I had been running 97/9800 pro's and even an Nvidia 6600GT in my 98SE machine. I dropped it back to using a slower CPU and a 4400Ti for much better compatibility.

I found the games that suited the faster cards play much better on my XP machine.

Yeah I have picked up several Pentium III and 4 platforms as i've been trying to come up with the perfect retro rig for me, but ultimately found that sticking with a single Pentium III and closer-to-Windows 98-era graphics card seems to work best since I want to be able to play everything from a handful of DOS games up to about where Windows Xp took over.

I've noticed that a number of pre-Xp-era games aren't coded to run at a specific speed so if you get into Pentium 4 era parts they run unplayably fast (specifically thinking of Zork Nemesis and Zork Grand Inquisitor here). With a 1ghz PIII I can slow their in-game rotation enough to play properly.

Depending on your performance goals, it seems that sticking with hardware roughly of the same era as the games you want to play typically gives the best game compatibility and experience.

it seems that sticking with hardware roughly of the same era as the games you want to play typically gives the best game compatibility and experience

Mostly never, especially when it comes to hardware 3D accelerated games.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-10-01, 18:14:

it seems that sticking with hardware roughly of the same era as the games you want to play typically gives the best game compatibility and experience

Mostly never, especially when it comes to hardware 3D accelerated games.

you're saying that using hardware from the same era as the game 'mostly never' gives the best compatibility and experience?

Not sure I follow - do you have any reason for feeling that way?

As far as I recall especially for early 3D hardware accelerated games you pretty much HAVE to have the hardware they were designed for if you want to play them with hardware acceleration at all since there were so many incompatible 3D technologies at the time.

texterted wrote on 2020-10-01, 15:45:

I had been running 97/9800 pro's and even an Nvidia 6600GT in my 98SE machine. I dropped it back to using a slower CPU and a 4400Ti for much better compatibility.

I found the games that suited the faster cards play much better on my XP machine.

What was "more compatibile"? You were able to play more games? Things ran smoother?

I think I am going to drop my 98 machine down the Ti4600 and see how it goes.

More of an "out of the box" sort of thing. Less meddling to get to play and more time spent playing!

For instance, NFS 5 (Porsche 2000). No way could I get it to work with my Radeons. Popped the Ti back in with the 45.23's and it fired right up.
I found that an A64 3000+ cpu, (1800MHz) got the best out of the Ti . Where I was using a 3800+ (2,400MHz) with the Radeons. Using a cpu over 2GHz can bring it's own issues.

Sure you can underclock or whatever, but now I just power it on and play. Which is kinda the whole point, really. My 98se machine with the Ti. Is still a beast, it's fantastic to use and something I could only dream about back in the day.

If you are lucky enough to have more than one machine? Then you can build them to suit the games you want to play. For me, anything borderline on the 98se machine gets played on the XP machine and I am a very happy bunny. 😁

I should mention that not everything is perfect, it's still Windows 98 after all. 😁 Using the Ti card still has its quirks, just a heck of a lot less than I had using the Radeons.

I may rebuild it shortly, only using dx8.1, to suit the Ti. As I have dx9 on it currently.

Radeons lost paletted textures and table fog -- go a Ti4600 or a FX5900U for the ultimate non-3dfx/pre-DX9 experience.

As far as I recall especially for early 3D hardware accelerated games you pretty much HAVE to have the hardware they were designed for

There are few exceptions like DOS Glide games for Voodoo 1, but most will run better on Voodoo 2 or even Voodoo 3. Other obscure proprietary stuff usually don't provide good gaming experience. And D3D and OGL games in general only win from more modern hardware.

texterted wrote on 2020-10-01, 23:46:

For instance, NFS 5 (Porsche 2000). No way could I get it to work with my Radeons. Popped the Ti back in with the 45.23's and it fired right up.
I found that an A64 3000+ cpu, (1800MHz) got the best out of the Ti . Where I was using a 3800+ (2,400MHz) with the Radeons. Using a cpu over 2GHz can bring it's own issues.

Strange, had no issues in NFS Porsche (Windows 98SE) with my Core 2 Duo / Radeon 9800 Pro / 2 GB RAM PC. It runs perfectly with Anisotropic filtering and Antialiasing when using Catalyst 4.3 😀
Anyway, for the absolute max performance (without sacrificing compatibility) in both DOS and Windows 98, I would go with a GeForce 3/Ti200/Ti500.
GeForce 4 Ti 4200-4600 cards are also very good for DOS, however performance is slower (but usually still more than enough, even for late DOS games).
If DOS is not really a concern, GeForce FX 5900(XT) is probably the perfect card for Windows 98 (and it's still good for occasional DOS usage, but some DOS games/demos will have issues such as image corruption).

your CPU is kinda overkill for 98se. You can drive a decently powerful card with that and run DX9 games with it. Thats really not the realm of 98se. A dx9 game runs a lot better on windows xp or even 2000sp4 . If you want to run old games like dx7 and some dx8 games thats like a TI4200. Thats the card id recommend for that. But then you cant take advantage of your overpowered CPU. So maybe you should go for something like a FX5700

I agree that a Pentium 4 is overkill for most Win98 games, however this is not always the case. Heck, I have two WinXP/Win98 dual boot machines with Core 2 Duo / Pentium Dual Core CPUs.
The truth of the matter is that, surprisingly, there are some Win98 games which are CPU bottlenecked even on an Athlon XP 2500+ (NFS High Stakes is one such example, which is probably poorly optimized - very hard to achieve a steady 60+ FPS)

On the other hand, I think that a Pentium 4 can actually struggle with newer Windows XP games (and even some older ones, like Far Cry). So, to me, P4 makes sense either as a Win98 only PC or as a dual boot WinXP/Win98 PC (which would allow you to play basically all Win98 games + early Win XP games). But for an XP-only machine, I think there are much better options than a Pentium 4.

And as for video cards, an FX 5900 / 5950 (or even better, a Radeon 9800 PRO/XT) do make a lot of sense if you simply want to max out everything including Anisotropic Filtering, Antialiasing and also run late Win98 games @ 1600 x 1200 or similar resolutions.
Not saying it's something that everyone wants to do, many times I myself simply prefer to play games on a SS7 PC, at < 30 FPS, just for nostalgia purposes 😀 .

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-10-02, 06:03:

As far as I recall especially for early 3D hardware accelerated games you pretty much HAVE to have the hardware they were designed for

There are few exceptions like DOS Glide games for Voodoo 1, but most will run better on Voodoo 2 or even Voodoo 3. Other obscure proprietary stuff usually don't provide good gaming experience. And D3D and OGL games in general only win from more modern hardware.

This 'exceptions' list is much bigger than 'a few' TBH:
3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)

as I said, in those mid-to-late 90's times there were several competing 3D technologies fighting for dominance before DirectX and OpenGL finally ended up winning. As you can see from that thread I linked, you literally can't play those games with hardware 3D acceleration without their specific technology supported in hardware.

Glide was sort of a middle position API as it had broader support than the 3D technologies on that list but we remember what happened to 3DFX... RIP.

kalm_traveler wrote on 2020-10-02, 15:13:

This 'exceptions' list is much bigger than 'a few' TBH: 3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D) […]
Show full quote

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-10-02, 06:03:

As far as I recall especially for early 3D hardware accelerated games you pretty much HAVE to have the hardware they were designed for

There are few exceptions like DOS Glide games for Voodoo 1, but most will run better on Voodoo 2 or even Voodoo 3. Other obscure proprietary stuff usually don't provide good gaming experience. And D3D and OGL games in general only win from more modern hardware.

This 'exceptions' list is much bigger than 'a few' TBH:
3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)

as I said, in those mid-to-late 90's times there were several competing 3D technologies fighting for dominance before DirectX and OpenGL finally ended up winning. As you can see from that thread I linked, you literally can't play those games with hardware 3D acceleration without their specific technology supported in hardware.

Glide was sort of a middle position API as it had broader support than the 3D technologies on that list but we remember what happened to 3DFX... RIP.

Ah yes the issue of all the odd apis that popped up while 3d acceleration was maturing. This is partially why I'm hesitant at just buying the most powerful GPU my board can support. In theory getting the last apg based graphics card and using something like glidegl will work for the majority of games people will want to play. But it f eels like I would be missing something by doing so.

Personally I run a Xeon 3230 with a 9800 Pro, and a Voodoo 2 add in card. This covers all the bases since I don't use this machine for DOS games.

So you can r un a voodoo card along with an average gpu? I was wondering and probably look into nabbing a card. Though I almost wonder if it would be possible to build a 3dfx card from a fpga? Heck would be neat if it was possible to build a gpu that's roughly late 90s era that could do dx, ogl, and glide with an fpga.

as I said, in those mid-to-late 90's times there were several competing 3D technologies

And like I said, it's mostly worse experience, compared to software on powerful CPU or 3dfx.

Hedgie wrote on 2020-10-04, 01:50:

So you can r un a voodoo card along with an average gpu? I was wondering and probably look into nabbing a card. Though I almost wonder if it would be possible to build a 3dfx card from a fpga? Heck would be neat if it was possible to build a gpu that's roughly late 90s era that could do dx, ogl, and glide with an fpga.

Definitely technically do-able, just need someone with enough drive and know-how to make it a reality.

Off the top of my head you'd need an FPGA powerful enough to do 3D graphics and be programmed to understand all those API calls from the various APIs used, and possibly more importantly someone who could write drivers for it afterwards for Windows 9x / 2000 / maybe Xp.

What do you think?

The issue is. Well is there an FPGA powerful enough to do those API calls and calculations? I'm not familiar enough to know. Mean I do know you can manage to runs older systems like amiga with one. Also is 3dfx glide even open source? Seems there might be some legality issues to consider with all of this outside of a gpu doing OGL.