Just as an interesting observation, I tried my TNT2 and G400MAX cards in my P3 1400, and found that the G400MAX keeps performing faster the more CPU power you throw at it, well past the performance levels of the SS7 platform. The TNT2 didn't scale as well with additional CPU power. There are of course much better choices of graphics for the P3 1400 though. Really interesting to see how well the Savage 2000 did. I wasn't aware it was that capable. Great stuff as always Phil. Keep up the good work :)
I was a Matrox guy back in late 90's, up until they started losing market to Nvidia. I still keep a pair of my original G200 cards, and just this year I noticed that one of them started having issues with OpenGL. I think the chip is finally going bad. It's good to have a pair on hand to be able to compare performance. The bad card runs DOS and Windows just fine and even some games, but stalls on ones requiring proper acceleration. Even the good card seems to be developing problems. Water in Matrox demo that came on the driver CD doesn't display properly. They used some special shading technique, as far as I recall. Thanks to Matrox I was able to get into video editing early, as they were the only truly affordable platform allowing video I/O and were much better in terms of quality compared to ATI All-In-Wonders. The downside was the reliance on their proprietary MJPEG codec (Matrox JPEG, not to be confused with Motion JPEG).
PowerVR Kyro 2 is my all time favorite video card. It had an interesting and very efficient architecture, and offered great value for money. It also had a TV-out so you could game and watch movies, which was rare back in the days.
@@tHeWasTeDYouTh their architecture suited efficiency over power since any hidden items were not rendered. This technology found its place in mobile devices where PowerVR has been very successful.
@@tHeWasTeDYouThImagination never made graphics cards. They're an IP licensing company. They make the designs and then people license them to make chips that use them, then another party buys those chips to put in graphics cards. That's why so many brands are associated with the card. Hercules made the card (the 3D Prophet 4500), STMicroelectronics manufactured the chip (Kyro II) and Imagination designed the GPU (PoweVR Series 3). Interestingly, Imagination just announced that their newest series, the B-series, has been licensed by 5 companies in the desktop, laptop, and cloud computing spaces. One of those products is a graphics card that will be released in China (and hopefully the US) as the Innosilicon Fantasy, a 6 TFLOP chiplet-based GPU with GDDR6 memory and of course it still has tile-based deferred rendering. Next year they'll be announcing their C-series which will have their second generation ray-tracing technology.
@@myownfriend23 didn't know about their B-series. All I heard was the A series a couple of months ago. At least the Chinese are funding them. thought they would go under when Apple started to make their own GPUs
Very fun series. It amazes me how many really crappy cards made it to market. I got very lucky, buying my first 3d accelerator (16MB Banshee) with barely any knowledge. Paired it w/ a K6-2 300mhz. Since I had nothing to compare it to, in my teenage eyes it was bottled lightning. Lasted until my GeForce 3 ti200 and by that time, the market had pretty much stabilized (plus far easier to find info & reviews online).
Phil, those SS7 videos are just fantastic, I'm watching each one of them a couple of times just to grasp every single detail you're mentioning. For me, the videos are super helpful because I'm trying all sorts of combinations with my SS7 machine, that I originally built thanks to you. Can't wait to see more videos about the same topic, I wonder what's left?
Haha, thank you, great that you're finding them useful. Well I got some ideas about another video, but not entirely sure. It will "come to me" I guess, it often does :D
I had several 3dfx Voodoo3 cards in my early days of system building - it was very much that point in time where you could convince yourself that you had a strong peformer just to the power of marketing or "coolness" factor. The Voodoo3 2000 was the most frustrating as it felt significantly bottlenecked by its own clockspeeds and this was notable in games, I later brought a "3000" through work as an OEM card - this got VERY hot and looking back was probably responsible for many blue screens due to voltage draw BUT it hit the "sweet spot" for the capabilities of these cards. When PC World were having a 3dfx "firesale" in late 2000 I brought the full-on 3500 TV with the big blue break out box.... it was a really unweildy solution but having that breakout box was the COOLEST thing and 3dfx had their own very curious skinned TV tuner software. It wasn't really very capable and PC hardware at the time wasn't very good for capture but I didn't pay much for it at all and got a lot of enjoyment from that card for 3 or more years. I must say I dont think that the drivers ever really got optimised to their full potential due to the short lifespan of these cards, and the x3dfx oddities of myth and mystery (supposedly ex-3dfx programmers but it was never verified) did move things forwards a bit but as with all these things it was clunky to go through an additioinal installation. The 3dfx driver software used to rock though and had its built in overclocker even though the memory and core clocks were linked - overclocking was still a bit of a new art form back then and I remember people liked working with percentages.
I tried these AmigaMerlin drivers, the actually run a tiny bit faster compared to the latest reference drivers, which is nice. The community did a good job here, there are also really cool drivers for the Banshee.
Why does these old part's look so nice in my eye's , i recently started to buy old working part's just to have them and play with them , specialy since in my country they have 0 value for most people , and they get sold for like 5$ a complete kit
no idea how I missed this review since I try to watch your videos regularly. I went searching the web for reviews on the Evil Kyro (which I have) and came across this.
The other big selling point of the old Matroxes back in the day that you didn't mention was their dual-head cards, being early adopters of multi-monitor computing they were huge for professionals that also had great windows directX performance.
After school I used to work in the maintenance and IT field for a few years and in the Dos days and even up until I upgraded to Pentium slot based systems the S3 was a beast in all Dos games and emulators and even early windows 32bit based emulators, kyro 2 in general was a pretty decent card as a med range one, had in my horrible Celeron junk slot shitty CPU days and it had a version of Myst optimized for it so it kicked some ass back in the day and also managed some very high resolutions on my 21" CRT monitor as a desktop computer svga card, but was traded for a much deserving ATI 7000 pro card
I remember my Pentium III with an S3 onboard card. It was the only onboard that could handle Quake 2 openGL here. After it i became a fan of the S3 video.
I can't understand why i like such videos so much. I don't even miss anything before radeon 8500, and don't want to have some of those cards.. maybe because at that times i had s3 trio 3d, that didn't support opengl for my favourite quake1..
Great Video and Video Series for that matter, bur speaking of PowerVR: Do you plan to do a video about the PowerVR PCX1 & PCX2 cards, or did you already do that? Tomb Raider & Mech Warrior 2 with the PowerSGL Patches alone are IMO worth a look.
Good Video! Your conclusions about the G400 match my experiences between 99 and 2001, although my card was the 16MB single head OEM version. In Direct 3D it was very capable and had a sharp 2d image. Unfortunatly, if I remember it correctly, it took more than a year for Matrox to integrate OpenGL suport on the drivers, until then one had to resort to a minigl driver, that had performace issues. But those like me, who had also a voodoo 2 (or two for the lucky ones) could compensate it with the 3dfx card, albeit at lower resolutions. In a time that the the nvidia cards where a little hit and miss, regarding 2D output, the Matrox's cards where good ones to use as the main card on a system equiped with voodoo 2's or 1's.
That is a good point. Nvidia cards at that time, it mattered what model you got regarding image quality. With Matrox though, you were guaranteed a mint image. The OpenGL support is a bummer, I really like to know how come 3dfx and Nvidia did so well but ATI and Matrox found it a bit harder. What is the "magic" regarding OpenGL that makes it so hard?
When I bought the G400, my budget at the time limited me to either the G400 with 16MB, or the RIVA TNT2 64. A TNT2 Ultra, or a Voodoo 3 where out of the question, because they were more expensive and could have problems with my board (my G400 died nearly 2 years later when I placed it again on the PC, after testing for a few days a brand new GF2 MX400 on my FIC PA-2013 rev 2.0 motherboard, I guess something got out of spec with this 'juicy card', the GF2 produced a lot of artifacts on that board). By the reviews I had read I knew that the G400Max gave the TNT2 Ultra a run for its money, so I guessed that the regular 16MB version should be competitive with the TNT2 M64, considering that I was willing to use the Voodoo 2 preferentially in all games that suported it, but needed a reasonable direct 3d card for my new , at the time, 17" monitor, and the S3 Virge DX (4MB PCI) I had wasn't good enough. At least the G400 with 16MB allowed 1600x1200 in 32 bit gaming ... if you were lucky the game run fast enough, the Voodoo 3 3000 cannot reach this resolution in 16bit 3d mode. Back to your question, regarding Open GL, I guess 3Dfx and Nvidia had better performance because they were the first choice of game developers at the time. By what I can recall the first big hit 3D games, in 96/97, were mainly Open GL, and then Glide (3Dfx had a miniGL layer that allowed to run OpenGL games). There were also Power Vr cards at the time, but they failed to gain ground against the 3dfx, because they required more powerfull CPU's to give the same performace as a voodoo 1. In 1998, 3Dfx launched the Voodoo 2, and Nvidia the first TNT, that was commercial sucess, and the first card to put a dent on 3Dfx reign, so I guess, they also gained some head start. By then, Matrox and ATI were, if I'm not mistaken, more related to business users (CAD's, Office, etc), and the OEM retail channel, even despite having some gamming capabilities on their cards, they were usually only choosed by those who could not afford a real "gamming card". The G200 was Matrox first card to have some sucess in Direct 3d gamming, providing at a the same time excellent 2D (they had earlier launched the m3d that was a 3D only, Power VR solution), but it also lacked integrated OpenGL suport at launch. Regarding ATI, I had the impression that in the Ati RAGE II days they were more present in the OEM segment, like S3, so their cards were not that good against the competition, only when the Rage 128 (Fury) was launched, did they get to the mainstream gamming arena, and then lacked the 3dfx and nvidia base. I always had the impression that ATI lagged behind the competition in the drivers departement (win9x). Even in Direct3D there were a lot of bugs and glitches, but they had good 2D signal. The problem was that some of the bugs prevented the user from running certain games even with a voodoo2 in the system.
I remember the Savage 2000 and Savage 4 cards for having drivers issues and really bad Direct3D compatibility, with lots of artifacts. Suprised you got this far with them in your review.
Newer drivers make these cards very solid and they are mostly cheaper if you can find them. You can get SiS 315 cards for like $20 bucks and it will play all your DOS games and early windows games great. I am starting to buy these cards for retro boxes because everything else just keeps going up in price. Sometimes you can find Geforce 2-4MX cards for cheap so those are my 2nd choice.
AFAIR, Savage4 on SS7 was horrible. Too many driver issues even on almost nonproblem ALi AladdinV. Replacing it for TNT2M64 - and almost no issues. And noticeably faster than Banshee. But Savage4 rocks on that Quake level with S3TC compressed textures 🖖 - it was truly amazing.
One of my first PCs have an integrated video card SiS 6326. It was no good experience, only dos games, strategy games on windows and some lite 3D DirectX games. Heavy games this video card cannot did. Days were much more excited when I bought a 3Dfx Voodoo 4 4500 PCI. :)
Great to see some more exotic card choices. I had the original savage 3d on a gainward card back in the day, and it displayed the same type of rendering issues in numerous games. These alpha/masking errors were consistent and probably due to some hardware shortcomings that didn't quite match up with expected direct3d behavior. Also not something that future driver updates could fix, workaround, or compensate for. The result being that quite a few games were not really playable. A shame really, because performance in general was pretty decent. In they end they just didn't have to R&D budget to keep up. The T&L unit in savage 2000 was bugged and was permanently disabled in the drivers.
Ah that is good to know! Yes a real shame as with good DX6 compatibility this would be a very good card to recommend. In OpenGL it performs outstanding.
Excel.lent review as always. I remember a friend of mine having an AGP graphics card that you haven't mentioned at all, and that was quite popular. It was based on the 3D Labs Permedia 2 chipset. I think he bought it to play with OpenGL accelerated 3D Studio type software. That card was not very good at gaming. More of a professional choice. But it was quite an impressive chipset anyway.
My Athlon rig from the 2000 had a Savage 2k card, I used to play Serious Sam on that pc with glitched textures all over the place, back then I thought my card was broken, soon after May Payne was released I ditched that card and I got myself a Geforce 2 GTS before switching to a geforce 4ti 4600.
+PhilsComputerLab hahaha, anyway thanks for the awesome videos , I loved this series , it put a lot of things into perspective the Matrox and Savage 2000 especially , makes me want to do a Super Socket 7 build now :3 , have a Savage 2000 and 3000 just dong nothing
I remember Austin Meyer of Laminar Research raging about appalling OpenGL performance of Matrox cards in X-plane 5 around year 2000 or 2001 ;) It was in fact worse than Riva TNT’s!
Thanks.. So in depth. An interesting card to me was made for HPs P3 and celeron Laptops. Silicon Motion Lynx which actually does a fair job with games like Unreal Gold, Quake 2 but does great in DOS as well. It's only 4MB on board also... Gateway laptops from that Era also have the same video chipset. Year 2000 or so, the lynx I think was DirectX7 capable & does great with 98se
+PhilsComputerLab you won't find much on them except drivers and currently they made storage solutions with PCIe x1. I found the most video card information from man pages of Ubuntu and Xorg. Linux seems to document almost everything lol
Nice job. What I found missing, were the results for 1280x1024 for some games. I miss also 1600x1200 resolution. Framerates are very high even for 1280x1024, so with 1600x1200 some of the card should have reasonable results. I don't agree with your interpretation of Kyro II. That in all the cases it need faster CPU. Only for GL Quake, for other games You tested Kyro II looses framerates for higher resolution. For higher resolutions this CPU is not bottleneck for Kyro II. I'm completely agree with You , that it is much easier, and logistic to stay with one platform for some time. You have made a great job with super socket 7 platform. What's next ?
love the videos. working on my own K6 super socket 7 setup. I got a k6-2 @400mhz and a k6-3 @400mhz. which would you recommend using? I also found a P3 500mhz slot 1 CPU the other day. Naturally, I HAVE to get it a motherboard to live in lol. any cheap but fun suggestions on that?
The G400MAX suffers in OpenGL because Matrox's OpenGL drivers were terrible. The open-source Linux drivers consistently outperformed Windows in Quake3 on those boards.
"I would not consider that card for the super socket 7 platform." As an AGP card is there any situation where the SIS card is a good choice? Or were you just being charitable?
The Voodoo 3 is indeed a nice card. That box filter helps out with the banding of 16-bit games. However, it's not as compatible with DOS games as an S3 or even an nVidia card. I only know of one game so far that will show what I mean, but try to play Pinball Illusions (part of Pinball Gold Pack on GoG) in either SVGA mode on a Voodoo Rush, Banshee, or 3. Whatever 2D core those cards use (Micronix or Macronix, not sure), simply cannot handle that game at either at 640x480 or 800x600. It just shows a small portion of the top of the screen completely scrambled. the 640x350 EGA resolution seems to work just fine.
I can't comment on Pinball Illusions, since it seems to have been added more recently to the compatibility matrix found at gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/ though I wanted to tell you that only Voodoo Rush uses external, 3rd party 2D chips, which are well known for being far from optimal. Starting with Voodoo Banshee the 3dfx cards all have their own, in-house developed 2D core integrated in the corresponding Voodoo chip, which overall is known to be one of the best.
@@armorgeddon Yeah, as an owner of a Voodoo3 and having a friend with a Voodoo5 5500, we both can attest that even those cards are incompatible with Illusions at any resolution higher than 640x350.
@@NightSprinter Ok! The game wasn't added to that compatibility matrix without reason ;-) Don't forget though that there were several BIOS versions for those Voodoo cards so maybe it also depends on that. I doubt it, but it's not impossible.
i had the gf 1-2 cards (gts level or better, didnt buy the low end tnt/tnt2) and kyro2 and s3 2000, returned the 2000, drivers and hardware flaws that required driver workarounds that hurt perf/quality... ugg, on the other hand my kyro2 was alot of fun, used them on alot of builds and upgrades nice card imho....always had good drivers imho.
The Dreamcast used a varient of the Videologic Neon 250 PowerVR chip, but slightly better in some aspects. This is two PowerVR generations before the Kyro 2.
Seems like a couple of the cards were cpu bottlenecked in different benchmarks, a lot of 90° horizontal results! Maybe rebench in a p4 agp board to see how far they can actually go?
Hi! Im new to the whole building old gaming pcs and really dont know the different kind of compatibility issues I may find. For now I just salvaged an old 775 socket with agp and IDE hdd channels PC and installed Win98Se on it. The motherboard is a Biostar P4M800 Pro-M7 which had drivers for Win98/ME. For the GPU Im using the integrated S3 UniChrome IGP. (would have to make more tests but according to 3dmark 99 should have similar performance to a tnt2 m64 or somewhere around that) So the hardware is not period correct for 9x, it was already on the way out by then, but for now I tried some games and it works pretty nice. Is there some big problem I might encounter with a build like this?
TheVanillatech It runs Core2Duos i think but I'm not really too interested on Windows XP, at least right now. Be it by unofficial patches, gog re editions, using vmware or something like that, or because they still just work, you can get to play most of the XP era games on modern systems. And I'm not really that much into this for some sort of authentic, period correct experience or anything like that. I just want a PC that runs those games I can't play on DosBox and have no possible workaround for working on modern systems, so mosly that specific set of games that needs 3D acceleration AND windows 9x because XP and newer break compatibility. Not that I'm completely against it, maybe If I get a better Win9X machine I can turn this one on that WinXP beast machine :)
check for powersgl versions of the games you test if you mess with the powervr again, quake, unreal and quite a few others have those exe's like they do 3dnow, there was even a compile that was 3dnow powersgl made by users years later if you can find it for quake and unreal ;)
great videos, I'm currently building a Win95 themed machine and have made 1998 my cut off year so many of the cards reviewed unfortunately are past my cut off date. been really struggling with the choice for the main video card. have 2 V2's in SLI but I'm mostly down between the Matrox G200 and original TNT for the primary card, decisions, decisions.
I'm into the same atempt ^^ But I haven't either of them :( so I have to use a bad (but faster than the original TNT) TNT2 m64 for now as the main gpu. The rest of my AGP gpus are either too old or too new, or too underpowered (I have an SIS6326 XD). I have also a voodoo banshee, but this is useless since I already have an SLI. What CPU are you using ? I'm planing to use an overclocked celeron 300A because I think that is what people would have used back then for a gaming PC seing how cheap that CPU was in comparison to the pentium 2 450 while it performed mostly the same when running at the same frequency and being very easy to overclock at that specific speed (I have one of the rare "bad" celeron 300A wich isn't quite stable at that speed XD)
I'm actually going for the high end so I'm using a PII 450. I know its the obvious choice for 1998 but I wanted to go slot 1 and I don't have any other PII machines running so for me its different. even threw a dxr2 card in there for DVD decoding and some Wing Commander IV (I know there's a patch but that's no fun). I figured the G200 would be nice with the V2 SLI because its great image quality would offset the degrade from the V2 passthrough but its just not a very gaming oriented card. That's why i'm thinking the TNT as its a bit more powerful and game playing oriented, maybe even a bit more game compatible. I also have a Banshee...I kind of like that card but struggle to find any reason to use it. on a side note...how are you adding spaces to your comments, when I do it and post it just clumps it together and eliminates my spacing.
+0blivi0n100 you know, you won't really use the main gpu for anything else other than 2D. DirectX and opengl game are running faster on the sli anyway. I think the matrox would be a better choice (not as good as the nvidia card for dos gaming apparently)
There is a Memory Management Problem on Computers with Pentium Processors specifically with Windows 95 and Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors."This problem no longer occurs in Windows 98." See Microsoft Article ID: 179897 - Last Review: 01/11/2015 01:40:53 - Revision: 5.0 on Microsoft's website. Now I think that the memory management problem issue might not be there with Windows 95c because I didn't see the memory management problems listed on that version on a Wikipedia article about Windows 95. Personally I have used Windows 95c on 233Mhz Gateway 2000 Pentium 2 system and have never had lockups or blue screens or any other problem. However I have never tried using earlier versions of Windows 95 like Windows 95B which originally was installed on the early first released Pentium II systems of mid 1997.Ideally Windows 98FE would be a match for a 450 Mhz Pentium II system with 2 V2's in SLI.
What about Matrox Millennium G200 8Mb? If you have this card maybe you could do a small video with some benchmarks and games from 98-2001 like Unreal 1 (or Unreal Tournament), Quake III Arena, Driver: You are the Wheelman, maybe Turok and Expendable? Cause in the past my friend has this card and pc config something like pii350/192mb sdram pc133/matrox millennium g200 8Mb(maybe upgrade to 16Mb i forget about how mb has his card) and we were such high hopes about Matrox cause Quake III Arena, Unreal or Unreal Tournament, Driver: You are the Wheelman and some other 3D games runs on Matrox so well! Today I have Matrox G200 and build those pc (pii-333(cannot get motherboard with 100mhz bus, only 66 so only get pii-333MHz but I think it do no difference)/192Mb sdram pc133/matrox millennium g200 8mb/creative sound blaster 16 vibra c isa/win 95, i run some of this games in 800x600 or 1024x768 with high graphics and games have so terrible lags. I didn't run fraps, but it feels like 20 or 25 fps. I forget which resolution my friend used (and he forget too :)) maybe 640x480, in this games runs pretty well. So I think, maybe somethink wrong with my pc or matrox g200 or I simply have wrong memories (something like a grass was greener and skies was higher:))? :) Or I simply have a cpu bottleneck and should install piii 800 or tualatin(they are great cpu btw, if you overclock them from ther default 1103MHz to 1500 or 1600 MHz they become more powerful than P4 1500 Willamete). And second question, currently I can buy Matrox Millennium G45+ MDHA16DLXB G450 16 Mb should I buy it or G400 Max will be a way better? It's really chip about 10$ so I think I didn't loose anything :)
I'd really like to see a video on the Intel i740 when you get your hands on one. There's really not too much info on it other than the fact it was one of Intel's few dedicated video cards. I have seen one or two videos suggesting it doesn't perform too well, but I would like to see more detailed information.
I think I have an Intel graphics card, not sure if it's that one. When was it produced? I might do a different series for older cads like the first Riva 128 and that Intel card but with a slower machine and older, more suitable games.
Ah, there you see it. This is what I mean't in the comment section of your other video. Notice how the Radeon maintains performance in 16-bit and 32-bit (barely any difference)? How it also maintains performance across resolutions? That's because the Radeon256 GPU (Rage6) incorporates HyperZ compression as well as rendering internally at 32-bit. You see a similar pattern with the Kyro since it also incorporates a memory bandwidth saving feature (Tile Based rendering) coupled with also rendering internally at 32-bit. Both produce a straight line across resolutions until you hit 1280x1024 and that's because they hit their Fill Rate bottlenecks. Such bandwidth saving features are standard nowadays but ATi and PowerVR were the ones who pioneered this technology.
Yes that's correct with the 16-Bit vs 32-Bit, but as for resolution, that's the weak Socket 7 CPU no feeding the card fast enough to show higher performance at lower resolutions.
Well you really got to form your own conclusions, for me it's the 3dfx Voodoo 3 though. My second pick would be the TNT2. And for DOS gaming the Savage 2000.
+PhilsComputerLab for me its GT 610 PCI :D. Just kidding, before your videos i was thinking that a v5 5500 was the most powerful one, but u loaded me and other people with alot other cards and i cant decide :D
PhilsComputerLab I read that the PowerVR cards are backwards compatible so the higher resolutions should work with the 2nd model (NEC), I really need to get one.
So while looking for my Matrox cards, I ended up finding an ELSA GLoria II card which appears to be based on the first nVidia Quadro chipset, and from the little I've looked up online, it seems this is based on an enhanced GeForce 256 core. What sort of performance could I expect from this thing on a Super Socket 7 machine? Also, how would my other Matrox cards compare to the G400 Max? They are a plain G400 (pulled from an IBM computer, it would seem) and two different G450s, one with 16MB of VRAM, the other with 32MB.
one PowerVR card that would work well is a PCX1 or PCX2 , its not cheap but it would work well as a secondary 3d accelerator. main problem is compatibility.
I have a PowerVR PCX1 which i got in a bulk lot of cards i purchased for next to nothing. For the last few years i have told myself that i will install it on one of my P2 machines, but i find it hard to stick to one project at a time and am always distracted, but i'll get the PowerVR running one day. When you say its not cheap, do you mean the cost of the PowerVR card these days??
lightdark28 Damn that much! Only reason i believe i got mine so cheap is because it was part of a bulk lot, and the seller didn't really know much about the cards.
actually thats how I got my PCX1 card, I got it in a bundle with something like 2 PCX1 cards and 3 Voodoo3 cards, along with a few other Nvidia/ATI cards. funny enough I ended selling the spares and making alot more money from them than I spent on that bundle.
Really seems to me like the SiS 305 is the best choice, clearly. But really, the Radeon SDR and G400 Max seem to be the best. I'd choose the G400 Max. Radeon SDR for performance, Matrox G400 Max for everything else. I'd end up getting one of them myself for my Pentium II system. The Kyro II probably loses lots of performance on the 320x240 test because of an unsupported resolution, so when it was bumped back up to a correct resolution, it gained a ton of performance back.
i used a g400 back in 2000 i think with an amd duron600*at1000mhz :) and for me its a memorable card. i played in 1024x768 and the performance was enough and i think this card have the best image quality back then. of course this vga was not the best but i used it very well.
Great video to top this topic off with. :-) Good job. Guess I have to source a Kyro-II and a Savage-2000 now. EDIT: Basically speaking, one can conclude that these four cards, will be the top cards for SS7. When dealing with the balance between compatibility and performance. TNT2-Ultra (I know you have only tested the pro) Voodoo3-3500 Savage2000 Matrox G400-Max Is that a viable point to make?
Yea these are definitely some of the best cards. Because of Glide, my pick is the V3, but everyone will have their own preferences. A DOS gamer is best off with a Savage for example. The Matrox gives you Environment Mapped Bump Mapping for example and the Savage you can check out compressed textures in Unreal. TNT2 does everything well, just doesn't have glide.
There's a review on anandtech back from 1999 on this card and it was only rivaled by the geforce 256 in opengl. In 32bit mode it actually kicks butt because of it's 16bit z-buffer. In Direct3D unfortunately, it performs badly. www.anandtech.com/show/410
cool :) what do you think about K6-III @ 500mhz and Geforce 4 mx440 plus 512mb ram? since i own one machine in this setup except gpu, but i'm thinking about installing one gf4 into it and also voodoo2 as a glide adapter.
You can use a Voodoo II with a second 3D card, just don't install the Direct3D and OpenGL drivers for the Voodoo II and it'll only kick on when Glide is needed. When OpenGL or Direct3D is needed it'll just use the main card.
A Geforce 4, even a MX, will be bound hard by the Super 7 CPU, but still should put out some decent numbers in 3D stuff. It's more fitting for the P3 or P4/Athlon XP era, but if it'll work in that old of an AGP socket, it's overkill but functional. I'm not sure on it's VESA compatibility or how far back drivers go back for Windows, as well.
Check out the video I did on Nvidia cards. The MX440 is based on the GeForce2, so it's a decent fit and has enough performance to play around with AA and AF. They are also very cheap and easy to find, so not a bad card at all!
My understanding is also that T&L is broken and not enabled because it leads to errors. I did not try to enable this though. I will definitely do this when I properly review this card!
i had the maxtor g400 max i thought i was good for the time ,i had it for some time then sold it and i got a gforce 4200ti think it was 128meg then a 6600gt then 7800gtx and after that i got 9800gtx that lasted till the gainward gtx460gs 2gig, then i got a asus gtx 580 1.5gig mem i still got that next was palit GTX 770 OC 4GB msi 970 and then 980ti and now i have 1060,,,i started way back with a trio 2meg card voodoo 1 & 2 ati 7200le Abit's Radeon 9800 XT,,,,,but never for get the GeForce FX 5900, NVIDIA became embroiled in a bitter controversy over questionable driver optimizations and outright cheating
that s3 card is more modern and recent than the others it is being benched against - this is why it is out performing them - these other cards should be compared against a savage4 - which was obliterated by the other cards in your video performance wise. the savage 2000 is basicallt a generation newer and should have been put against like... the geforce 256
I can follow your thinking. But watch the previous videos first, because I tested GeForce 256, GF 2, 3 and 4 and other faster cards. The cards I'm using in this specific video to compare, those are the fastest of 3dfx and Nvidia. So for the S3 to beat those, that's why it was so amazing. Hope that makes sense. The top cards are not necessarily top on the SS7 platform, which is very CPU limited.
Just as an interesting observation, I tried my TNT2 and G400MAX cards in my P3 1400, and found that the G400MAX keeps performing faster the more CPU power you throw at it, well past the performance levels of the SS7 platform. The TNT2 didn't scale as well with additional CPU power. There are of course much better choices of graphics for the P3 1400 though. Really interesting to see how well the Savage 2000 did. I wasn't aware it was that capable.
Great stuff as always Phil. Keep up the good work :)
I was a Matrox guy back in late 90's, up until they started losing market to Nvidia. I still keep a pair of my original G200 cards, and just this year I noticed that one of them started having issues with OpenGL. I think the chip is finally going bad. It's good to have a pair on hand to be able to compare performance. The bad card runs DOS and Windows just fine and even some games, but stalls on ones requiring proper acceleration. Even the good card seems to be developing problems. Water in Matrox demo that came on the driver CD doesn't display properly. They used some special shading technique, as far as I recall.
Thanks to Matrox I was able to get into video editing early, as they were the only truly affordable platform allowing video I/O and were much better in terms of quality compared to ATI All-In-Wonders. The downside was the reliance on their proprietary MJPEG codec (Matrox JPEG, not to be confused with Motion JPEG).
PowerVR Kyro 2 is my all time favorite video card. It had an interesting and very efficient architecture, and offered great value for money. It also had a TV-out so you could game and watch movies, which was rare back in the days.
why did PowerVR stop making pc graphics cards?
@@tHeWasTeDYouTh their architecture suited efficiency over power since any hidden items were not rendered. This technology found its place in mobile devices where PowerVR has been very successful.
@@tHeWasTeDYouThImagination never made graphics cards. They're an IP licensing company. They make the designs and then people license them to make chips that use them, then another party buys those chips to put in graphics cards. That's why so many brands are associated with the card. Hercules made the card (the 3D Prophet 4500), STMicroelectronics manufactured the chip (Kyro II) and Imagination designed the GPU (PoweVR Series 3).
Interestingly, Imagination just announced that their newest series, the B-series, has been licensed by 5 companies in the desktop, laptop, and cloud computing spaces. One of those products is a graphics card that will be released in China (and hopefully the US) as the Innosilicon Fantasy, a 6 TFLOP chiplet-based GPU with GDDR6 memory and of course it still has tile-based deferred rendering.
Next year they'll be announcing their C-series which will have their second generation ray-tracing technology.
@@myownfriend23 didn't know about their B-series. All I heard was the A series a couple of months ago. At least the Chinese are funding them. thought they would go under when Apple started to make their own GPUs
Very fun series. It amazes me how many really crappy cards made it to market. I got very lucky, buying my first 3d accelerator (16MB Banshee) with barely any knowledge. Paired it w/ a K6-2 300mhz. Since I had nothing to compare it to, in my teenage eyes it was bottled lightning. Lasted until my GeForce 3 ti200 and by that time, the market had pretty much stabilized (plus far easier to find info & reviews online).
Phil, those SS7 videos are just fantastic, I'm watching each one of them a couple of times just to grasp every single detail you're mentioning. For me, the videos are super helpful because I'm trying all sorts of combinations with my SS7 machine, that I originally built thanks to you. Can't wait to see more videos about the same topic, I wonder what's left?
Haha, thank you, great that you're finding them useful. Well I got some ideas about another video, but not entirely sure. It will "come to me" I guess, it often does :D
Gotta say, impressed with the Kyro II!
I had several 3dfx Voodoo3 cards in my early days of system building - it was very much that point in time where you could convince yourself that you had a strong peformer just to the power of marketing or "coolness" factor. The Voodoo3 2000 was the most frustrating as it felt significantly bottlenecked by its own clockspeeds and this was notable in games, I later brought a "3000" through work as an OEM card - this got VERY hot and looking back was probably responsible for many blue screens due to voltage draw BUT it hit the "sweet spot" for the capabilities of these cards. When PC World were having a 3dfx "firesale" in late 2000 I brought the full-on 3500 TV with the big blue break out box.... it was a really unweildy solution but having that breakout box was the COOLEST thing and 3dfx had their own very curious skinned TV tuner software. It wasn't really very capable and PC hardware at the time wasn't very good for capture but I didn't pay much for it at all and got a lot of enjoyment from that card for 3 or more years. I must say I dont think that the drivers ever really got optimised to their full potential due to the short lifespan of these cards, and the x3dfx oddities of myth and mystery (supposedly ex-3dfx programmers but it was never verified) did move things forwards a bit but as with all these things it was clunky to go through an additioinal installation. The 3dfx driver software used to rock though and had its built in overclocker even though the memory and core clocks were linked - overclocking was still a bit of a new art form back then and I remember people liked working with percentages.
I tried these AmigaMerlin drivers, the actually run a tiny bit faster compared to the latest reference drivers, which is nice. The community did a good job here, there are also really cool drivers for the Banshee.
Why does these old part's look so nice in my eye's , i recently started to buy old working part's just to have them and play with them , specialy since in my country they have 0 value for most people , and they get sold for like 5$ a complete kit
no idea how I missed this review since I try to watch your videos regularly. I went searching the web for reviews on the Evil Kyro (which I have) and came across this.
The other big selling point of the old Matroxes back in the day that you didn't mention was their dual-head cards, being early adopters of multi-monitor computing they were huge for professionals that also had great windows directX performance.
After school I used to work in the maintenance and IT field for a few years and in the Dos days and even up until I upgraded to Pentium slot based systems the S3 was a beast in all Dos games and emulators and even early windows 32bit based emulators, kyro 2 in general was a pretty decent card as a med range one, had in my horrible Celeron junk slot shitty CPU days and it had a version of Myst optimized for it so it kicked some ass back in the day and also managed some very high resolutions on my 21" CRT monitor as a desktop computer svga card, but was traded for a much deserving ATI 7000 pro card
11:37 I am still waiting for the Matrox G800!!!!!!!
I remember my Pentium III with an S3 onboard card. It was the only onboard that could handle Quake 2 openGL here.
After it i became a fan of the S3 video.
*****
But it was a exception
*****
That's a shame, if it was still around the competition would be great
What did you clean up all those old VGA cards with? They look mint!
I can't understand why i like such videos so much. I don't even miss anything before radeon 8500, and don't want to have some of those cards.. maybe because at that times i had s3 trio 3d, that didn't support opengl for my favourite quake1..
Great Video and Video Series for that matter, bur speaking of PowerVR: Do you plan to do a video about the PowerVR PCX1 & PCX2 cards, or did you already do that? Tomb Raider & Mech Warrior 2 with the PowerSGL Patches alone are IMO worth a look.
I do not have these cards I'm afraid. I do know about them and they are interesting, but also focused on a very few specific games.
Good Video! Your conclusions about the G400 match my experiences between 99 and 2001, although my card was the 16MB single head OEM version. In Direct 3D it was very capable and had a sharp 2d image. Unfortunatly, if I remember it correctly, it took more than a year for Matrox to integrate OpenGL suport on the drivers, until then one had to resort to a minigl driver, that had performace issues. But those like me, who had also a voodoo 2 (or two for the lucky ones) could compensate it with the 3dfx card, albeit at lower resolutions.
In a time that the the nvidia cards where a little hit and miss, regarding 2D output, the Matrox's cards where good ones to use as the main card on a system equiped with voodoo 2's or 1's.
That is a good point. Nvidia cards at that time, it mattered what model you got regarding image quality. With Matrox though, you were guaranteed a mint image. The OpenGL support is a bummer, I really like to know how come 3dfx and Nvidia did so well but ATI and Matrox found it a bit harder. What is the "magic" regarding OpenGL that makes it so hard?
When I bought the G400, my budget at the time limited me to either the G400 with 16MB, or the RIVA TNT2 64. A TNT2 Ultra, or a Voodoo 3 where out of the question, because they were more expensive and could have problems with my board (my G400 died nearly 2 years later when I placed it again on the PC, after testing for a few days a brand new GF2 MX400 on my FIC PA-2013 rev 2.0 motherboard, I guess something got out of spec with this 'juicy card', the GF2 produced a lot of artifacts on that board).
By the reviews I had read I knew that the G400Max gave the TNT2 Ultra a run for its money, so I guessed that the regular 16MB version should be competitive with the TNT2 M64, considering that I was willing to use the Voodoo 2 preferentially in all games that suported it, but needed a reasonable direct 3d card for my new , at the time, 17" monitor, and the S3 Virge DX (4MB PCI) I had wasn't good enough. At least the G400 with 16MB allowed 1600x1200 in 32 bit gaming ... if you were lucky the game run fast enough, the Voodoo 3 3000 cannot reach this resolution in 16bit 3d mode.
Back to your question, regarding Open GL, I guess 3Dfx and Nvidia had better performance because they were the first choice of game developers at the time.
By what I can recall the first big hit 3D games, in 96/97, were mainly Open GL, and then Glide (3Dfx had a miniGL layer that allowed to run OpenGL games). There were also Power Vr cards at the time, but they failed to gain ground against the 3dfx, because they required more powerfull CPU's to give the same performace as a voodoo 1.
In 1998, 3Dfx launched the Voodoo 2, and Nvidia the first TNT, that was commercial sucess, and the first card to put a dent on 3Dfx reign, so I guess, they also gained some head start.
By then, Matrox and ATI were, if I'm not mistaken, more related to business users (CAD's, Office, etc), and the OEM retail channel, even despite having some gamming capabilities on their cards, they were usually only choosed by those who could not afford a real "gamming card".
The G200 was Matrox first card to have some sucess in Direct 3d gamming, providing at a the same time excellent 2D (they had earlier launched the m3d that was a 3D only, Power VR solution), but it also lacked integrated OpenGL suport at launch.
Regarding ATI, I had the impression that in the Ati RAGE II days they were more present in the OEM segment, like S3, so their cards were not that good against the competition, only when the Rage 128 (Fury) was launched, did they get to the mainstream gamming arena, and then lacked the 3dfx and nvidia base. I always had the impression that ATI lagged behind the competition in the drivers departement (win9x). Even in Direct3D there were a lot of bugs and glitches, but they had good 2D signal. The problem was that some of the bugs prevented the user from running certain games even with a voodoo2 in the system.
In Unreal, only with a 3dfx was the "smoke" at the beginning of the game allright. With other brands cards it got pixelized.
I remember the Savage 2000 and Savage 4 cards for having drivers issues and really bad Direct3D compatibility, with lots of artifacts. Suprised you got this far with them in your review.
Newer drivers make these cards very solid and they are mostly cheaper if you can find them. You can get SiS 315 cards for like $20 bucks and it will play all your DOS games and early windows games great. I am starting to buy these cards for retro boxes because everything else just keeps going up in price. Sometimes you can find Geforce 2-4MX cards for cheap so those are my 2nd choice.
AFAIR, Savage4 on SS7 was horrible. Too many driver issues even on almost nonproblem ALi AladdinV. Replacing it for TNT2M64 - and almost no issues. And noticeably faster than Banshee.
But Savage4 rocks on that Quake level with S3TC compressed textures 🖖 - it was truly amazing.
One of my first PCs have an integrated video card SiS 6326. It was no good experience, only dos games, strategy games on windows and some lite 3D DirectX games. Heavy games this video card cannot did. Days were much more excited when I bought a 3Dfx Voodoo 4 4500 PCI. :)
I remember tech TV doing a review on the SIS and they said it was to expensive but they hoped the manufacturer would keep going in that line
Great to see some more exotic card choices. I had the original savage 3d on a gainward card back in the day, and it displayed the same type of rendering issues in numerous games. These alpha/masking errors were consistent and probably due to some hardware shortcomings that didn't quite match up with expected direct3d behavior. Also not something that future driver updates could fix, workaround, or compensate for. The result being that quite a few games were not really playable. A shame really, because performance in general was pretty decent. In they end they just didn't have to R&D budget to keep up. The T&L unit in savage 2000 was bugged and was permanently disabled in the drivers.
Ah that is good to know! Yes a real shame as with good DX6 compatibility this would be a very good card to recommend. In OpenGL it performs outstanding.
Excel.lent review as always. I remember a friend of mine having an AGP graphics card that you haven't mentioned at all, and that was quite popular. It was based on the 3D Labs Permedia 2 chipset. I think he bought it to play with OpenGL accelerated 3D Studio type software. That card was not very good at gaming. More of a professional choice. But it was quite an impressive chipset anyway.
Would love to have a system with the Kyro, such an exotic beast in the wild! 😍🤗
My Athlon rig from the 2000 had a Savage 2k card, I used to play Serious Sam on that pc with glitched textures all over the place, back then I thought my card was broken, soon after May Payne was released I ditched that card and I got myself a Geforce 2 GTS before switching to a geforce 4ti 4600.
Thanks for looking at one of the Sis cards ^.^
Haha, no problem, I did it for you :) It sure delivered :D
+PhilsComputerLab it's a stinker, but the 305 is still a step up from the 6326 :)
I know! How bad would that card be!
+PhilsComputerLab hahaha, anyway thanks for the awesome videos , I loved this series , it put a lot of things into perspective the Matrox and Savage 2000 especially , makes me want to do a Super Socket 7 build now :3 , have a Savage 2000 and 3000 just dong nothing
I remember Austin Meyer of Laminar Research raging about appalling OpenGL performance of Matrox cards in X-plane 5 around year 2000 or 2001 ;) It was in fact worse than Riva TNT’s!
Thanks you Phil, for making a terrible day that much better :)
Aaaaaa, hope it gets better soon.
Terrible day too. Thanks Phil
Have a decent day, but day gets much better after this nice video:)
The sis 315 is much better compared to the 305
Looks like I'll be going with my voodoo3 3000
Thanks.. So in depth. An interesting card to me was made for HPs P3 and celeron Laptops. Silicon Motion Lynx which actually does a fair job with games like Unreal Gold, Quake 2 but does great in DOS as well. It's only 4MB on board also... Gateway laptops from that Era also have the same video chipset. Year 2000 or so, the lynx I think was DirectX7 capable & does great with 98se
I'm always amazed at what else is out there. Silicon Motion, I don't think I've heard of that name, very interesting.
+PhilsComputerLab you won't find much on them except drivers and currently they made storage solutions with PCIe x1. I found the most video card information from man pages of Ubuntu and Xorg. Linux seems to document almost everything lol
Nice job. What I found missing, were the results for 1280x1024 for some games. I miss also 1600x1200 resolution. Framerates are very high even for 1280x1024, so with 1600x1200 some of the card should have reasonable results.
I don't agree with your interpretation of Kyro II. That in all the cases it need faster CPU. Only for GL Quake, for other games You tested Kyro II looses framerates for higher resolution. For higher resolutions this CPU is not bottleneck for Kyro II.
I'm completely agree with You , that it is much easier, and logistic to stay with one platform for some time.
You have made a great job with super socket 7 platform. What's next ?
S3 Savage 2000 was marketed as GeForce 256 equivalent and launcher after GeForce 256 so it's no wonder it's beating the older TNT2 in some games.
love the videos. working on my own K6 super socket 7 setup. I got a k6-2 @400mhz and a k6-3 @400mhz. which would you recommend using? I also found a P3 500mhz slot 1 CPU the other day. Naturally, I HAVE to get it a motherboard to live in lol. any cheap but fun suggestions on that?
K6-3 is faster, but that's pretty obvious :D
The G400MAX suffers in OpenGL because Matrox's OpenGL drivers were terrible. The open-source Linux drivers consistently outperformed Windows in Quake3 on those boards.
"I would not consider that card for the super socket 7 platform." As an AGP card is there any situation where the SIS card is a good choice? Or were you just being charitable?
The Voodoo 3 is indeed a nice card. That box filter helps out with the banding of 16-bit games. However, it's not as compatible with DOS games as an S3 or even an nVidia card. I only know of one game so far that will show what I mean, but try to play Pinball Illusions (part of Pinball Gold Pack on GoG) in either SVGA mode on a Voodoo Rush, Banshee, or 3. Whatever 2D core those cards use (Micronix or Macronix, not sure), simply cannot handle that game at either at 640x480 or 800x600. It just shows a small portion of the top of the screen completely scrambled. the 640x350 EGA resolution seems to work just fine.
I can't comment on Pinball Illusions, since it seems to have been added more recently to the compatibility matrix found at gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/ though I wanted to tell you that only Voodoo Rush uses external, 3rd party 2D chips, which are well known for being far from optimal. Starting with Voodoo Banshee the 3dfx cards all have their own, in-house developed 2D core integrated in the corresponding Voodoo chip, which overall is known to be one of the best.
@@armorgeddon Yeah, as an owner of a Voodoo3 and having a friend with a Voodoo5 5500, we both can attest that even those cards are incompatible with Illusions at any resolution higher than 640x350.
@@NightSprinter Ok! The game wasn't added to that compatibility matrix without reason ;-) Don't forget though that there were several BIOS versions for those Voodoo cards so maybe it also depends on that. I doubt it, but it's not impossible.
i had the gf 1-2 cards (gts level or better, didnt buy the low end tnt/tnt2) and kyro2 and s3 2000, returned the 2000, drivers and hardware flaws that required driver workarounds that hurt perf/quality... ugg, on the other hand my kyro2 was alot of fun, used them on alot of builds and upgrades nice card imho....always had good drivers imho.
I think a PowerVR chip was used in the SEGA Dreamcast. Great texture support, but no post-processing.
Yes, there are two configurations of Dreamcast: with Voodoo2 and PowerVR, but PowerVR wins. iPad 3 have a PowerVR GPU.
The Dreamcast used a varient of the Videologic Neon 250 PowerVR chip, but slightly better in some aspects. This is two PowerVR generations before the Kyro 2.
Seems like a couple of the cards were cpu bottlenecked in different benchmarks, a lot of 90° horizontal results! Maybe rebench in a p4 agp board to see how far they can actually go?
It's about finding the best video card for Super Socket 7, I hope that clears up any confusion.
Hi! Im new to the whole building old gaming pcs and really dont know the different kind of compatibility issues I may find.
For now I just salvaged an old 775 socket with agp and IDE hdd channels PC and installed Win98Se on it.
The motherboard is a Biostar P4M800 Pro-M7 which had drivers for Win98/ME.
For the GPU Im using the integrated S3 UniChrome IGP.
(would have to make more tests but according to 3dmark 99 should have similar performance to a tnt2 m64 or somewhere around that)
So the hardware is not period correct for 9x, it was already on the way out by then, but for now I tried some games and it works pretty nice.
Is there some big problem I might encounter with a build like this?
TheVanillatech It runs Core2Duos i think but I'm not really too interested on Windows XP, at least right now.
Be it by unofficial patches, gog re editions, using vmware or something like that, or because they still just work, you can get to play most of the XP era games on modern systems.
And I'm not really that much into this for some sort of authentic, period correct experience or anything like that.
I just want a PC that runs those games I can't play on DosBox and have no possible workaround for working on modern systems, so mosly that specific set of games that needs 3D acceleration AND windows 9x because XP and newer break compatibility.
Not that I'm completely against it, maybe If I get a better Win9X machine I can turn this one on that WinXP beast machine :)
I wish I'd waited a bit back in the day and got the the Kyro 2 instead of the GeForce 2 mx 400
check for powersgl versions of the games you test if you mess with the powervr again, quake, unreal and quite a few others have those exe's like they do 3dnow, there was even a compile that was 3dnow powersgl made by users years later if you can find it for quake and unreal ;)
Problem is Kyro doesn't support PowerVR's own API called PowerSGL anymore.
great videos, I'm currently building a Win95 themed machine and have made 1998 my cut off year so many of the cards reviewed unfortunately are past my cut off date. been really struggling with the choice for the main video card. have 2 V2's in SLI but I'm mostly down between the Matrox G200 and original TNT for the primary card, decisions, decisions.
I'm into the same atempt ^^
But I haven't either of them :( so I have to use a bad (but faster than the original TNT) TNT2 m64 for now as the main gpu.
The rest of my AGP gpus are either too old or too new, or too underpowered (I have an SIS6326 XD). I have also a voodoo banshee, but this is useless since I already have an SLI.
What CPU are you using ? I'm planing to use an overclocked celeron 300A because I think that is what people would have used back then for a gaming PC seing how cheap that CPU was in comparison to the pentium 2 450 while it performed mostly the same when running at the same frequency and being very easy to overclock at that specific speed (I have one of the rare "bad" celeron 300A wich isn't quite stable at that speed XD)
I'm actually going for the high end so I'm using a PII 450. I know its the obvious choice for 1998 but I wanted to go slot 1 and I don't have any other PII machines running so for me its different. even threw a dxr2 card in there for DVD decoding and some Wing Commander IV (I know there's a patch but that's no fun).
I figured the G200 would be nice with the V2 SLI because its great image quality would offset the degrade from the V2 passthrough but its just not a very gaming oriented card. That's why i'm thinking the TNT as its a bit more powerful and game playing oriented, maybe even a bit more game compatible.
I also have a Banshee...I kind of like that card but struggle to find any reason to use it. on a side note...how are you adding spaces to your comments, when I do it and post it just clumps it together and eliminates my spacing.
+0blivi0n100 you know, you won't really use the main gpu for anything else other than 2D. DirectX and opengl game are running faster on the sli anyway. I think the matrox would be a better choice (not as good as the nvidia card for dos gaming apparently)
yea, your probably right on that.
There is a Memory Management Problem on Computers with Pentium Processors specifically with Windows 95 and Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors."This problem no longer occurs in Windows 98."
See Microsoft Article ID: 179897 - Last Review: 01/11/2015 01:40:53 - Revision: 5.0 on Microsoft's website.
Now I think that the memory management problem issue might not be there with Windows 95c because I didn't see the memory management problems listed on that version on a Wikipedia article about Windows 95.
Personally I have used Windows 95c on 233Mhz Gateway 2000 Pentium 2 system and have never had lockups or blue screens or any other problem.
However I have never tried using earlier versions of Windows 95 like Windows 95B which originally was installed on the early first released Pentium II systems of mid 1997.Ideally Windows 98FE would be a match for a 450 Mhz Pentium II system with 2 V2's in SLI.
Hello, great job with all those cards!
Will you try the cards that are affected by cpu bottleneck in a faster platform?
I remember how much faster my geforce 3 got when I went from a thunderbird 1.3 to an athlon xp 2600
Absolutely! But when, I don't know. But yes, it's on the books :D
What about Matrox Millennium G200 8Mb? If you have this card maybe you could do a small video with some benchmarks and games from 98-2001 like Unreal 1 (or Unreal Tournament), Quake III Arena, Driver: You are the Wheelman, maybe Turok and Expendable? Cause in the past my friend has this card and pc config something like pii350/192mb sdram pc133/matrox millennium g200 8Mb(maybe upgrade to 16Mb i forget about how mb has his card) and we were such high hopes about Matrox cause Quake III Arena, Unreal or Unreal Tournament, Driver: You are the Wheelman and some other 3D games runs on Matrox so well! Today I have Matrox G200 and build those pc (pii-333(cannot get motherboard with 100mhz bus, only 66 so only get pii-333MHz but I think it do no difference)/192Mb sdram pc133/matrox millennium g200 8mb/creative sound blaster 16 vibra c isa/win 95, i run some of this games in 800x600 or 1024x768 with high graphics and games have so terrible lags. I didn't run fraps, but it feels like 20 or 25 fps. I forget which resolution my friend used (and he forget too :)) maybe 640x480, in this games runs pretty well. So I think, maybe somethink wrong with my pc or matrox g200 or I simply have wrong memories (something like a grass was greener and skies was higher:))? :) Or I simply have a cpu bottleneck and should install piii 800 or tualatin(they are great cpu btw, if you overclock them from ther default 1103MHz to 1500 or 1600 MHz they become more powerful than P4 1500 Willamete).
And second question, currently I can buy Matrox Millennium G45+ MDHA16DLXB G450 16 Mb should I buy it or G400 Max will be a way better? It's really chip about 10$ so I think I didn't loose anything :)
I'd really like to see a video on the Intel i740 when you get your hands on one. There's really not too much info on it other than the fact it was one of Intel's few dedicated video cards.
I have seen one or two videos suggesting it doesn't perform too well, but I would like to see more detailed information.
I think I have an Intel graphics card, not sure if it's that one. When was it produced? I might do a different series for older cads like the first Riva 128 and that Intel card but with a slower machine and older, more suitable games.
"Intel's few dedicated video cards"
Wait, has Intel actually released any dGPU other than the i740 before?
I'm not sure. I just know I have a card with an Intel logo on the cooler sitting at home :)
+PhilsComputerLab I think it came out sometime in 1998.
+Party Waffel Yeah, apparently one was canceled and the other is pretty rare. I believe those two other cards were known as the i752 and i754.
Ah, there you see it. This is what I mean't in the comment section of your other video. Notice how the Radeon maintains performance in 16-bit and 32-bit (barely any difference)? How it also maintains performance across resolutions? That's because the Radeon256 GPU (Rage6) incorporates HyperZ compression as well as rendering internally at 32-bit. You see a similar pattern with the Kyro since it also incorporates a memory bandwidth saving feature (Tile Based rendering) coupled with also rendering internally at 32-bit. Both produce a straight line across resolutions until you hit 1280x1024 and that's because they hit their Fill Rate bottlenecks.
Such bandwidth saving features are standard nowadays but ATi and PowerVR were the ones who pioneered this technology.
Yes that's correct with the 16-Bit vs 32-Bit, but as for resolution, that's the weak Socket 7 CPU no feeding the card fast enough to show higher performance at lower resolutions.
So, after this video we will see the BEST card for super socket 7? Can't wait for it! :D
Well you really got to form your own conclusions, for me it's the 3dfx Voodoo 3 though. My second pick would be the TNT2. And for DOS gaming the Savage 2000.
+PhilsComputerLab for me its GT 610 PCI :D. Just kidding, before your videos i was thinking that a v5 5500 was the most powerful one, but u loaded me and other people with alot other cards and i cant decide :D
First world problems :P
6:40 How you ran Q2 in DOS is everybody's mystery.
Windows 98 SE.
Hi Phil, did you know that the PowerVR card can run the OG Resident Evil at 800x600...
I don't have a PowerVR, but I know it runs some games at higher resolutions compared to Voodoo cards. Tomb Raider is another example.
PhilsComputerLab I read that the PowerVR cards are backwards compatible so the higher resolutions should work with the 2nd model (NEC), I really need to get one.
So while looking for my Matrox cards, I ended up finding an ELSA GLoria II card which appears to be based on the first nVidia Quadro chipset, and from the little I've looked up online, it seems this is based on an enhanced GeForce 256 core. What sort of performance could I expect from this thing on a Super Socket 7 machine?
Also, how would my other Matrox cards compare to the G400 Max? They are a plain G400 (pulled from an IBM computer, it would seem) and two different G450s, one with 16MB of VRAM, the other with 32MB.
They will perform similar to the cards I used. The MAX is the fastest though. In OpenGL the 550 is a bit faster.
thanks
one PowerVR card that would work well is a PCX1 or PCX2 , its not cheap but it would work well as a secondary 3d accelerator.
main problem is compatibility.
I have a PowerVR PCX1 which i got in a bulk lot of cards i purchased for next to nothing. For the last few years i have told myself that i will install it on one of my P2 machines, but i find it hard to stick to one project at a time and am always distracted, but i'll get the PowerVR running one day. When you say its not cheap, do you mean the cost of the PowerVR card these days??
Ive seen PCX1 cards go for over £70 in some cases, its not a cheap card sadly.
lightdark28 Damn that much! Only reason i believe i got mine so cheap is because it was part of a bulk lot, and the seller didn't really know much about the cards.
actually thats how I got my PCX1 card, I got it in a bundle with something like 2 PCX1 cards and 3 Voodoo3 cards, along with a few other Nvidia/ATI cards.
funny enough I ended selling the spares and making alot more money from them than I spent on that bundle.
Really seems to me like the SiS 305 is the best choice, clearly.
But really, the Radeon SDR and G400 Max seem to be the best. I'd choose the G400 Max. Radeon SDR for performance, Matrox G400 Max for everything else. I'd end up getting one of them myself for my Pentium II system.
The Kyro II probably loses lots of performance on the 320x240 test because of an unsupported resolution, so when it was bumped back up to a correct resolution, it gained a ton of performance back.
i used a g400 back in 2000 i think with an amd duron600*at1000mhz :) and for me its a memorable card. i played in 1024x768 and the performance was enough and i think this card have the best image quality back then. of course this vga was not the best but i used it very well.
Great video to top this topic off with. :-) Good job.
Guess I have to source a Kyro-II and a Savage-2000 now.
EDIT:
Basically speaking, one can conclude that these four cards, will be the top cards for SS7. When dealing with the balance between compatibility and performance.
TNT2-Ultra (I know you have only tested the pro)
Voodoo3-3500
Savage2000
Matrox G400-Max
Is that a viable point to make?
Yea these are definitely some of the best cards. Because of Glide, my pick is the V3, but everyone will have their own preferences. A DOS gamer is best off with a Savage for example. The Matrox gives you Environment Mapped Bump Mapping for example and the Savage you can check out compressed textures in Unreal. TNT2 does everything well, just doesn't have glide.
Do an extended review on the S3 Savage card
I reviewed the Savage4 recently. The 2000 should be a faster version, but otherwise quite similar.
There's a review on anandtech back from 1999 on this card and it was only rivaled by the geforce 256 in opengl.
In 32bit mode it actually kicks butt because of it's 16bit z-buffer.
In Direct3D unfortunately, it performs badly.
www.anandtech.com/show/410
Nice, thanks for sharing!
Power VR still strong today in Handy SOCs.
Yup
You know geforce 2 gts was available at that time and smokes competition. Gts 64 or ti or ultra variants only, avoid mx at all cost
cool :) what do you think about K6-III @ 500mhz and Geforce 4 mx440 plus 512mb ram? since i own one machine in this setup except gpu, but i'm thinking about installing one gf4 into it and also voodoo2 as a glide adapter.
I don't think you can combine a 3D card with a Voodoo 2. I think you'll need to get a 2D card instead.
You can use a Voodoo II with a second 3D card, just don't install the Direct3D and OpenGL drivers for the Voodoo II and it'll only kick on when Glide is needed. When OpenGL or Direct3D is needed it'll just use the main card.
A Geforce 4, even a MX, will be bound hard by the Super 7 CPU, but still should put out some decent numbers in 3D stuff. It's more fitting for the P3 or P4/Athlon XP era, but if it'll work in that old of an AGP socket, it's overkill but functional. I'm not sure on it's VESA compatibility or how far back drivers go back for Windows, as well.
Check out the video I did on Nvidia cards. The MX440 is based on the GeForce2, so it's a decent fit and has enough performance to play around with AA and AF. They are also very cheap and easy to find, so not a bad card at all!
PhilsComputerLab GeForce 2 is MX400 and GeForce 4 is MX440 or so
S3 (530, 540) is useless in 2D, but 3D good, for me best choise for SS7 is TNT2 or GeForce 2 Pro.
do you know that powervr made a card called the neon250
Yea they made a few cards actually. I don't have any though I'm afraid.
SIS may look rubbish in these tests but it's still better than software rendering.
I've got a pair of SIS 315s.. heh.
Can you play MotoRacer2 on win9x?, this game has support for PowerVR cards
I'd be surprised if it didn't run.
Savage 2000 achieved high framerates in OpenGL because it has integrated T&L engine on chip
afaik T&L was not working on the Savage 2000. Hardware bug.
+RetroScorp I've read that finally T&L was enabled in the latest drivers. Maybe Phil would be able to test it :)
My understanding is also that T&L is broken and not enabled because it leads to errors. I did not try to enable this though. I will definitely do this when I properly review this card!
i had the maxtor g400 max i thought i was good for the time ,i had it for some time then sold it and i got a gforce 4200ti think it was 128meg then a 6600gt then 7800gtx and after that i got 9800gtx that lasted till the gainward gtx460gs 2gig, then i got a asus gtx 580 1.5gig mem i still got that next was palit GTX 770 OC 4GB msi 970 and then 980ti and now i have 1060,,,i started way back with a trio 2meg card voodoo 1 & 2 ati 7200le Abit's Radeon 9800 XT,,,,,but never for get the GeForce FX 5900, NVIDIA became embroiled in a bitter controversy over questionable driver optimizations and outright cheating
Now try putting HD3850 AGP version here lol
That will not work due to a much too new AGP version.
that s3 card is more modern and recent than the others it is being benched against - this is why it is out performing them - these other cards should be compared against a savage4 - which was obliterated by the other cards in your video performance wise. the savage 2000 is basicallt a generation newer and should have been put against like... the geforce 256
I can follow your thinking. But watch the previous videos first, because I tested GeForce 256, GF 2, 3 and 4 and other faster cards. The cards I'm using in this specific video to compare, those are the fastest of 3dfx and Nvidia. So for the S3 to beat those, that's why it was so amazing.
Hope that makes sense. The top cards are not necessarily top on the SS7 platform, which is very CPU limited.
30 subscribes to 10 000, YAAAAAA
:D
I had a Matrox G200, any chance of playing about with one of them some time?
Graphics codds. The only type of fish that use OpenGL
Herk-Q-Lees.
Useless test. My sock7 has no agp slot. Best gpu is the best agp card
Super Socket 7. Suuuuuuper.