Kahenraz wrote on 2024-02-27, 10:45:

Voodoo would be the fastest. It might be bottlenecked from the slower processor, so even a Voodoo 2 or Banshee could suffice. I' […]
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Voodoo would be the fastest. It might be bottlenecked from the slower processor, so even a Voodoo 2 or Banshee could suffice. I've been playing around with different graphics cards in my Socket 7 this past week; old, new, Nvidia, ATI, Matrox, and decided that I like the Rage XL the most. It has great Direct3D 5 and OpenGL 1.1 support. It's not the fastest, but it's nearly perfect and I'm happy with it.

You can also pair a Rage Turbo AGP, Voodoo 2, and a PowerVR PX2 for D3D 5, OpenGL 1.1, Glide, CIF, and PVR.

If you want to push the envelope a bit, the TNT2 is also a great pick for this era. Anything GeForce feels a bit gratuitous, and also suffers from a texel issue with DirectX 5 titles. These problems can be mitigated, but there may be more:

Mipmap settings that fix Incoming (DirectX 5) on the GeForce FX

Newer drivers are not always better on older hardware (especially without SSE):

Kahenraz wrote on 2021-10-03, 10:04:

I've finally managed to track down the cause of the driver instability I've been experiencing since version 56.64 in my testing. It comes down to Nvidia having a different code path for SSE-enabled processors or a bug introduced by a new optimization. This can be demonstrated exactly by the T&L demo with the missing light.

When testing any Pentium 2 or "Mendocino" Celeron, the light model disappears, graphical glitches begin to occur, and drivers overall become unstable. But without changing any drivers I swapped my CPU for a Coppermine and suddenly everything renders properly and the drivers become stable.

On a similar note, the Dawn demo will crash when run without a processor that supports SSE but only on NT 2000 or higher. It will still crash on Windows 98/ME even with SSE, but this may be for a different reason.

NVIDIA GeForce FX driver testing on an Intel 440EX summary and report

Thank you very much, for the moment i'm looking for a cheap option. I hope V3 AGP is ok, but i'm gonna buy a V2 12MB for sure 😀

Glide is especially forgiving on weaker CPUs. Nothing is faster.

i got today GeForce FX 5500 today i downloaded it last update driver for win 98 today What I didn't realize is that 12/21/2005 was the last update and today 12/21/2025 I downloaded it 🤣 20 years later