I had one X1950 Pro AGP too, it was just fine until it suddenly died on me. No idea why.
Archer57 wrote on 2025-07-22, 00:22:So far i was not able to notice a difference between x800GTO and 7600GT in a few games i tried...
Prior to GeForce 8, NVidia's anti aliasing was noticeably lower quality in that you can see stair stepping on the edges much more clearly. This is probably due to ATI having gamma corrected MSAA, starting with the first D3D9 Radeons (R300). Nvidia added this with GF8.
GeForce 6/7 have pretty aggressive texture filtering "optimizations". You might notice lower/softer detail in the distance than with the ATI card. There may also be more mip map transition shimmer. When I played Oblivion on a GeForce 7, I had to set it to HQ texture filtering or the snow in particular was rendered incorrectly. HQ texture filtering is a sizeable performance hit on GF7.
If you run any games at 16-bit color depth, the Radeon's dithering will look a bit nicer. Less muddy and the dither pattern less clearly tiling.
The Radeon X1000 cards in particular are far superior to the GF7 in these areas. They are really in another class though, a half generation step towards the D3D10 cards. GF7 is more or less a wider GF6 chip, as Radeon Xxx0 is a scaled up form of Radeon 9800/9600. The X1000 cards have lots of improvements including robust D3D9 SM3 that is far beyond GF6/7's implementation, improved texture filtering including a top quality HQ AF mode, and even improved 16-bit dithering.
X1950pro agp = fun to experiment with on fast agp systems, acceptably quiet, but I would not use it regularly. Expensive, not common, and I don't trust the single slot cooler to keep the card alive with regular use. Also no drivers for Win98, so not very useful.
X850xt pe agp = very fast card for late 98 and early XP games, drivers work ok in many win98 games I tried. But the stock cooler is too loud. Also expensive and not commonly found. Unnecessary overkill for win98 unless you want to dual boot.
X600 pci-e = I know it's a bit off topic, but get one while they're still cheap. Tried it in a bunch of Win 98 games, and compatibility is the same as my agp Ati cards. I used a lga775 Via chipset board with chipsets drivers for Win98, a regular ide hard drive, and if I was going to build a cheap but fast Win98 rig, this would be it. Performance is plenty fast for any game I would run in that OS.
pixel_workbench wrote on 2025-07-22, 13:56:X600 pci-e = I know it's a bit off topic, but get one while they're still cheap. Tried it in a bunch of Win 98 games, and compatibility is the same as my agp Ati cards.
The X600 uses RV370 GPU. It's basically an updated PCI-e variant of the RV350/RV360, that is the 9600 Pro/XT. Usually clocked the same as the Pro too.
Has anyone managed to get SimCity 4 to work well with the Radeon X series cards? I've only managed to get ~5-10 fps on max graphics settings at 1024x768 even on a Core 2 Duo.
swaaye wrote on 2025-07-22, 13:48:Prior to GeForce 8, NVidia's anti aliasing was noticeably lower quality in that you can see stair stepping on the edges much mo […]
Prior to GeForce 8, NVidia's anti aliasing was noticeably lower quality in that you can see stair stepping on the edges much more clearly. This is probably due to ATI having gamma corrected MSAA, starting with the first D3D9 Radeons (R300). Nvidia added this with GF8.
GeForce 6/7 have pretty aggressive texture filtering "optimizations". You might notice lower/softer detail in the distance than with the ATI card. There may also be more mip map transition shimmer. When I played Oblivion on a GeForce 7, I had to set it to HQ texture filtering or the snow in particular was rendered incorrectly. HQ texture filtering is a sizeable performance hit on GF7.
If you run any games at 16-bit color depth, the Radeon's dithering will look a bit nicer. Less muddy and the dither pattern less clearly tiling.
The Radeon X1000 cards in particular are far superior to the GF7 in these areas. They are really in another class though, a half generation step towards the D3D10 cards. GF7 is more or less a wider GF6 chip, as Radeon Xxx0 is a scaled up form of Radeon 9800/9600. The X1000 cards have lots of improvements including robust D3D9 SM3 that is far beyond GF6/7's implementation, improved texture filtering including a top quality HQ AF mode, and even improved 16-bit dithering.
Curious. I do have pci-e x1950pro, perhaps i'll compare with that to see if i notice something. I've never practically seen any consequential difference, large enough to be immediately noticeable when i run a game. So that'd be a curious experiment...
Also received my "not working" x700pro and... yikes. The card is likely fine - half of the capacitors missing from the bridge chip. That'll be a fun soldering session... One of the reason why i prefer not to remove those pad to add cooling...
Archer57 wrote on 2025-07-23, 04:14:swaaye wrote on 2025-07-22, 13:48:Prior to GeForce 8, NVidia's anti aliasing was noticeably lower quality in that you can see stair stepping on the edges much mo […]
Prior to GeForce 8, NVidia's anti aliasing was noticeably lower quality in that you can see stair stepping on the edges much more clearly. This is probably due to ATI having gamma corrected MSAA, starting with the first D3D9 Radeons (R300). Nvidia added this with GF8.
GeForce 6/7 have pretty aggressive texture filtering "optimizations". You might notice lower/softer detail in the distance than with the ATI card. There may also be more mip map transition shimmer. When I played Oblivion on a GeForce 7, I had to set it to HQ texture filtering or the snow in particular was rendered incorrectly. HQ texture filtering is a sizeable performance hit on GF7.
If you run any games at 16-bit color depth, the Radeon's dithering will look a bit nicer. Less muddy and the dither pattern less clearly tiling.
The Radeon X1000 cards in particular are far superior to the GF7 in these areas. They are really in another class though, a half generation step towards the D3D10 cards. GF7 is more or less a wider GF6 chip, as Radeon Xxx0 is a scaled up form of Radeon 9800/9600. The X1000 cards have lots of improvements including robust D3D9 SM3 that is far beyond GF6/7's implementation, improved texture filtering including a top quality HQ AF mode, and even improved 16-bit dithering.
Curious. I do have pci-e x1950pro, perhaps i'll compare with that to see if i notice something. I've never practically seen any consequential difference, large enough to be immediately noticeable when i run a game. So that'd be a curious experiment...
Also received my "not working" x700pro and... yikes. The card is likely fine - half of the capacitors missing from the bridge chip. That'll be a fun soldering session... One of the reason why i prefer not to remove those pad to add cooling...
I've seen a similar failure pattern lately on another ebay card. People thought they they'll do themselves a favor tinkering with the rialto chip, but I think more often than not they made things worse.
Fingers crossed that you can get yours going again.
