6800GT or X800XT or ? for win98?

C

cyclone3d

[H]F Junkie
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So.. I am planning on making a manual switched dual AGP slot extension for my retro system.

This would allow me to have my V5-5500 and another card in the system at the same time.

The system would have to be powered off in order to switch with card was active.. no biggie.

I have been doing a lot of research and nobody can seem to agree on what is the best AGP card for Win98.

some say go 6800GT/Ultra and some say go with an older Nvidia card such as the FX series due to the drivers that support the 6800 cards having issues in Win98.

Others say go with an ATI X800 Pro/XT/XT PE.. or even an X850 Pro/XT.

Others say go with an ATI 9800Pro.

Not like it would cost much to try out multiple cards and see which I like best... but I figured I would ask and see what people here have to say about it.
 
I had the X800XT PE for my Windows XP system back in the day and it was an amazing card. It performed a little better than the 6800 Ultra in most DX 9 titles if I remember correctly. The 6800 cards had more future proof features at the time so it might be the better card today. I'd say get the one you can find the best deal on.
 
What's the latest card that was even supported under Windows 98? We're talking DX8 not DX9 so even a 4 series should get the job done. I can't think of anything that requires windows 98 that would need even that much power. Remember that Windows 98 only supports 512MB of system memory without tweaks so a 256MB video card is probably overkill.

EDIT: I guess you could get DX9 in 98, but I definitely wouldn't bother. If the game uses DX8.1 or DX9 it would be much easier to run it on XP. You are probably looking for support for DX3 - DX7 titles on Windows 98. For that you really want an older card as the newer cards performed worse on the older DX generations, but would obviously smoke the older cards in DX9. I'd probably look for a Geforce 4 or maybe one of the 9xxx series radeons. I do know the GeForce 4 was a solid DX8 card but can't remember far enough back to know how the radeons handled it. Those cards come with 128MB of video memory which is still pretty huge for the games you probably want to play.
 
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bman212121 said:
What's the latest card that was even supported under Windows 98? We're talking DX8 not DX9 so even a 4 series should get the job done. I can't think of anything that requires windows 98 that would need even that much power. Remember that Windows 98 only supports 512MB of system memory without tweaks so a 256MB video card is probably overkill.

EDIT: I guess you could get DX9 in 98, but I definitely wouldn't bother. If the game uses DX8.1 or DX9 it would be much easier to run it on XP. You are probably looking for support for DX3 - DX7 titles on Windows 98. For that you really want an older card as the newer cards performed worse on the older DX generations, but would obviously smoke the older cards in DX9. I'd probably look for a Geforce 4 or maybe one of the 9xxx series radeons. I do know the GeForce 4 was a solid DX8 card but can't remember far enough back to know how the radeons handled it. Those cards come with 128MB of video memory which is still pretty huge for the games you probably want to play.
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My current retro box has 1.25GB of RAM and I didn't have to do any tweaks to make it run with that. With 1.5GB it was acting funny though.

I guess I will do some testing with what I have... FX 5500 and 9800 (not sure if pro or not). I still will probably end up picking up an X800XT PE and maybe a 6800GT since they are pretty cheap.. at least to do some testing.

Thing is.. the whole system is going to be totally overkill for Win98 stuff.. but that was kinda the point.
 
May I ask why W98 and not XP?

I had a retro gaming PC with with windows XP, an old Barton XP2500+ and a Geforce 6800/Vodoo2/matroxM3d. It was quite good, but then I've got pretty much all of my retro games working under windows 7 x64 at the time and now windows 10. Eventually both the mobo and geforce died.

I'm running games like Unreal Gold, moto racing, viper racing, NFS 1 to 5, Quake, doom 1,2, Half Life 1, Rogue Squadron and more.
 
Stoly said:
May I ask why W98 and not XP?

I had a retro gaming PC with with windows XP, an old Barton XP2500+ and a Geforce 6800/Vodoo2/matroxM3d. It was quite good, but then I've got pretty much all of my retro games working under windows 7 x64 at the time and now windows 10. Eventually both the mobo and geforce died.

I'm running games like Unreal Gold, moto racing, viper racing, NFS 1 to 5, Quake, doom 1,2, Half Life 1, Rogue Squadron and more.
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Mostly for DOS games. I know I could use DOSBOX, and could probably get a decent amount of Win98 games working on XP or higher.. but it is just easier and more fun IMO to run on the OS and hardware it was supported on.

Plus a lot of the sound effects/music is not going to be the same, especially for games that support the ROLAND devices and also were meant for older sounds cards such as the AWE64.

If I am unable to get my PCI-ISA bridge setup working with the AWE64 I will most likely end up with a DOS/Win98 machine that will use the AWE64 and my Voodoo5-5500 and then a 98/XP machine that will use an X800XT PE, Athlon 64 x2, and an Audigy2 ZS.

Oh, and for the DOS/Win98 machine and flight/space sims I have a NOS Thrustmaster HOTAS setup that I picked up for cheap a while back. Never should have gotten rid of my original setup way back in the day.
 
cyclone3d said:
Mostly for DOS games. I know I could use DOSBOX, and could probably get a decent amount of Win98 games working on XP or higher.. but it is just easier and more fun IMO to run on the OS and hardware it was supported on.
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Since this is [H] I think I get the right to pick on you for lumping DOS and Windows 98 together! :p I don't know about you but I ran DOS games on a 486 DX2 with like 16MB of ram and a cirrus logic card. I ran Windows 98 games on a P166 OCed with like 96MB of memory and I can't even remember the video card of the time. There was a big difference between those two and you're running Windows 98 on faster hardware than I ran XP on.

Like you said you can play around with configurations to see what might be able to run the most stuff without having to tweak it. The Dos games are going to be 640 x 480 or lower and some of the windows 98 games might get up to 1024 x 768. When I think of supported hardware I think of running detonator drivers which won't support those 6 series cards. My general perception is that the farther out you go, stuff starts to get lost in translation. The best experience is going to require drivers closer to the time the games were around as they would have been optimized for those games. So rather than focusing on getting newer hardware, I'd consider looking for older stuff than what you even have as it might work better. I want to say that even on my 2500+ barton back in the XP days I was having issues getting some DOS games to run as they are 16 bit, and the processor was so powerful already games that didn't have a limiter on them would render too fast to be playable. C&C comes to mind as the scrolling was impossible (Which someone figured out a way to get the frame rate locked down now) and I think the DOS version of Sim City 2000 if you clicked on Cheetah or whatever the fast speed was called it would go so fast you couldn't play the game.

I have not built one so it will be interesting to see how it goes for you. Some people probably figured out better methods than what we used to have for supporting those titles, so hopefully it does work out well. Based upon my knowledge from actually installing and playing games through those time periods if I was going to build a DOS / Win 98 pc I'd probably focus around using a P3 and 512MB of ram paired with an overkill Geforce 2 or 3. I did a quick check and even Q3 arena could get 100fps with a geforce 2. But that and UT would probably run better under XP and you could use 6 series cards and it would perform very well. I tend of think of Windows 98 gaming as running games that came out in 98 and before, and DOS games as stuff before 95. Anything 2000 through say 2008 probably works better on Windows XP and might need to be setup accordingly.

TL;DR If you're going old school but having issues, going older instead of newer might actually work better even if the newer stuff is faster.
 
As far as X800XT vs 6800GT goes, one thing to consider is that the 6800GT supports Shader Model 3.0 whereas the X800XT only supports Shader Model 2.0b. 9800Pro only supports Shader Model 2.0a IIRC.

That may or may not matter depending on what games you are playing. For very retro games it probably won't matter, but most of the later DX9 games pretty much required Shader Model 3.0. 6800GT will still play World of Warcraft for example, while a X800XT will not.
 
I have both cards I swap in on my win98se box.

6800 series is the last official card with drivers on win98se. It performs great. Couple it with a voodoo2 and you have the ultimate retro rig
The x800 has only beta driver support as it was not officially supported on 98se. It's drivers are good but some games do suffer a couple of glitches.

Imo if I had to only choose one I'd go with the 6800gt

If you have any specific questions about i.e. ther let me know
 
bman212121 said:
Since this is [H] I think I get the right to pick on you for lumping DOS and Windows 98 together! :p I don't know about you but I ran DOS games on a 486 DX2 with like 16MB of ram and a cirrus logic card. I ran Windows 98 games on a P166 OCed with like 96MB of memory and I can't even remember the video card of the time. There was a big difference between those two and you're running Windows 98 on faster hardware than I ran XP on.

Like you said you can play around with configurations to see what might be able to run the most stuff without having to tweak it. The Dos games are going to be 640 x 480 or lower and some of the windows 98 games might get up to 1024 x 768. When I think of supported hardware I think of running detonator drivers which won't support those 6 series cards. My general perception is that the farther out you go, stuff starts to get lost in translation. The best experience is going to require drivers closer to the time the games were around as they would have been optimized for those games. So rather than focusing on getting newer hardware, I'd consider looking for older stuff than what you even have as it might work better. I want to say that even on my 2500+ barton back in the XP days I was having issues getting some DOS games to run as they are 16 bit, and the processor was so powerful already games that didn't have a limiter on them would render too fast to be playable. C&C comes to mind as the scrolling was impossible (Which someone figured out a way to get the frame rate locked down now) and I think the DOS version of Sim City 2000 if you clicked on Cheetah or whatever the fast speed was called it would go so fast you couldn't play the game.

I have not built one so it will be interesting to see how it goes for you. Some people probably figured out better methods than what we used to have for supporting those titles, so hopefully it does work out well. Based upon my knowledge from actually installing and playing games through those time periods if I was going to build a DOS / Win 98 pc I'd probably focus around using a P3 and 512MB of ram paired with an overkill Geforce 2 or 3. I did a quick check and even Q3 arena could get 100fps with a geforce 2. But that and UT would probably run better under XP and you could use 6 series cards and it would perform very well. I tend of think of Windows 98 gaming as running games that came out in 98 and before, and DOS games as stuff before 95. Anything 2000 through say 2008 probably works better on Windows XP and might need to be setup accordingly.

TL;DR If you're going old school but having issues, going older instead of newer might actually work better even if the newer stuff is faster.
Click to expand...

Heh, the current processor for my retro rig is a Barton Mobile 2800+ running at 2.4Ghz :D

The drive I am using is an SSD. This thing is already stupid fast for a Win98 machine.

I'm not too worried about super old stuff not running or running too fast. That can be worked around IF I am even interested in a particular game that has issues.

Lumping DOS and Win98 together.. well, it's not like I didn't play DOS and Win98 games on the same machine back in the day so why not?

My older setup I had working all nice.. before I switched to an SSD. Somehow I had it booting to a boot menu where I could choose DOS 6.22 or Win98. Now that I redid it, it is not working properly even with the boot menu. I think I had maybe done something and put 6.22 on there after I installed 98SE.

Planning on going to a multi-boot setup by using a boot manager and multiple partitions and maybe multiple disks.

I would really like to just have a single super overpowered retro machine that I can run everything I want to on it. Stuff has gotten so crazy easy to build computer wise in the last 7-8 years that I have forgotten some of how to set up old systems and make them just work.
 
From a pure horsepower perspective I believe the X800XT had the edge on the 6800GT/Ultra. In this scenario not sure that it matters much, both cards will slice through any game from that era. I'd go with the less power draw, heat, and best driver support of the 2.

I have an old s939 system I want to setup with some older games as well. Might even go older back to my s754. This thread got me thinking lol
 
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