draetheus wrote on 2025-10-08, 14:09:

Just curious on everyone's take at the state of things in 2025, can "good enough" compatibility be achieved through cheap, non retro taxed mid to late 2000s parts?

Absolutely. Check out Phil's YouTube channel if you haven't already. He has a few videos with LGA775 systems using PCIe GPUs that are running Win98SE just fine. Of the two legacy features from the thread that you linked to, table fog is the more commonly used one, and it's fully supported on Nvidia GPUs. And for ATi cards, simply dual-booting with WinXP and using Catalyst 7.11 there will get you perfect table fog emulation.

And the best part is, you don't need a super expensive Radeon X850 XT PE for that. Even an affordable X550 or X600 card will work just fine for most Win9x titles. You might not be able to run every game at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF forced on top, but anything below that should work fairly well on the aforementioned cards.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-10-08, 14:34:

And the best part is, you don't need a super expensive Radeon X850 XT PE for that. Even an affordable X550 or X600 card will work just fine for most Win9x titles. You might not be able to run every game at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF forced on top, but anything below that should work fairly well on the aforementioned cards.

I'm really curious about systems with the Xpress X1250 IGP. Spec wise they are on par with an X550 or X600 and supported by the catalyst 7.11 drivers according to the release notes. It probably wont hit that level of performance unless you pair it with a high end Phenom but still.

draetheus wrote on 2025-10-08, 15:07:

I'm really curious about systems with the Xpress X1250 IGP. Spec wise they are on par with an X550 or X600 and supported by the catalyst 7.11 drivers according to the release notes. It probably wont hit that level of performance unless you pair it with a high end Phenom but still.

If you're targeting only WinXP, without the need for Win9x driver support, you can go for a cheap Radeon X1300 Pro card. It should have similar (or better) performance as the X600, or a Radeon 9600 XT, if you want an AGP comparison. Similarly, even low-end cards from the Nvidia 7000 series should handle Win9x era games reasonably well under WinXP, though Radeons probably have better compatibility with older titles.

As for using even newer GPUs, note that going beyond GeForce 7000 and Radeon X1000 cards removes 16-bit dithering. This will cause color banding in older games which didn't support 32-bit color depth.

ATi did a lot of X800 variants with 8/12 pipelines which are still easy to find. Even 8 pipeline would be on par with 9800XT.

I recently put together one of these systems. Cheap, low power, low noise, all PCIe, DX1-11, 8x SSAA, parts easily available, etc. Better compatibility than period builds for mainstream 9x era gaming as far as DirectX is concerned and obviously Glide wrapping is available. Paletted textures is one of the few things it doesn't have, you could get that as well if you don't need everything in PCIe. Not a beginner friendly build though and you have to ignore most recommendations.