dm- wrote on 2025-01-16, 04:26:

MATS/MODS for DOS

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pFuLL … kJDv4TiJKE_GWNw

Thank you for sharing this.

Could someone upload the vBios of those Visiontek cards earlier in the thread?

Well, today I FINALLY got the Pentium IIIEB 1000. A bit tricky to fit in the socket, a couple of pins were slighlty bent. Never had issue with pins that little bent, maybe socket 370 is more sensible to them, but nothing a poker card couldn't fix.

And what's there to say... I almost doubled the score on 3Dmark2000, going from 2200 to 4173. Guess that Celeron 700 was a bottleneck even for a TNT2 M64.
I'll have to test some games, but at this point I'm not even sure how much I will need a Ti 4200 to play pre 2001 games.
I'll think about it while the Albatron Ti 4200 is in for repair.

In the meantime I absolutely need to replace and upgrade the ram (currently it runs one PC100 stick and the other PC133, a mess), get a new hard drive (the one I have is a 20GB 4500rpm one from 2000), maybe separate the HDD and DVD drive on two IDE channels, instead of sharing one, and replace the stock dinatron fan on the new cooler. 6000 rpm sure will provide great cooling, but I feel that for a 29W CPU is kinda overkill. Gotta get a noctua 60mm fan.
Only after that I'll think about the GPU and the sound card...

TheMLGladiator wrote on 2025-01-20, 14:10:

Could someone upload the vBios of those Visiontek cards earlier in the thread?

Isn't there a wiki with bios and drivers here on vogons?

Got the card back from the repair shop. They told me they reballed both the GPU and the memory (for 40€ total).

First impressions are astonishing: The card boots up without any artifacts in the OS. Even installing drivers, it's all smooth and crisp.
Going into Benchmarks something weird happens.
3dmark2000 benchmark goes without a problem, 6827 points (was expecting higher, but maybe both the pentium III and the 2x AGP limitation thanks of the chipset are to blame) and no noticeable artifacts.
But, when playing the demo, here some artifacts appear again. They are mostly visible on 2D elements, like the "DX7 introduction" video and the loading screens. During 3D they are almost invisible, maybe popping here and there in some 3D scenes, and not all of them.
Then I moved to games.
First Half Life, I have the demo installed: Open GL no issue whatsoever. smooth as butter even at 1024x768 and no artifacts to be seen. But Direct3D renderer? Here's some artifacts back. Actually more prominent than 3dmark2000. Artifacts that would make the game bothersome to play.
That's weird. Let's test another DX game.
I pop in Max Payne and, look at that, basically no artifact (some white pixel may pop up on some frames, but you need to look for it to notice), and again smooth as butter.

Reported back to the repair shop, we're both happy with the result. The card can be used to play games and works properly in most cases, the remaining artifact are most likely caused by silicon degradation, and nothing can be done there. For an overall expense of 40€ on this card (I got refunded by the seller since it arrived completely fried), I can't even complain when looking at average prices of Ti 4200. I think I'll keep it and use it in this machine, untill it properly dies, then it may serve as a nice spare parts provider. Then I'll decide if it's worth to keep buying upgrades over the TNT2 M64.

Unless some of you may have an idea to why only some DirectX application keep showing artifacts, while none are present in either the OS, OpenGL and other DX games.

Mondodimotori wrote on 2025-01-28, 20:27:

Artifacts that would make the game bothersome to play.

Try to reduce the GPU and memory frequency by 50-100 MHz.

Takedasun wrote on 2025-02-02, 12:46:

Try to reduce the GPU and memory frequency by 50-100 MHz.

Yeah, I was thinking about trying that. Afterall, this version of the Ti 4200 has a pretty heavy OC on both the memory and the GPU itself when compared to the reference model. But I'm alredy happy enough that the card went from a brick to being useful. I also tested it in 3dMark2001 and, while clearly is CPU limited by the Pentium III, I can't see any artifacts whatsoever. Even in the loading screen and introduction "DirectX 8" video, while they would pop up proninently in the 3dMark2000 loading screen and "DirectX 7" video.
I'll for sure try to downclock the card a bit and see if the artifacts go away, but I'll probably keep that underclock simply to preserve the silicon for longer. It's not like its gonna make that big of a difference with a Pentium III.