Raithe on 23/4/2012 at 01:15
So the other day my friend brings me a falcon northwest fragbox pro. Pentium 4, AGP and I'm thinking, this will make a great pre 2005 gaming rig.
The only thing I'm stuck on is picking a graphics card. I'm building this to run stuff from 95-04 Doom3, Thief 3, UT2k4 etc will be about as high as it goes; AVP Gold, Thief Gold, X-BtF will be the lower. (excluding dos box titles) Now I know that everything NVIDIA has problems after the FX line. (my experience stops at geforce 2 gts and starts again at 8800 gts so I'm going off what I've read) I had a Hercules 3d Prophet 9700 pro (R.I.P.) and while I recall occasional glitches in older titles what I really recall was the catalyst/bios nightmare trying to get it set up right. (though it was fast once I did)
So here is my query: Going for maximum legacy compatibility while still maintaining playable (though outstanding wouldn't be frowned upon) framerates in the the 2004 era titles, which card is the best bet? (Bear in mind that this is an SFF case which means the card cooler faces the outer edge, so no dual slot solutions) Right now from my end of the research it's looking like a 5900 ultra or a ti4800se.
I know there are things like ddfix for certain titles, but that's only for beloved iconic marvels like Thief with awesome fan communities. Doesn't help on the oddball gems, so we're looking for the last generation of cards before the GPU manufacterers said "DX 6/7? .... Never heard of it"
voodoo47 on 24/4/2012 at 19:46
if you are looking for performance, a radeon9800 or perhaps geforce6600 would be the way to go (especially if you want decent performance in doom3/ut2004). both of those cards should be able to run old dx6/7 games fine (may require some tinkering with the drivers though). I wouldn't recommend anything older/slower, the driver support is much worse and there is no gain in the compatibility field either.
as for drivers, when talking about older cards (r9800/gf6600) catalyst is more solid, but the last update was a few years ago, nv keeps releasing new ones, but they are doing a poor job, and finding a driver that "runs all my games without artifacts" can be a nightmare.
and stay away from bridged cards from ati (x1000 agp series, for example), they tend to be problematic, especially on older agp chipsets (bridged cards from nv, like the 6600, are ok). fx series from nv is pretty awful as well..
Raithe on 25/4/2012 at 16:44
Radeon isn't physically an option. The motherboard (for who knows what reason) has the cmos battery mounted vertically about halfway between the agp port and the card back plate. (exactly where the fan connection on older nvidia cards is, which can just fit though its tight, but on all radeons there are a series of three capacitors there. tried it with my burned up 9700.)
I don't mind tinkering with drivers to find the perfect set, in fact I find that sort of thing enjoyable. (easier with nvidia than ati, as ati's seem to jump around randomly where nvidia's are mostly linear in degredation: newer=worse) I NEVER use driver revisions past the release of the next generation card without very good reason as they tend to be flat awful since their too focused on the newer hardware.
My concern is hardware support. For example the FX line is the last set nvidia's to support 8-bit palleted textures. (ati never did, well maybe the rage. all 3dfx's do.) If you look at all the old games the problems all start popping up with the release of the 6800. Those early DX games used some weird tricks which quickly became unsupported around that time. DX9 and the dawn of pixel shading being mostly responsible as all the old hardware tricks could now be done in software with shaders. That or, in the case of palleted textures, the card's speed made it useless. Performance in the very late titles is a secondary concern as I have newer boxes which run those fine. I'd just like to be able to use the box for the occasional lan game of UT2k4 or Doom 3 if needed. Anything ti4600 and above will suffice performance wise.
I'm looking for anyone with experience in the changes made to directX/opengl hardware support during the 5 & 6 series of nvidia cards. (I know the 4 won't be an issue) Is the loss of 8-bit palleted textures the only major change in the geforce 6? Did the FX line lose support for anything that the 4 series had? My major choices as of this post are a ti4600/ti4800se (preference to 4600) a 5900XT or a 6800GT since those will fit in the case and I can find them new in box. I'd prefer the 6800GT but only if the only thing I'm losing is 8-bit palleted textures as I can work around that.
voodoo47 on 26/4/2012 at 00:02
ah yes, the 8bit palleted texture support, forgot about that one. if that is what you require, the fx series might not be such a bad choice, but remember, directx9 support/speed is bad. dx8.1 and opengl performance is ok.
Raithe on 26/4/2012 at 09:57
See that's part of the problem. I really don't know what a lot of the causes are. For years I ran a Voodoo5 AGP. Then my last universal AGP motherboard gave out. The PC I ended up replacing it with was PCI express and I got an 8800 GTS (v92) to go in it. Can't say as I'm too pleased with it. The performance is... well less than it should be, below what the 6800U/GT benches at on the same rig. (In stuff like Doom3 and UT2k4, stuff from the 6800's era) Actually, digging up my old benchmark logs from when I had the 9700 pro running on a similar setup it's below or just a little above some of those. Sad. More importantly though about half my old games don't work anymore or are very buggy. I know it's the card because otherwise all my hardware is the same. (except motherboard, but same CPU)
I've found "fixes" for a lot of them but there's two problems there, one is that they don't usually completely fix the issue & two is that very few of them bother to explain what was causing the problem in the first place. It's just "This is broken on newer hardware, here's the patch", very helpful. Thus I'm having problems deciding which gen of card to use. If I knew what had changed I could reverse what the causes are, but I can't find documentation of the changes. You'd think they'd bother to tell developers, a nice list perhaps X card supports Y functions. Apparently not.
EDIT:
and no the games in question aren't Glide. Though the performance loss in openGL in UT99 is still a sore spot with modern hardware.
