Wait sorry, I accidentally posted it in Video and not General Old Hardware. Can any administrator move this post there?

No, Radeon X850XT is as far as you can go in Windows 98.

Oh, thanks for letting me know. What about the motherboard and CPU? which combination will work best?
Also, on the AMD site for the graphics card, it says this:
Note: As of January 1, 2004, Microsoft no longer accepted certification submissions for the Microsoft® Windows® Millennium Edition operating system. The ATI Catalyst® CREW however is committed to all its customers and is now providing non certified WHQL software drivers for users of the Windows Millennium Edition operating system. Windows Millennium Edition users can obtain the software driver at: http://www.support.ati.com/. Windows 98/98SE is supported through the ME driver.
If I understand it correct, the Windows Me driver will work fine on Windows 98 if I install it on there. Is that true?

Oh wait ,it was on the website for Catalyst 6.5. My bad. Guess I'll have to wait for the parts to ship.

The last driver that ATI released for Windows Me & 98 was version 6.2, which, as I mentioned previously, supports cards like the Radeon X800 / X850 series.

Regarding a motherboard and CPU, this is debatable. There are many options...
My personal preference when it comes to using Windows 98 with these ultra overkill powerful cards, is to go all out and also use an ultra overkill CPU (such as a Core 2 Duo E7500/E7600 or Pentium Dual Core E5800). My motherboard of choice for these CPUs is the Asrock 775i65g R2.0/R3.0. This way, you can have a WinXP/Win98 dual boot PC, which is ultra overkill for 98, but also very decent for early XP gaming.

If, on the other hand, you prefer to keep it at least semi-period correct, you can also go with an Athlon 64 Venice/San Diego or Pentium 4 Northwood build. Depending on the game & resolution, these CPUs (particularly the Northwood) can bottleneck an X800/X850 video card in Windows XP, though.

I think that building some kind overkill platform for Win98 is not bad idea as this allow to play any Win98 game on it maximum and get best experience. I also build such system on the Asrock 775i65g R2.0 with Radeon X800GTO (current as I need new PSU to return X850XT back in rig) with 512 MB DDR2, Vortex 2. And I have to say that play many old games is a pleasure and not an old experience when I was limited on hardware that I can use. I think if you are not try to be time correct and build authentic rig its the best that any can a fold.

Retroit wrote on 2021-04-19, 13:28:

I think that building some kind overkill platform for Win98 is not bad idea as this allow to play any Win98 game on it maximum and get best experience. I also build such system on the Asrock 775i65g R2.0 with Radeon X800GTO (current as I need new PSU to return X850XT back in rig) with 512 MB DDR2, Vortex 2. And I have to say that play many old games is a pleasure and not an old experience when I was limited on hardware that I can use. I think if you are not try to be time correct and build authentic rig its the best that any can a fold.

Same mobo here but with an X800 Pro, and indeed, it's glorious. I can do any game at 1600x1200, FSAA maxed out, 60fps locked, it's glorious. Games didn't run this well for me in the day and now an overkill Windows machine lets me do just that.

I run a Biostar P4M890-M7 SE LGA775 motherboard with an Intel Core2Duo E4600, an ASUS Extreme AX850PRO and 2 GB of RAM and let me tell you: It is PURE BLISS. ı don't go back to my more time corerct Windows 98 builds anymore.

I also have a Typhoon A471-N60/A461-L00 (Yamaha YMF744) sound card in there which provides decent Sound Blaster compatibility, OPL3 and wavetable for DOS games too. It's just so good.

I dual boot Windows 98 with Antix 19.3 Linux, that means whenever I need to get online with that box or do some productivity task, I don't even need to switch to my main PC.

Apparently there are unsigned Millennium edition drivers in an ATI V6.5 driver installer release it is said they are unsigned but compatible with both millennium and 98se.
I looked everywhere so I will try the v6.2 release for 98/me
Personally I need it but I can't find it all i see is use v6.2 does the v6.5 catalyst installer xp include the unofficial millennium driver as well? i did see it back in the day but the card vanished i have another i wanna fire up millennium with it to go with my 4gb ram and 500gb fat32 big fat PATA disk 😀 oh i have 160, 250, 500, 1000, 2000gb sata's as well
I promise a full bench and spec disclosure about it! but i need drivers first so if 6.2 dun work i'll be back to say so.

Sorry to revive an old thread, but AMD's own website says in the listing for 6.5 says that the Windows ME driver will provide Windows 98 compatibility for this card: https://drivers.amd.com/relnotes/catalyst_65_ … ease_notes.html

Internet Archive didn't get the ATI Support pages properly so I can't find it there. Surely this must exist on a hard drive somewhere though? I've got a AGP 1600 and I'd love to be able to use it in a fast 98 build. Frankly, it's more interesting for that than as a period-correct XP card.

The listed driver is for Windows 2000/XP. Last driver for Win9x family of operating systems is 6.2, which has no driver model for any R5xx generation chips.
Also X1600 still sucks for Win9x gaming workload compared to Radeon X700, because the latter has twice the amount of pixel pipelines and rasterizer units.

IIRC last working driver for Ati and 98 was for the X850 XT PE, 98 never got support beyond that.

For nvidia its the 7900 GS. I might be remembering that wrong and it was an earlier 7 series card.

Both cards though would be terriblefor most 98 games due to missing features.

Here's what the page for Catalyst 6.5 which I linked to actually says:

As of January 1, 2004, Microsoft no longer accepted certification submissions for the Microsoft® Windows® Millennium Edition operating system. The ATI Catalyst® CREW however is committed to all its customers and is now providing non certified WHQL software drivers for users of the Windows Millennium Edition operating system. Windows Millennium Edition users can obtain the software driver at: http://www.support.ati.com/. Windows 98/98SE is supported through the ME driver.

It might suck compared to a X700 or 7900GS but...these cards aren't exactly easy to find these days and I'd still like to try it if it works.

That notice leads to long dead ATi support site with no indication that it has anything to do with Catalyst 6.5. So it's just another wild-goose chase.

Last Windows ME drivers I can find anywhere are the Catalyst 6.2 drivers, So I assume anything later never actually got released even if the patch notes state otherwise.

Also relying on ATI patch notes for accuracy was bad back in the day and still is now.

Even found a FTP archive of ATI drivers here https://ftpmirror.infania.net/sites/ati/ATI%20Catalyst/ and there are zero 98/me drivers beyond 6.2.

Surprised anyone still has an archive working but this one is, might have to grab a mirror of it myself.

That's a pretty cool archive!

And maybe you're right. Catalyst 6.4 has the same note and it might just refer to the 6.2 drivers. And 6.2 for XP supports the X1600 but not for Windows ME. I'll let go on this I guess.