Best Super Socket 7 GPU? Part 2: Nvidia

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[soylentgreenb]

The T in T&L emphatically does not stand for texture; it stands for transform. Rasterizing, z-culling and texturing is pretty much all a 3DFX voodoo 1 does.

Transformation is taking the coordinates of a vertex and multiplying it by a matrix that represents several different rotations, translations, skews and other transformations. You have a viewport in the game, you have to translate and rotate the coordinates of everything in the world so that it represents what you see from that viewport, with the camera at the origin.

Then you have the perspective divide. Things further away usually are supposed to be smaller; there's some particular field of view that you want to use. This isn't always the case; sometimes you want orthogonal projection for 2D or a top down game.

In the end all, the coordinates fit neatly into a cube with x, y and z-values between plus and minus 1 and clipping that which is too far away, or not on the screen is very easy. Triangles which are partially inside the cube have to be clipped.

The big innovation of the 3DFX voodoo was to not do T&L in hardware. Games had to support software rendering, so they couldn't use that many polygons anyway; therefore, what you needed to offload from the CPU was the expensive texturing and z-culling. This made the voodoo cheap and effective.


T&L wasn't really that important when the geforce 256 was introduced, but gradually games stopped supporting software rendering and started really beefing up the number of polygons. In the Geforce 2 era and beyond it started really hurting to not have hardware T&L.

[GAMMAXII]

Oh a 40 minute video from Phil

"Grabs Popcorn"

[DanafoxyVixen]

Im really keen to see your results regarding the Sound card slowdown investigation. keep up the good videos!

[kaneCVR]

That's funny - I have the exact same motherboard and I use a Riva TNT2 PRO + Voodoo 2 SLi on it. I run quite a few games on the TNT2 PRO, and never had an issue. The secret is using VIA 4in1 4.35 OR OLDER. As for nvidia drivers, the most stable driver is 41.09 - this works with most nvidia cards up to the FX series.

BIOS - wise you don't have to do anything, but do make sure you COMPLETELY WIPE the Voodoo 3 drivers before you install ANY nvidia drivers because that causes A LOT of weirdness (BSODS, hangs and such). I personally recommend keeping a copy of your windows folder on a seperate partition -with only chipset drivers installed (as well as audio, USB, whatever) - no directX, no video drivers - so you can override your windows folder when testing another brand of card. Windows 98 is EXTREMELY fidgety about drivers and such.

[NikiDaDude]

It probably makes me a weirdo but I still remember the specs of most of these cards, and I still get excited when I see a GeForce 3.
I've lusted after them so much as a kid.

[Martin-skdf]

I still remember my Geforce 256 SDR purchase. The memory bandwith was a bottleneck and was the main focus for overclocking. Later nvidia released the DDR version which made the purchase feel sour.

[kaneCVR]

My 2 cents:
1. Stay away from the TNT2 M64 - it's ok for 640x480, but if you go any higher (and you will if you want to play Quake 2 and alike) the TNT2 M64 is too slow. The TNT2 PRO on the other hand is great up to 1280x1024 on the K6-III.
2. Don't use a Geforce 4 MX if you plan to play older dos games as well. It has compatibility issues with some titles
3. The Geforce 4 Ti is NOT a winXP card. If you want to play win98 games with eye-candy all the way up, at 1600x1200, it's the card to get. Some games like Dugeon Keeper 2 don't like winXP - they will crash to desktop and other lovely things. Used in a Pentium III or Athlon XP FAST win98 machine, the GF4 Ti allows you to play lots of win98-prefered games at insane levels of detail (I recently finished Black & White 2 on my 3800+ A64 / GF4 Ti 4600 playing on 1920x1080 :D ).

My picks would be: - if you want to throw money and time at this retro rig get a TNT2 PRO or Geforce 256. If you want it done CHEAP get a Geforce 2 MX, preferably the MX400.

Great video Phil!

[clipboard]

Love this channel with retro ( ...and no-so-retro ...) hardware...!!!... Keep it up mate...=)

[MrMilli]

@12:38 I often didn't install VIA chipset drivers in the old days (90's). The MVP3 in Windows 98, without chipset drivers, will run at 1x AGP (instead of 2x) and features like AGP Fast Write and Side Band Addressing will also be disabled without drivers.
Basically turning it into a 66Mhz PCI port which was actually sufficient for old cards.
This story repeated itself a couple times with VIA's first AGP 4x and 8x chipsets.
Old ATI cards gave you the option to set the AGP speed in the driver, which was a life saver in Windows.

[DatMake]

I'm running a MSI Geforce 4 Ti 4800 SE in my win98 machine, and after seeing the results i'm considering to swap it with my Gainward Geforce 2 Ti. Thanks for this research!

[CkRtech]

I have my old Pentium III 700Mhz system that I was considering pulling out of storage and building a Windows 98 system for say 1998-2001. I think I actually still have my Creative Labs 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro (GeForce 256) - in box no less - in storage with it. This video definitely has me curious regarding how everything is going to come together. Probably going to drop a Diamond Monster MX300 (Aureal Vortex 2) in it. Will see how it goes. Thanks for the videos, Phil!

[vetzRetro]

One of your best videos to date :) Loved the analysis with the graphs. That ELSA card is a VIVO card, not 3D glasses (Video in, Video out).

Suggestion: Show some footage of the game/benchmark being run in the background of the graphs (just barely visible), could make for a bit more visually interesting presentation.

[MrMateczkoYT]

Phew, nice long video, always liked your charts, beautiful :)
Even though I have absolutely no interest in such old cards and more towards somthing like 6800 GT for 98SE, it's something about the quality of the video and your voice that makes your videos so good to watch :)

[WitoEngelke]

Phil! Please! T&L has nothing to do with textures! It is the part of the pipeline which was not covered in consumer hardware before: Transformation. It was common to have geometry processing on workstation cards, often in the form of a GLINT chip (3dlabs) but these cards were extremely expensive. NVidia made the first consumer card wich supported geometry processing. And also: It was not supported out of the box for games, which is true but for everything using OpenGL, for example id software titles. It was crazy because the first Geforce and first Quadro outperformed these super expensive Elsa Gloria beasts right away and where so much cheaper.

[tofuguru]

I agree with so much of this.

I have the majority of those cards... And for me it's between my riva tnt 2 ultra (viper v770 ultra) or my GeForce2 ti.

For the price... Go tnt 2 ultra or TNT 2.

GeForce2 ti performs better, but not by as much as it's cost difference.

The gf2 mx400 is a nice in-between too. Although I get better performance with my tnt2 ultra in many scenarios.

Great vid. Great efforts!

Wish we were closer. I'd loan you a lot of my equipment if you wanted to test. (I'm in the USA)
I have more stuff than I do time 😅

Keep up the good work. Love all your old and new videos.

[CTFC-GERMANY]

The Lable on your TNT2-Pro says "ViVO" this term was used for "Video in / Video out" back in days. maybe the additional SubD-Port was used for kind on TV-Connection? AFAIR the Elsa 3D glasses are connected via VGA-Adapter Cable. Nice Video anyways!!!

[JohnSmith-iucj]

The 40 driver was too new for the 4mx, you should use the 28 driver for less cpu bottleneck!

[hulkamana]

Thanks for the in-depth review! I can tell that it was a lot of work, made exponentially more challenging when you work full time. The video's are very much appreciated!

Back in the summer of 2001, I bought a Geforce 3 that looked just like your Quadro Pro. It was from an obscure off brand company that went by the name eVGA. As I recall, it cost around $300. I bought it to replace my Voodoo 5 5500. As such, I'm excited to see how well the 3dfx cards fare in 98SE. I believe I still have it somewhere. I really hope so, as I can't get enough of this "retro" PC hardware, and I've recently begun collecting these old parts.

[Faiadenza]

I had a gf4 mx440se with 64mb vram (I think) back in the days. After hotglueing a 40mm Fan onto the heatsink, it was quite overclockable and put out decent Performance. Fun times!

[LawrenceTimme]

Great effort making this video. The quadro would be my pic