386SX wrote on 2021-08-19, 15:56:

About the Geforce 4 MX while I didn't use it I agree it might be a great late DX7 card but still far from period correct. It might work I suppose but the driver overhead might be a bit too much for the old cpu and also I'd check the bus wattage compatibility just like for the Radeon 7500. Anyway I still prefer the range of cards that might have been used in that period correct time. The Geforce 2 MX for example sounds always as a good feature full GPU for any late 90 - early 2000 configs while often with low quality VGA outputs.

I tried to replace 4MX with 2MX in one of my Intel BX builds (400MHz PII - to be more period correct) and simply can't. System hangs after installing drivers and reboot.
No matter which drivers I tried to use - same result. It wasn't possible to install drivers on Windows 98, even after clean install !
Moreover this wasn't this particular card issue - tried 2x 2MX400 and 1x 2MX200.
I was able to install Windows 95 on this motherboard with USB/AGP supplement and Nvidia drivers, but it wasn't very stable.
In contrast to this, every single 4MX card was working just fine, no matter if it was NV17 or NV18, 64bit or 128 bit, 64MB ram or 128MB ram. That's really strange...
And I observed strange issue with ctmouse + Dos Navigator in DOS. Only on 2MX !

Besides that, the performance and image quality (of 4MX cards) speaks for itself...
...and sometimes they also have DVI port.
...and for this GPU passive cooling is just fine (until it is not used with AthlonXP or Pentium 4), in fact this is what I'm using right now (with P3 750 on BX).
...driver overhead ? Detonators 40.72 are only 12MB zipped.

Looks like I'm advocate of Geforce 4MX cards 😉 Well, for Intel BX for sure !

As said I'm not expert of the Geforce 4 MX series so I don't remember which driver and until when it was supported but I suppose for a period when drivers did increase on weight (even the 2000 ATi R100 I think to remember was supported by some late Catalyst package). And talking about a Pentium II, to keep sw on the light side might help I suppose for the supported games.
I don't know why the MX200 or 400 couldn't run but it'd be interesting to test the original Geforce2 MX 32MB SDR to see if that problem is still there. Assuming to find a good brand one cause many didn't have exactly great output quality. The GPU instead was very good with all the feature anyone would need and that's why it had so much success.
Maybe a bit too modern for a time correct point of view but I suppose it was a good choice to give a last boost to such platforms just like a K6-2/3.
Anyway I'm not saying the 4 MX wasn't a good series, I wanted to find the MX 460 to collect time ago. 😉

I don't like the older NV-Cards. NV1 seems to be a cool thing... the first NV-card I really like is the GF3-passive and the GF6200 passive. So for this project I will not use an older riva128/tnt/tnt2/gf2/mx etc.

I did some further testing with S3/savage and R7000.

R7000
- has by far the best S3TC textures in UT99/Unreal with S3TC patch. This also has to do with the 16AF activated via driver.
- has some glitches in older games like Turok (eg "render overleap" must be deactivated).
- In Win3x R7000 works ootb with svga-standard 256color drivers.
- jazz2 stutters in hardware-mode

S3 Savage4
- is not as sharp as the R7000
- has native Win3x drivers, so full colors available
- is slower and produces some hickups in games
- has some glitches on textures in some games (eg HOTD2)
- has the best gfx-quality in Revil2 ( eg blood look here https://youtu.be/XVflw_Qj6JU ) I checked that and this guy is right, no other cards that I have is so good in this game.
- beside that he is also right in terms of the color spectrum. The S3-savage4 has the best colors I have seen so far. Even better then R7000 and this is a fantastic card.
- jazz2 is smooth in hardware-mode

Compared to G400/R7000 my opinion is that the G400 and the R7000 are the better choice for a P3 around 700mhz, from this and up I think it's better to go for a PS1/2 card. The Savage4 seems to be the right choice for a P2/400 or P3-500. Perhaps with a voodoo2 beside. For P2 slower then 366 the S3 savage can also be used with a voodoo1, but in my opinion it't better to go for >366mhz with the savage4.

EMBM is nice, but in the real world you better go for S3TC support because more games can make use of that.

Doc