get a geforce2 titanium card 😀 and here is an article with 21 of them, there are two fg2ti cards with dvi too!
http://www.thg.ru/graphic/20011218/print.html

Leadtek WinFast Titanium TH
Suma Platinum GeForce2 Ti

(I hope that the gf2ti chip is a real ggf2 and not a low-cost gf3 🙄 )

some of the Hercules 3D Prophet II GeForce 2 have DVI output

the problem is that the video signal from the DVI is general very poor because its goes through the RAMDAC and then to the SiliconImage Chip to get Digitalized again. like on most other cards from this time

Very interesting. Thanks a lot people. 😀

You can improve the quality on pretty much any Geforce2 by removing the little bypass capacitors behind the VGA plug. The mod won't make it into a Matrox card or anything, but it'll give you a decently sharp output.

It doesn't take much time or skill to do, either, basically all you need is a fine-tipped soldering iron and a needle, heat the things up and pop 'em off.

I've gotta get myself a soldering iron! 😀
One day, I could recap my "bad caps" Epox mobo. The next day, I could improve the image quality on a GF2 card. That's 2 for the price of 1. 😉

Yes, it would definitely be a productive investment if you're going to be playing with old hardware, especially Athlon-era parts, where everything seemed to have shoddy capacitors.

One other thing to consider, WRT the GF2, is maybe take a look at the GF4 MX440. That card essentially is a GF2, but with generally better output quality, and it's a lot easier to find them with DVI ports, too.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

WRT the GF2, is maybe take a look at the GF4 MX440. That card essentially is a GF2, but with generally better output quality, and it's a lot easier to find them with DVI ports, too.

Ah! I've got one of those. One made by Gainward. And its output quality is very good.

Well, if you don't mind it not being 100% 'period correct' then it'd be worth a try. Basically, they took the GF2 core, changed the memory architecture a little bit for cost-reduction, and added proper dual monitor support and some video decoding features for MPEG2. In games, though, it's functionally about the same as a GF2 Ti.

I highly recommend these two GF 2 models:

Gainward Geforce 2 Pro 64mb GS

Crystal clear output and 64mb of videom mem isn't too shabby...and it's the "GS" model so it's more overclock tolerant

My 2nd recommendation is the Asus V7700 series...there's a nice 64mb Pro model...crystal clear output too

Thanks - I will try and get a Gainward GF2.
And then I'll race it against my Gainward GF4 MX440! 😁

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nv … eForce_2_series
clock speed info. GeForce2 Ultra is the top of the heap, even compared to the later Pro and Ti cards.

The GeForce4MX is much more efficient than the 2. They really improved their architecture. The GF4MX 440 can challenge the best GF2 cards much of the time. The GF4MX 460, which is rather rare, is faster than all GF2s, I believe. It's also faster than the GF3 cards at times.
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/gf4mx/

wow, MX440 cards are actually better than normal GF2/pro ones? that is new to me

The GeForce4 MX is mainly a boosted GF2 due to memory controller rework (Lightspeed Memory Architecture II). Ok and Hardware iDCT, but that doesn't improve 3D performance.
This site lists the theoretical bandwidth and technical parameters quite well: http://mysite.verizon.net/pchardwarelinks/video_tnt.htm
GF2 Ti and the GF4MX feature the newer 0.15 micron size and the GF4MXs have also higher clock rates.

Yeah the GF4MX is simply much more efficient. GF2 threw away a lot of performance because of how inefficient it was at using memory bandwidth and managing hidden surface removal (I don't think it did this at all).

LMA is similar to ATI's HyperZ. Just another marketing name for hidden surface removal, z-buffer optimization, caches and memory access tweaks.

If you look up the original Radeon SDR reviews you can see it destroy the GeForce2 MX for the same reason. And Radeon 7500 can match GeForce2 Ultra even with half of the fillrate. The real Radeon 7500 at 290/230 clocks, that is, not the cheap knockoff versions.

Thanks a lot everyone. This place is a goldmine of awesome retro information.

swaaye wrote:

... And Radeon 7500 can match GeForce2 Ultra even with half of the fillrate. The real Radeon 7500 at 290/230 clocks, that is, not the cheap knockoff versions.

That's really interesting. Is it possible to spot a real Radeon 7500 from a cheap knockoff, just by looking at a photo on ebay for example?

It'd be hard to pick one out from a picture. The newer cheapo ones, and the OEM ones are usually pretty easy to spot, with brightly colored PCBs and large-ish cheapy aluminum heatsinks on the former, and low-profile or oddly shaped PCBs on the latter. The original one looks pretty much the same as a first-gen Radeon. The trouble is, there's also a 7500LE that looks almost identical to the 'good' ones.

exxe wrote:

some of the Hercules 3D Prophet II GeForce 2 have DVI output

the problem is that the video signal from the DVI is general very poor because its goes through the RAMDAC and then to the SiliconImage Chip to get Digitalized again. like on most other cards from this time

I had one a 3D Prophet II and was very happy with it. IIRC it was easily overclockable too. I never tried the DVI output but I do remember reviewers not liking it.

retro games 100 wrote:

That's really interesting. Is it possible to spot a real Radeon 7500 from a cheap knockoff, just by looking at a photo on ebay for example?

The retail Radeon 7500 cards built by ATI look like this (this is my card). It comes clocked at 290MHz core, 230MHz RAM.

I tried overclocking it and I remember getting the core to a bit over 300MHz and the RAM to around 330MHz. It had more memory bandwidth than a GeForce4 Ti 4600. The GPU can't really take advantage of that much bandwidth though. 😁

The retail Radeon 7500 cards built by ATI look like this (this is my card)

Yep, that's the one I was thinking of, seems to be the most commonly available one. But like I said above, you still have to be careful, because the 7500LE looked like that too, and eBay listings don't always specify which version it is. If you got the LE DDR, it wouldn't be so much a problem, as you could likely clock it up to standard speeds, but there was also an LE with SDRAM.