Thanks for doing this. How come the voodoo 3 3000 shows "0" in all the results though? I have one in my PIII rig and am curious about how it compares to the rest of the bunch...

MMaximus wrote:

Thanks for doing this. How come the voodoo 3 3000 shows "0" in all the results though? I have one in my PIII rig and am curious about how it compares to the rest of the bunch...

Because he's only showing results at 32bpp. 🙁

OP - thank you for posting this. I will go to your site to check the rest of the results. When results take months (let alone a year) to collect, I always give the utmost respect. Cheers, and thanks!

Great work. I'm surprised by the mx440 beating a GeForce 3!

If I lived closer I'd loan you my cards for testing. No way I got time for that testing.

Awesome! That's already an impressive collection of cards.

Always lovely to see the MX440 do well.

Thanks for doing this and sharing it with the community. We greatly benefit from the blood, sweat, tears, and time that goes into this endeavor.

Thank you for nice set of tests. Just few notes from my side.

In Unreal Benchmark, you probably have a mistake, with resolution 640x480x32, you probably meant x32, not x16: "Enabling 32-bit color in Unreal Gold causes a significant performance drop across the board, even at 640x480x16."

And it's pity, that you tested all ATI cards with 6.2 driver, as it seams, that on slower HW, it's driver with highest overhead, at least according to testing of this fellow Vogoner: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, quick test.. The 6.2 version is only needed for 9550.

And also, it's too bad, that you don't have Radeon 9500 instead of 9550. That card it's real underdog in my eyes, since if you have right version (non-Pro with 128MB RAM), then that card its having 256-bit memory bus width (not 128-bit, as Wikipedia suggest), and also with some luck can be unlocked by Softmod into full blown 9700, and with a bit overclock even surpass 9700 Pro.

But other then that, I give you my highest respect for your dedication during the testing!

Srandista wrote:

In Unreal Benchmark, you probably have a mistake, with resolution 640x480x32, you probably meant x32, not x16: "Enabling 32-bit color in Unreal Gold causes a significant performance drop across the board, even at 640x480x16."

Fixed. Good catch!

Srandista wrote:

And it's pity, that you tested all ATI cards with 6.2 driver, as it seams, that on slower HW, it's driver with highest overhead, at least according to testing of this fellow Vogoner: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, quick test.. The 6.2 version is only needed for 9550.

Catalyst 6.2 does seem to have an awful lot of overhead. If I ever revisit any of the ATI cards, I'll have to try some of the older drivers and see what kind of impact they have on the benchmarks. I hear bad things about older ATI drivers, though, so I wonder if I'd just be trading high overhead for bugs. 😒

Srandista wrote:

And also, it's too bad, that you don't have Radeon 9500 instead of 9550. That card it's real underdog in my eyes, since if you have right version (non-Pro with 128MB RAM), then that card its having 256-bit memory bus width (not 128-bit, as Wikipedia suggest), and also with some luck can be unlocked by Softmod into full blown 9700, and with a bit overclock even surpass 9700 Pro.

I'm definitely looking to acquire more R300-based cards. While the Radeon 9550 wasn't the fastest card I tested for this project, it did have the unique ability to enable 4x AA and 8x AF with virtually no performance cost. (Not the case for the GeForce 6200!) Driver compatibility was damn near perfect, too. I can imagine that the mid-range R300 cards would be quite nice to have for Windows 98 gaming.

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Great work. I'm surprised by the mx440 beating a GeForce 3!

firage wrote:

Always lovely to see the MX440 do well.

The GeForce4 MX440 is pretty much my favorite Windows 98 card. It's as fast as the GeForce2 Ultra (sometimes faster) and doesn't have the wavy horizontal lines problem (discussed here). The GeForce3 beats the MX440 in some tests, but it has the blurry font problem in Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, which is basically a deal breaker for me.

If I could only have one video card for Windows 98 gaming, it would probably be a GeForce4 MX440 or something similar (MX460, Quadro4 380XGL).

Thanks to everyone who's responded so far. It's good to know that other people find value in this kind of stuff. If I ever get the urge to embark on another benchmarking project, I'll be sure to share the results here.

maximus wrote:

Catalyst 6.2 does seem to have an awful lot of overhead. If I ever revisit any of the ATI cards, I'll have to try some of the older drivers and see what kind of impact they have on the benchmarks. I hear bad things about older ATI drivers, though, so I wonder if I'd just be trading high overhead for bugs. 😒

If you're still having trouble finding older ATI drivers, here's a place that may help (scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page on that link for the older 9x-compatible drivers: http://www.oldapps.com/ati.php

I use Catalyst 3.1, so that version may be worth a shot to try on your Radeon 8500 and 7500.

I'm surprised by the mx440 beating a GeForce 3!

That's because all this tests does not include trilinear filtering.