Intels onboard graphics improved slightly over the years but the 810 vintage was not a high point for Intel . It was more of a media chip for playing back video and had poor compatibility in many cases.

A PCI 3d accelerator that has solid compatibility and drivers should at least make older games run great with fewer bugs, even if the ones intended for a piii are meh.

Remember that even a GEFORCE 2 runs circles around a typical 810, so find a card with best compatibility and not necessarily the last PCI 3d accelerator

Even the SIS 315 PCI 32/64mb and later Xaber 2 are faster

Heck a lowsy Matrox g400 / g450 will give you a better time if you can find the pci version, 🤣

Not tough to beat an 810

🤣🤣🤣 https://www.ebay.com/p/109630970?iid=377092736392

Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS pci

Definitely. I have got i815E with additional AIMM VRAM module and still even Voodoo 2 or Banshee is an improvement...

The i810 isn't horrible, it does a really nice clean 2d picture.
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 280 PCI also works well for Win98, it's equivalent to a GeForce FX 5200 64-bit.
They can be had for quite a bit cheaper than the 5500 last time I checked, but it does need a DMS-59 adapter to go with it.

GeForce 5200 is in and went from a pitiful 620 3d Marks to 3140.

A good gain and I will keep an eye open for a pci 5500 that isn't unobtainium priced....

There is no point in 5500 if you have a good 5200.

Putas wrote on 2026-04-10, 18:38:

There is no point in 5500 if you have a good 5200.

Isn't there a clock speed difference or is the performance gain negligible?

In my view, the 810E is only really suitable for games up to 1999, DX6 – not much more than that. And certainly nothing that uses DX7, for obvious reasons.
When it works, in my opinion, the image quality is very good.

2D image quality highly relies on motherboard build quality, but it may be OK indeed. I like my PIII 1GHz + i815 + Voodoo2 12MB machine.

FX 5200 and 5500 are almost the same GPUs (20 MHz core clock difference while the card is mainly bandwith limited - it uses old NV10 memory controller). The most important thing for FX5200/5500 is 400 MHz 128-bit memory - 64-bit variants are much slower (some has 300-333 MHz VRAM as well). But on the other hand, FX5200 128-bit in an overkill for PCI anyway...

I'd stick with the i810 because I'd think putting a whatever ati/nv would make it less curiously interesting. If any PCI video though, it'd probably be one of the non-ATI/NV ones anyway (kyro, g400, savage etc). Peak performance video maxxing bores me

leileilol wrote on 2026-04-11, 00:29:

I'd stick with the i810 because I'd think putting a whatever ati/nv would make it less curiously interesting. If any PCI video though, it'd probably be one of the non-ATI/NV ones anyway (kyro, g400, savage etc). Peak performance video maxxing bores me

The genuine experience from when those systems were new is that most of us did not have ATI/NV.

I either had onboard video or cheap SIS/Mattox gpus through 2006 .

I always had a large selection of older games and emulators so it didn’t make much difference but when I did get a newer game, part of the experience was that for most of us they ran badly .

Wierd part was the last generation of SIS 32/64mb gpus wasn’t terrible, even the onboard ones ran some of the more modern stuff that puked on slightly older hardware.

Back then if you weren’t big $$$ you were gonna make do with the low end oddball stuff that seemed to be everywhere (at the time) but is impossible to find now.

Voodoo3 would be a great match for that system. Not Nvidia nor ATI, much better performence than i810 graphics, period correct, good compatibility and small PCI penalty (only in few geometry-heavy games AGP variant is noticeably faster).