Even the slowest Geforce FX 5200 or FX 5500 PCI will be significantly faster than most cards that were available in the late 90s with very few downsides, so I would go that way if you're on a budget. They are not real great for games made after 2000, but they'll easily outpace a Voodoo 3 or TNT2, even if the FX 5200 has a 64bit memory bus (mainly due to a much more advanced architecture, higher clocks and DDR memory).

The Radeon cards are also options, but drivers are somewhat less consistent and there may be a few compatibility issues or missing features depending on the cards and games you want to play.

A Geforce 6200 would be even faster than the 5200, but there will be some compatibility and feature tradeoffs, similar to what you get with the PCI Radeons that you mentioned (but with a lot higher performance).

Don't get an 8400GS though, as those are not supported by Windows 98.

A lot of people will recommend a Voodoo3, but unless you want one for nostalgia reasons or are trying to build a period correct system, the benefits are pretty minor and the performance will likely be much lower than an FX 5200. For games that only work well with the 3dfx Glide API you can use a Glide wrapper on a non-3dfx card to get the game working while having the performance of a newer card.

EDIT: Oh, and if you can find an FX 5200 or 5500 with eight memory chips there is a good chance that it will have a 128bit memory bus, which will make it quite a bit faster.

But do they even exist? I saw models with 8 chips, but those were 256 MB models which is a clear giveaway that it's a 64 bit or some low spec variant (just with an unnecessary amount of ram).

Retronerd878 wrote on 2026-08-01, 18:13:

But do they even exist? I saw models with 8 chips, but those were 256 MB models which is a clear giveaway that it's a 64 bit or some low spec variant (just with an unnecessary amount of ram).

There are lots of 128bit FX 5200 and 5500 cards out there, and a lot of them are 256MB. Just a quick example:
https://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/produc … m=9b-14-133-007

I like the NVIDIA Quadro NVS 280 PCI. It's a 64 bit Geforce FX 5200 based card. I also have it in a small form factor S370 W98 PC.
Compatibility is great, it works great with dgVoodoo for all your dos and windows glide needs, and the performance is great for OpenGL and fine for D3D below D3D9.
On top of that it's still incredibly cheap to pick one up, so well worth giving a try.
I also tried a 64 bit Radeon 9250 and 128 bit Radeon 9000 (which were much more expensive) and they are fine and have some nice features like nice anisotropic filtering and nice scaling options for the DVI out, but they weren't better performers than the Nvidia and had annoying compatibility issues. The NVS280 I found to be the best all-rounder.

I have a Radeon 9250 PCI sitting around that I pulled out of a Power Mac G4 MDD - it works, but since it's a full-height card it's not going to work in your system. I also have a VisionTek low profile 9250 PCI, but I lost one of the push pins for the cooler and it also uses one of those DMS-59 connectors... which I don't have a single breakout cable for, so annoyingly I can't use it nor any of my 2400 Pros that I have too many of.

A 128-bit Radeon 8500 - 9250 would have the benefit of a high performance anisotropic filtering implemention (but it only works on top of bilinear filtering). Radeon 9500 and later really step up the texture filtering quality, remove the bilinear limitation and also add particularly high quality multisample AA. Radeon 8500 - 9250 essentially have useless anti-aliasing (performance hit / bugs).

Nvidia cards have a bit better game compatibility. It's mostly down to some specific games that use somewhat NVidia specific stuff because the development house was very pro-NVidia or even some relatively 3dfx focused things like table fog and 8-bit palettized textures. For games with Glide compatibility it's often best to use a Glide wrapper anyway.

DirectX 10 cards like GF8 and later (Radeon HD too) have even more compatibility issues with old games and also lack dithering of 16bpp rendering which makes some old games look terrible.