for a long time.
In that case your candidates narrowed down to 7200, 7000, 7500, and 8500.

7200 (R100) was announced first (April 2000), followed by the low-end 7000 (RV100) in February 2001. 7000 was probably okay in 2001 but would have troubles coping mid-2000 games (your 8800 GT was released in October 2007).

7500 (RV200) and 8500 (R200) were both announced in August 2001. 8500 was arguably the fastest GPU one could buy in Christmas 2001 so your dad was very generous and gave you a really big gift if it was an 8500. OTOH 7500 was an upgraded version of 7200: same number of shaders but with newer lithography and higher frequency, making it a good choice over the older 7200, unless the latter had a clearance price.

Found these ad and review in PC Magazine Dec. 11, 2001 issue:

OT: The next issue gave IA-64 architecture (Merced) an Editor's Choice. 🤣

I ran across a picture of the Win 98 control panel with the ATI drivers icon and something about that looked really familiar. It could have been from some laptop I've used that had integrated ATI graphics if it wasn't from the old desktop, not sure.

If it was an ATI card in there it couldn't have been the 7500, that would have been too expensive. It was probably either the 7200 or some variant of it, or the mx400. Heh, I'll probably never know.

x73rmin8r wrote on 2024-09-20, 11:54:

If it was an ATI card in there it couldn't have been the 7500, that would have been too expensive. It was probably either the 7200 or some variant of it, or the mx400. Heh, I'll probably never know.

Seems likely that it was one of the DirectX 7 cards with <= 128 bit DDR memory, yes. They were all in the same gulag at the bottom of the chart in 2002. https://www.anandtech.com/show/872/5 But lots of people manage to enjoy games at 20 FPS, especially if they had never played with faster frame rates.

I can't rule out the possibility that his father was infused with the Christmas spirit and got one of the DirectX 8 cards like the Geforce 3 or Radeon 8500, yet for the 8500, I feel like if the OP had a Radeon 8500 in early 2002, he might remember buggy drivers.

The other games OP remembers playing might be diagnostic. For example early Radeon drivers messed up some early DX stuff horribly I have heard. So if all the old stuff played perfect, then that's probably an indication of nVidia, if the old stuff only "came back" after a few updates or some messing around, more a signal for ATI.

It's also safe to assume if OP's father went with a store employee recommendation, it's much more likely it was nvidia than ATI. ATI back then was well known for not having very polished drivers and nvidia already had great brand recognition as the top dog of the gaming GPU business.