Probably no help to you, but I would use a geforce 2 Ti or GTS, or Geforce 4 MX460 and stick to DirectX 7 titles. That's just me though!
I think your expectations are misaligned. 3D gaming on Windows 98 can be a frustrating experience. I wasted a ton of money on parts back in 1998-2000.
My personal advice and recommendation: Buy a Voodoo3. The Voodoo3 is a good match for CPU's 500-1000MHz under Win98 (preferably, Second Edition). This is precisely what I paired with the Athlon (Slot A) 800MHz I built in 2000, and finally achieved decent stability. Win98 really is that fragile. The key thing I learned back then - pick your hardware, install the drivers, then leave it alone. Things start going badly once you start swapping out stuff and changing drivers.
You shouldn't expect to run games from 2004 on it though. A separate build with newer hardware and WinXP would be more appropriate for those games.
I highly agree with both of these statements:
Shagittarius wrote on Yesterday, 17:17:You are bound to find games that won't run on every config for some reason. The best you can do is maintain multiple platforms and hope that it will run on one of them. Or just say bollocks to it all and let it go.
swaaye wrote on Yesterday, 17:53:I think the OP might just be a bit unaware of how delicate Win9x is. It is very easy to crash this OS. It doesn't have the various process and memory protection techniques of NT. Any misbehaving software or drivers or incompatibilities somewhere can lead to memory corruption and that's it.
Hi, on break at the moment, sorry I took so long to respond.
I am using Windows Update Restored as my source of updates, as those should all be official Microsoft updates that don't cause issues, or at least shouldn't? I do indeed have the chipset drivers installed, and I'm not sure if my Motherboard would let me mess with those settings. I have not run a RAM testing program at this time, and don't really know what a good one would be, and the BIOS is the latest one, which I flashed onto it myself.
I've seen some folk mention how Direct X past 7.0a can cause issues. Prior to this thread, a friend of mine, Nicknine, made this very claim to me, but I struggled to find any actual reasoning and evidence to suggest this was a real issue. But it must be, since folk here are mentioning it, too. The version of Direct X I have installed at this time is 9.0c. Specifically the last version before they made some Direct X 10 changes (or that's what that falconfly website says). I assume that because I have the GeForce FX 5200, that I NEED DX9, but I'm not sure.
I've known for sometime that 9x is just kind of a mess, and prone to having many things going wrong, and I guess I was confident in making this build, after watching channels like Phil's Computer Lab, and LGR, since it felt like to me that they usually didn't have issues, so, as stupid as it sounds, I kinda expected to get "lucky", I suppose. It's certainly cemented in my head now, with everyone telling me, and my own experience, that you have to be super careful with this OS, certainly way more than with Windows 2000, which has worked well, on the same system.
I'm also seeing the Voodoo 3 suggested quite a bit, which is super surprising to me, since I would have expected such a card be suggested for a lower class machine. I don't know how bad the prices are now, especially for an AGP version, but if the GeForce FX cannot be used with Direct X 7.0a, then I suppose I'll try and seek a Voodoo 3?
Thank you everyone who has responded to this thread, giving your advice, and insights. For now, I'll try and truck forward with the GeForce FX 5200, and only play games that use Direct X 7.0a (assuming I can use the drivers with just Direct X 7.0a, idk if I can) on Windows 98, while DX8 onwards I'll play on the Windows 2000 install.
EDIT: Voodoo 3 3000 AGP prices are... Surprisingly reasonable, compared to the 4 and 5, which I didn't expect at all. Well, assuming I don't jinx myself, and they don't suddenly spike in 2-3 weeks time, I think I'll try and get one of those, if it turns out the GeForce FX can't be used with Direct X 7.0a installed.
The Voodoo 3 didn't utilise the AGP slot benefits. There's very little speed difference between a Voodoo 3 PCI and AGP.
I would try to run Win98QI (no other patches needed), and see if you encounter any issues.
You don't need DX9c for DX9a card, actual DX requirement is game thing - if game expects DX9(a/c) it will prompt you about it.
If it doesn't, you can run DX7 only on DX9 hardware and be OK (at least until you run shader based game 😁)
I don't know your budget, but I've had good success with Radeon cards on my Win9x builds (including my Windows 95 overkill machine). You might also want to consider some of the varients that tend to go for lower prices at slightly reduced performance.
If you don't mind limiting software support to DirectX 8, you could consider a Radeon 9100. It's a rebranded Radeon 8500, but tends to cost less.
For DirectX 9 at the mid-range, you could consider a Medion Radeon 9600 TX, a factory overclocked Radeon 9500 Pro.
At the high end, you could consider a Medion Radeon 9800 XL, an underclocked Radeon 9800 Pro. I have one, and I'm hoping the underclock will improve the GPUs lifespan.
As mentioned earlier, the Radeon drivers can render table fog, but the effect doesn't look as good as native hardware rendering.
fosterwj03 wrote on Today, 14:30:As mentioned earlier, the Radeon drivers can render table fog, but the effect doesn't look as good as native hardware rendering.
The solution to that is to dual-boot Win98 and WinXP, and play the games that use table fog under XP. Catalyst 7.11 drivers (and above) enable Radeon cards to render table fog perfectly under WinXP. However, those drivers only work on 9500 cards and up, so the lower end 9250 and such can't use them. Tweaking registry settings to make table fog work on Radeons under Win98 is possible, but the success rate varies greatly from game to game. Even when it works, the end result still doesn't look correct. In contrast, table fog is 100% accurate under WinXP with Catalyst 7.11, looks identical to what 3DFX and Nvidia cards render, and works fine in all games that use it.
Paletted textures aren't supported on Radeons even under WinXP, but that's practically a non-issue since only a handful of games are negatively impacted. In most cases, that feature was used to improve performance, so its absence won't affect the visuals. The few notable exceptions are Final Fantasy 7/8 and Driver.
I used to reinstall Win9x probably once a month when it was the daily driver. I still have a 98SE serial memorized. 🤣
I suggest not installing any Windows updates unless a game or drivers needs something. For Win98, I also suggest not using the USB 2.0 packs and instead disable it in the BIOS. The USB 2.0 controller is separate from USB 1.1 and most old boards allow 2.0 to be disabled. The 2.0 functionality is just another thing that complicates resource management, adds new drivers, and it doesn't help you play games.
swaaye wrote on Today, 18:35:I used to reinstall Win9x probably once a month when it was the daily driver. I still have a 98SE serial memorized. 🤣
Same here. I also had the key memorised due to installing so often. I used to subscribe to computer magazines and used to try out all the demos, and free software. Also I bought at least one game every week from the shop (usually older games from the discounted section)
It really didn't take long to make it unstable or have odd issues.
