VOGONS


best windows 98 agp card

Topic actions

Reply 21 of 153, by Gamecollector

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Well, I have even faster card - ATi X850 PE AGp. But the main trouble with the ATi is - drivers.
D3d compatibility isn't excellent, OpenGL compatibility is even worse.
As the example, ePSXe + OGL plugin = substrate blending issues - my hate-o-meter is going to the red area...

Asus P4P800 SE/Pentium4 3.2E/2 Gb DDR400B,
Radeon HD3850 Agp (Sapphire), Catalyst 14.4 (XpProSp3).
Voodoo2 12 MB SLI, Win2k drivers 1.02.00 (XpProSp3).

Reply 22 of 153, by noshutdown

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie
sgt76 wrote:

Yeah bro, no arguments there. I wish my 4600 ti didn't die. Now that was the perfect win98 card for me- so damn powerful and compatible with everything I play. But used ones are just too much off the 'bay... let's see though, it wouldn't be the first time I gave in to easy temptation.

i understand but let it be man, most ti4600 cards suffer from short life expectancy due to high clock and the heat generated, its very common so you have to live with it.
ti4200 has lower clock and therefore slower but also less prone to heat deaths.

Reply 24 of 153, by swaaye

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++
Gamecollector wrote:

Well, I have even faster card - ATi X850 PE AGp. But the main trouble with the ATi is - drivers.
D3d compatibility isn't excellent, OpenGL compatibility is even worse.
As the example, ePSXe + OGL plugin = substrate blending issues - my hate-o-meter is going to the red area...

ATI cards definitely have limited usefulness for retro. Bad DOS support and 3D drivers that are iffy, but also the simple fact that some game companies pretended ATI didn't exist and did poor verification on ATI hardware. This was a problem ATI created for themselves because of their terrible support for Rage and early Radeons, and an apparent inability to maintain relations like NV does.

There are also games that rely on NV proprietary OpenGL extensions (eg Bioware) for speed or some effects. This is almost like the Glide issue of years before. It's fast, it works, NV has the majority and ATI drivers were a mess.

Reply 25 of 153, by tincup

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

hmmm... I ran an ATI 9700 Pro in the 2001-04 time period and had a terrific experience. I updated the drivers regularly and don't recall many or sever compatibility/performance issues. The card was more stable than the 2x EVGA 7800GT SLI I followed it up with - new drivers always broke a few games and I ended up rolling back to an early set to cure the compatibility problems. I later discovered others with the same card often did too.

Reply 27 of 153, by swaaye

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++
tincup wrote:

hmmm... I ran an ATI 9700 Pro in the 2001-04 time period and had a terrific experience.

I don't mean to say that Radeon 9700 wasn't amazing, because it was for D3D7-9 games. But it is not the ideal card for a retro machine that is going to run pre-DirectX 7 games, or for old non-Quake-based OpenGL games.

-DOS VESA support is iffy. Radeon is the only card I've seen TIE Fighter SVGA lock up on.
-No D3D5 table fog. This makes some games look awful. It is sometimes possible to get it working with registry tweaks and older drivers but NVIDIA officially supports this up to GeForce 7.
-And if you like Bioware's NWN or KOTOR, you don't want these cards because the renderers are truly NVIDIA optimized. KOTOR works pretty well with Catalyst 4.2 though (you can even enable soft shadows).

Reply 28 of 153, by melbar

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Which AGP card would be best for a CPU for example a 1200MHz tualatin? OS is Win98.

  • - GF 2 Ti
    - GF 3 Ti200
    - GF 4 Ti4400 / 4800SE
    - GF FX5700

#1 K6-2/500, #2 Athlon1200, #3 Celeron1000A, #4 A64-3700, #5 P4HT-3200, #6 P4-2800, #7 Am486DX2-66

Reply 29 of 153, by meljor

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Geforce2 and 3 are good options and more period correct. Geforce4 is the best option as it is the quickest and gets you ''free AA'' compared to the others and also because it is a bit bottlenecked by that cpu without AA.

So ti4400 it is.

Cool it well, they get pretty hot and therefor die more often than ti4200.

asus tx97-e, 233mmx, voodoo1, s3 virge ,sb16
asus p5a, k6-3+ @ 550mhz, voodoo2 12mb sli, gf2 gts, awe32
asus p3b-f, p3-700, voodoo3 3500TV agp, awe64
asus tusl2-c, p3-S 1,4ghz, voodoo5 5500, live!
asus a7n8x DL, barton cpu, 6800ultra, Voodoo3 pci, audigy1

Reply 30 of 153, by brostenen

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++

The two fastest cards I have tried, that still retained the best compatibillity, are both Medion branded.
One is the GF4-ti4200 and the other is a Radeon9800-XXL. The worst card amoung highend that I have
tried, are the FX-5XXX range of GF cards. They are compatibility wise inferriour to GF4's.

SAM_0548.JPG
Filename
SAM_0548.JPG
File size
1.14 MiB
Views
5277 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception
SAM_0547 (1).JPG
Filename
SAM_0547 (1).JPG
File size
1.13 MiB
Views
5277 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

Now...
There are some things to consider, regarding these two cards. Though the 9800-XXL pumps out
a bit more than the 4200. The 9800-XXL is not a card I recommend.

The 9800-XXL runs extremely hot. So hot that I have a feeling that it will melt or something.
So in order to run that card, it need a bigger and better cooler.
The other thing about it, are that it lacks some technology, making early 98 games rendered
wrong. What exactly, I can not really remember. So it is reserved for late-98 gaming.

The 4200 on the other hand. Yet slower than the 9800, still fast enough. Runs cold.
This making it a good card for long time useage.
Yes it can be overclocked to a 4400 or faster, wich I would not recommend.
On the positive side. The 4200 is more compatible than the 9800-XXL.
On the other hand, the 9800-XXL has better control for AA and AF in both D3D and OpenGL.

However. Both cards will make you need to patch games for the latest version.
As both cards makes GFX quirks in early Win98 games. UT99 and Porche2000 to name a few.

Don't eat stuff off a 15 year old never cleaned cpu cooler.
Those cakes make you sick....

My blog: http://to9xct.blogspot.dk
My YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/brostenen

001100 010010 011110 100001 101101 110011

Reply 31 of 153, by Tetrium

User metadata
Rank l33t++
Rank
l33t++
melbar wrote:
Which AGP card would be best for a CPU for example a 1200MHz tualatin? OS is Win98. […]
Show full quote

Which AGP card would be best for a CPU for example a 1200MHz tualatin? OS is Win98.

  • - GF 2 Ti
    - GF 3 Ti200
    - GF 4 Ti4400 / 4800SE
    - GF FX5700

'Best' is kinda hard to say, it's also a matter of taste and of what one is wanting personally.
It also depends on what you have available.

But personally I'd pick the GF3 Ti200. I used a Medion one in my Tualatin 1400 and it seemed a good fit. That Medion GF3 was passive too, though I did give case cooling a little bit more attention in this build 😀

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 32 of 153, by melbar

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

Sure, it's a matter of taste. I have all these cards already. Only want to say, it's not easy to decide sometimes when you have several possibilities.

Cause the PIII tualatin are relativly expensive and i was searching for a cheap CPU, i have now a Tualeron (celeron 1000A). I think overclocking to 1.4Ghz should be no problem,
and my research & calculations have shown that it should be fast as an PIII 1200-tualatin (even with data-prefech considered).

Regarding correct time maching of this hardware i can see:

Celeron 1000A (release Jan. 2002)
GF 2 Ti (release Oct. 2001)
GF 3 Ti200 (release Oct. 2001)
GF 4 Ti4400 / 4800SE (release Feb. 2002 for the 4400, Jan. 2003 for the 4800SE)
GF FX5700 (release Oct. 2003)

#1 K6-2/500, #2 Athlon1200, #3 Celeron1000A, #4 A64-3700, #5 P4HT-3200, #6 P4-2800, #7 Am486DX2-66

Reply 33 of 153, by kanecvr

User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

This is a broad question. There's no such thing as "best windows 98 agp card". If you want to know what the fastest AGP video card with win98 drivers is, that would be the X850XT - but there's more to it than that.

For every machine, there's an appropriate video card. If the video card is too new, it will cause compatibility problem at a driver level (in some cases even at a hardware level) - for example using a GF 6800 in a pentium 3. You loose about 3/4 of the card's performance because the CPU and AGP interface are too slow to cope. Here's a few good examples of balanced builds:

- Skt 939 Athlon 64 (3800+ or faster) single core or a fast LGA775 P4 like the 660 or 670 + Radeon X850XT or GF 6800 ultra - this is the fastest you can go with win98.
- Skt 478 P4 (3GHz+) or Athlon XP 3200+ with a GF FX 5900XT or Radeon 9800
- Skt 478 P4 (2.4GHz+) or an Athon XP (2400+) with a Gefroce 4 Titanium 4600 or a Radeon 9700 PRO
- PIII 1.4GHz or Athlon (non-XP, 1333Mhz) + Geforce 4 Ti4200
- PIII 1GHz or Duron/Athlon + Radeon 8500 / Gerforce 3 Ti500

It all depends on what you want to play.

Reply 34 of 153, by betamax80

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

I am fortunate enough to have a 3dfx Voodoo3 3500TV that I brought when PC World was "firesaling" them in November 2000. Where does that fit in with all of this? Considering this is not my "main pc" by any means, and I have an XP box as well. Should I use it for that wonderful GLIDE functionality, or be looking at a more recent card in the ~2002 era as you guys are discussing?

Reply 35 of 153, by dr.zeissler

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

I currently use a GF6200-AGP passive 64Bit in my P4/1,6 Ghz (38TDP!). It is a very good card, even for 64Bit. I can run the early Radeon8500 up to 9700 radeon demos, and the matrox-reef-demo (3d-analyze). The GF4 demos do not run good, don't know why, the (older)Games I tested so far are very good in terms of visual quality and performance. I am currently thinking about testing an other card, but which DX9/win98/agp4x 1,5volt card is silent and only uses a single slot? (and is better then my gf6200)

Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines

Reply 37 of 153, by elianda

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

Isn't a 7950GT faster than a 7800?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-05PC-8aIA

Retronn.de - Vintage Hardware Gallery, Drivers, Guides, Videos. Now with file search
Youtube Channel
FTP Server - Driver Archive and more
DVI2PCIe alignment and 2D image quality measurement tool