VOGONS


First post, by data9791

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I found a working RV100 in some junk I was given. From what I understand these are basically the shitbox version of a Radeon 7000. But being PCI, my thinking is it may be useful to me as a dos card or something. Does this thing have any practical use beyond being a vastly inferior 98se/XP spare to the cards I already own?

Reply 1 of 3, by Warlord

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I don't think it's particularly valuable, but in dos it might be a good card, its not as good for retro gaming as early geforce cards because it lacks some "Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported."

Reply 2 of 3, by dionb

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Could be usable as DOS card in PCI-only build.

Really depends on your resources/situation. One of these could be most useful in a PC with no AGP and nasty integrated video eating memory bandwidth, such as i810, SiS530/540/630/PLE133 chipsets. It would perform similarly to a TNT2 PCI, i.e. good enough not to be a bottleneck in DOS, but if you want serious Windows/DirectX stuff you need a better card. So only useful for a DOS system where the performance impact of UMA/shared memory VGA actaully matters.

Then again, one of the great luxuries with retro stuff is that performance doesn't have to matter - compared to new stuff it's all glacially slow anyway, and if you need a faster system, you just use a slightly less old one. So nothing stops you from building a period-correct crappy low-end system. For a short while I tried to combine as many buggy oddities as possible in one system - i820 chipset with MTH and SDRAM, Savage2000 AGP, too-hot P3-600B etc. Until I decided I had better things to do with my time 😉

Reply 3 of 3, by appiah4

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It probably has TV-Out and DVI which makes it good for capturing DOS mode stuff.

It's also a pretty good card for i810 Pentium III buıilds; I use a Radeon 7000 in my Compaq Deskpro EN-SFF for this purpose. It runs cool and has comparable performance to a TNT2/G450.

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