Yes, ATI cards lacks 8-bit paletted textures and table fog. Because of these reasons, I would go for MX 440, especially, if you're aiming for Windows 98.

If you can get a 128 bit MX-440 or a MX-460 I'd get that of the 9250 for better compatibility with older games and back in those days I had less issues with Nvidia drives than ATI drivers.

Back in the early 2000s I had a Radeon 9200SE and I had no issues with the XP drivers.

The problem as I see it that you want the same PC both for XP and 98SE and the difficult thing is that as Srandista said, for 98SE you might want 8-bit paletted textures and table fog, while for XP you might want DirectX 9... which isn't supported by either of your options. The middle ground would be the Geforce FX which has good W98 support and also DX9 support, however it's trash for DX9, especially the lower end solutions (FX5200/5500) you might find cheaply. I couldn't recommend any FX below 5600 Ultra or 5700. They are just too close to and often beaten by the GF4 Ti in DX8 and too weak for proper DX9.

So If only these two are your options, then the Geforce MX to at least have a proper W98 feature list.
If you run into an FX5700, you can get nGlide on top and at least semi-decent DX9 speed in early titles.

For a while I thought of getting an fx 5200, but here in Brazil, fake versions of that card are very common. So it's not worth taking the risk.

To be honest, I played more the Win98 generation games and the early XP generation games. From 2002/2003 onwards I migrated to the consoles (for convenience, maybe). The MX 440 seems to be the best choice. Thanks!

A last question: can the mx 440 run Max Payne 2 minimally fine?

I just looked up the system requirements and you should be fine. I have a MX-460 in a socket A XP build and it runs games from that era quite well.

https://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/re … x-payne-2/11343

Windows 98 can have trouble with 1gb of RAM without a patch. Downgrading to 512mb would be better.

Retromonkey wrote on 2021-01-20, 00:43:

A last question: can the mx 440 run Max Payne 2 minimally fine?

I remember Max Payne 2 to be a very well optimized game. It should run very well. I have an MX400 series card at home. I don't remember if it's 400 or 440, but I think the latter. If I have the time I'll check it out, but this will be an especially busy weekend so no promises.

A small change: I noticed that all the options of the MX 440 are 64 bits, and a friend offered me an FX 5500 (256mb / 128bits) for a somewhat interesting price. In this scenario, is it still worth taking the MX 440?

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-01-20, 07:14:

Retromonkey wrote on 2021-01-20, 00:43:

A last question: can the mx 440 run Max Payne 2 minimally fine?

I remember Max Payne 2 to be a very well optimized game. It should run very well. I have an MX400 series card at home. I don't remember if it's 400 or 440, but I think the latter. If I have the time I'll check it out, but this will be an especially busy weekend so no promises.

Thanks, man! Don't worry.

Retromonkey wrote on 2021-01-20, 11:35:

A friend offered me an FX 5500 (256mb / 128bits) for a somewhat interesting price. In this scenario, is it still worth taking the MX 440?

I suspect not there are both W98 + WXP drivers for the FX 5500 .

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-01-19, 16:11:

If you can get a 128 bit MX-440 or a MX-460 I'd get that of the 9250 for better compatibility with older games and back in those days I had less issues with Nvidia drives than ATI drivers.

That's the problem: the cards I found are all 64 bits.

Will I have a very big loss of performance compared to a 128bit? Or do they still run the very early XP games minimally decent?

Is the performance loss between 128-bit and 64-bit versions significant enough to justify choosing an fx5500 (as I mentioned above)?

red-ray wrote on 2021-01-20, 11:52:

Retromonkey wrote on 2021-01-20, 11:35:

A friend offered me an FX 5500 (256mb / 128bits) for a somewhat interesting price. In this scenario, is it still worth taking the MX 440?

I suspect not there are both W98 + WXP drivers for the FX 5500 .

As they are two different systems (each one in a different HD), I can install specific versions of the driver for each windows. It wouldn't be a problem, would it?

Retromonkey wrote on 2021-01-20, 14:43:

As they are two different systems (each one in a different HD), I can install specific versions of the driver for each windows. It wouldn't be a problem, would it?

No problem at all, you don't even need to use different disks, just different partitions. I typically have a disk with several partitions and select which OS to use at boot time. The only real constraint is that W98 should be on C:, all the other drives should be in the logical drive partition and you should install the older ones first. Typically I install in the following order:

• C: Windows 98SE
• D: Windows 2000
• E: Windows XP Professional
• F: Windows 2003 Enterprise Server
• ...

Retromonkey wrote on 2021-01-20, 11:35:

RandomStranger wrote on 2021-01-20, 07:14:

I remember Max Payne 2 to be a very well optimized game. It should run very well. I have an MX400 series card at home. I don't remember if it's 400 or 440, but I think the latter. If I have the time I'll check it out, but this will be an especially busy weekend so no promises.

Thanks, man! Don't worry.

So I did the tests. My test setup was:

Abit SA7
512MB DDR RAM
1.6GHz Pentium 4 (Northwood)
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

The specs of the graphics cards (click for the large version):

I addet the TNT2s because I recently got the 16MB IBM branded version and I wanted to compare it with the 32MB non-branded version.
** I just noticed while writing this that the 32MB TNT2 I had isn't an M64 as I thought. I never looked at it that closely **
The Audigy is also a recent find I wanted to test in a W98 setup.

The games I was using were all original retail games:
International Rally Championship
Thief: The Dark Project
StarCraft
Need for Speed: High Stakes
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Max Payne: The Fall of Max Payne

Initially I wanted to test everything in Windows 98SE, but something got messed up with the DirectX and the last 3 games and 3DMark 2000 and 2001SE wouldn't launch so I tested these on XP.

Some older games also didn't support Fraps overlay so I'll only give my impressions. I tested everything on the highest available graphics settings in 1024×768 resolution.

Windows 98 SE tests

International Rally Championship: Aside of not letting me to enable hardware accelerated 3D, it ran very fast without any hiccup on everything. Fraps was visible in the game menu but not while racing.
Thief: The Dark Project: There were a couple of barely noticeable frame drops on the TNT2M64, but overall no real issue with anything.
StarCraft: I only played the first training level. On the 16MB TNT2 it was very stuttery. On the rest of the cards it ran well.
Need for Speed: High Stakes: On the TNT2M64 it's very stuttery; on the 32MB TNT2 when there are a lot of particle effects and a lot of cars on screen, like at the start of a race, it stutters, otherwise it ran alright. From MX440 upwards there are no problems.

Up until now I didn't have a first-hand experience with the FX-5200. I know it's abysmal, but it's surprising how slow it really is. And this one was a 128bit version and still soundly beaten by the MX440. Though back then the manufacturers tended to use slower memory on the 256MB variants of cards mid- or lower tier cards and this one indeed has very low-clocked memories so the MX440 had the Bandwith advantage. Well, it's not like the game isn't playable and the FX is more feature rich. Maybe that's what makes it slower. I had some weird experiences with Geforce MX cards where not supporting certain features made them faster. Like I used to have an MX200 which ran San Andreas better than my Radeon 9200 and was almost as fast as my Radeon 9600 Pro.

Windows XP tests

This time I left the TNT2s out. They have proven themselves in MOHAA.

]

So now I can run 3DMark. I think in 2000 there might be some bottleneck. In 2001SE all the cards do more or less as expected. Except the FX5200 which is still irredeemable garbage.

In games the MX440 did exceptionally well, again beating the FX5200 in every single game. And not just that, It was very close to the higher tier GPUs. Here comes what I wrote earlier. Sometimes not supporting certain features can be an advantage. I didn't see any serious image quality issues either. I have no doubts now, the MX440 is the budget king. The only game where it really struggled is Hot Pursuit 2.

The Ti200 on the other hand had some issues with Vice City. It just didn't want to launch. Otherwise it performed very close to the Ti4200. So close I started to suspect CPU bottleneck.

The Ti4200 is an old favorite of mine and this only strengthened my love.

And the FX5200... for the right price, to be precise on the same price as the MX440, it's alright. If you find one with 128bit bus AND 400MHz RAM, those might worth something, but the average bandwidth-starved versions are e-waste.