I have 2 video cards from my old PCs and I'm trying to figure out which one is better for my emulation/older PC gaming XP computer. I have: NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro (Microsoft Corporation) and S3 ViRGE GX/DX. Bonus question: in the future if I wanted to buy the best possible video card a Pentium 4 motherboard running XP could handle, what should I get?
They're both pretty crap, but the Nvidia card is easily the more powerful of the two, as well as probably going to be less of a driver nightmare. Trying to get anything by S3 working right these days is an exercise in frustration.
I was tossing up between a Radeon HD3450 and a Nvidia 6200 for my little Pentium 4 project, trying to balance price and performance. I ended up going with the 6200 because of the passive heatsink and it being powered directly via the agp slot rather than an additional cable. Most reports seem to indicate that the HD3450 is better though. I think agp cards went up into the radeion HD4xxx and nvidia 7xxx range as well, but I think these can be hard to find and/or expensive. Depends if your p4 mobo has a pci-e slot or not
Thanks a bunch guys. I'll go ahead and keep the Nvidia in the Pentium 4 and move the S3 into the Pentium 3 that the Nvidia card came out of. The weaker one should really be running 98SE, 2000, or ME so I can play Win98 games on something natively that is better than the Win98 laptop I have. It even only has a 20GB hard drive where my Pentium 4 has 129GB in it. They have the exact same SoundBlaster card in them.
You might be better off using the S3 Virge in a purely DOS machine. From what I remember they had pretty great 2D performance back in the day (3D is abysmal, they were called "3D De-celerators" for a reason). The TNT sucks, it's the budget model with a narrow 64 bit bus. I can't believe I remember this shit. If you want a good old Win98se machine, maybe grab dual voodoo 2s and the most powerful single core CPU you can get. 512MB RAM too (not any more, Win98 has issues with it and although they're semi-solvable, stability can still be an issue). That should run everything at the time super smooth.
And I remember my S3 Virge had 2MB VRAM with 4x512KB expansion slots for up to 4MB total. Fuck you S3 with your '3D'
The HD3xxx and HD4xxx cards are 2-3 generations newer than the 7xxx cards (which were competing against the Radeon 1xxx line). I recall there being a Radeon 3xxx card for AGP slots, but personally I think that would be heavily CPU limited in any motherboard that could take it (unless they made Core 2 Duo compatible AGP boards, not that unlikely given how long lga775 lasted). The 6200 you got is a lowest tier card, weakest of the weak, but okay for playing Quake 3. My old AGP machine has an Athlon 64 X2, a Via chipset motherboard because nforce3 had fuck-all support, and a beast of a Radeon 1950 Pro AGP. It requires two molex connectors and a power supply that can push enough amps to it, but damn it was incredibly powerful AND very cheap. Current high-end cards cost 3x as much as that card did.
Oh I see, my mistake was assuming that the last of the agp nvidia cards were equivalent to the last of the agp radeon cards, but it seems radeon supported agp for much longer. Hmmm, I may have to reconsider my purchase...
