At least S3 successfully made its Texture Compress technology the industrial standard for both DirectX and OpenGL.......

The S3 demo maps with S3TC works just fine on the GOG version of Unreal gold on windows 10. Who knew 1999 offered such incredible graphics. Thank you Phil for sharing this with us.

I'm loving the 70s porn music.

@mrmcguru163

4 жыл бұрын

hahaha, my first thought

ahh man, those were the times. :) I miss it. That feeling when I turned on my old P200mmx with 128megs and s3 virge and voodoo 1 card. and played all those great games like Sports Car GT, Re-Volt, Need For Speed 4, Red Alert, Tycoon and so on. ahh... i must build some old hardware.

This exact card was my fist video card. Remember it ran Half-Life, System Shock 2 and Deus Ex, all of them at 800*600 flawlessly.

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Nice! Do you remember how much it cost? Or how much in comparison to 3dfx and Nvidia cards?

@LuisMercadoorg

8 жыл бұрын

+PhilsComputerLab I don't remember the exact price but I do know that it was tremendously cheaper than any recognized brand card at the time. I was a teenager at the time, maybe 15 or 16 by 1998 and my mother made me pay for half my computer. Since in Mexico everything is three times as expensive I remember researching extensively for the cheapest possible computer that would allow me to play Half-Life decently (my obsession for that game was beyond measure). My final system was a PIII at 550mhz, the Savage 4 and 96 ram. Oh how I wanted the Voodoo3.

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Thank you for sharing this! I can see how this card was awesome value. Play around with the resolution and details and it's a decent card.

@LuisMercadoorg

8 жыл бұрын

+PhilsComputerLab it was a decent card indeed. Enabling S3TC in Deus Ex made me look at the wood textures at the intro for minutes. I remember wondering how graphics could not get any better haha. But now 17 years later I think I'm still preferring Deus Ex, Half-Life and specially System Shock 2 than most new titles. Graphics do not impress me anymore for some reason.

@MVCZ1

8 жыл бұрын

Bought this card back in 1999 as new card in my K6-2 machine. It was a GT version (slower and with 16MB), but it clocked fairly well up to 143/143 MHz (which was sold as Savage 4 extreme version) without any additional cooling. It was a lot cheaper than TNT2 M64, i think 1/2 or 2/3 price of M64. This was my first graphics card that tought me, how to play with registry settings and so on :) Every driver was "specific", some of them had better D3D but worse opengl ICD or metald river, had to combine it for best performance. I think that there was also problem with AGP texturing which S3 disabled, but it could be enabled again. Anyway the best you can do is not to use standard S3 driver, but set of so called Rizen's tweaked driver. And there also existed a tweaking tool, looked like powerstrip, but it was developed exclusively for savage cards and offered number of advanced options. I've played unreal tournament back at the time, visual quality was better than D3D and was reasonably fast. I also tried the demo levels and it was awesome on K6-2 with 32MB RAM. It was not a popular card back at the time, but it was not that bad. Shame on S3 they could never released proper drivers... and in Windows2000/XP there was huge performance drop and non functional OpenGL and Metal, i think.

Man, i discovered your chanel yesterday. It's pure gold. Keep up the amazing job.

Phil, your videos are superb, keep them going!

If I remember it well, almost every games that use Unreal engine at the time support MetaL renderer. There were many of them, exception went just for Harry potter games that were Direct3D only. UE1 games running S3's MetaL made Savage3D/Savage4 great alternative to 3dfx's Voodoo 3. It was frustrating how people only talked about S3 Savage4 as NVidia Riva TNT2's contender which only made it incompetent.

The Savage 4 was the very first GPU I ever bought myself. Spent R350 on it, and used it until I got the GeForce 4Ti 4800se. Was really happy with it, and the Pentium 3. Mechwarrior 2 in DOS was my jam!

The Egypt level was running on huge screens at the Creative Labs booth at CeBIT '99. It was really impressive.

@philscomputerlab

3 жыл бұрын

Wow that must have quite amazing back in the day!

@SomePotato

3 жыл бұрын

@@philscomputerlab The consumer halls at CeBIT '99 were a lot like Gamescom today. Guillemont and Creative where pretty close and competed for the loudest show, much to the dismay of business visitors. But I was an 18 year old kid, so I loved it. That and the free booze at the countless parties.

That card is a savage.

Hi, Phil! Your channel is just getting better and better! I was watching it all day :)

@philscomputerlab

7 жыл бұрын

Thank you!

Having finally gotten my own Savage4 working (bitflip driver works correctly on my Asus P2L97 with DX7 installed, not on any of my newer PC), I'm finding that it gives a better experience than the Viper V550 that came with the PC - especially since 32bit colours is usable on S3 cards due to at most a 10% performance hit, instead of around 50%. Unreal Gold runs at a higher framerate than with the V550 or my Vanta (125MHz mem and core). That is only with the metal api however - the drivers and single pixel pipe do limit the performance somewhat in DX games. Fun fact: Some companies were still manufacturing Savage4 in 2001 and maybe even 2002, going off the sticker on the back of my card. Edit: Why ^that^ is important, is that the later Savage 4 cards despite being built on the cheap (certainly far lower quality than any Diamond card before or after the turn of the millenium), have a really good VGA ouput even at higher resolutions - as good as my Oxygen VX1 (which is really broken in Commander Keen4+5) and Matrox G550. They still suffer from the capacitor plague though.

S3 Savage 32mb my first gpu...had alot Open Gl issues but still,made my childhood

I remember, it blew my mind, when I installed some fresh drivers on this baby and was able to play games like Quake 3 and Homeworld with 3d acceleration.

I remember back in 2000 using S3Tweak, an incredibly powerfull and usefull tool to overclock and tweak driver settings. Drivers were very unstable for quite some time and Windows XP drivers suck, but W9x are just fine. I had a 16 MB version and currently still have a 32 MB version.

Great review as usual :) It would be good to see a Power VR Prophet 4500 (Kyro 2) review at some point. I remember having one and it's tile based rendering technique could edge out the mighty Geforce 2 in some games. It was a great card for the time but lacked driver support and hardware T+L which ultimately killed it off :(

Wow, that Egypt level really look amazing

Wow thanks for the video, I always thought the S3 was crap other then DOS, but those textures look really good in Unreal.

Damn...this is a hardware nostalgia...!!! Nice review as usual...!!!..B-)

I have an AMD Athlon with the S3 Savage 4 Xtreme 32 mb on my Windows 2000 Professional SP4 and can't complain with my old games 🙂

Thanks. I just found a laptop with a Pentium 3 and S3 Savage 4 running 98SE so this was useful to now what it is capable of.

The texture compression technology looks absolutely fantastic. So it does have revolutionary tech for its time.

I have a card very similar to this still. A Number Nine SR9 w/ S3 Savage4 Xtreme 166MHz core/166MHz 16MB SGRAM. Cool little card, the DDR memory makes it not too bad actually and it has AGP 4X. Has a DVI display output too.

Nice review as always, i had Savage3D and 2000. Friend got Savage4, but it was overheating a lot. Also all Savage card had compatibility problems with AGP texturing in some games (freezing). To fix that, there was made free tool working only in W9x called S3Tweak. You should try it, it has much more driver options than Powerstrip including possibility to change size of agp texturing or disable it, vsync, overclocking, texture types atd. It also support profiles for various games (can be often found in unofficial mixed modded drivers). Usually when any game freeze just disable AGP texturing and it often helps...

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Bugger, wish I'd known that :)

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

But I don't get upset about missing things, because you got to accept that you will never be able to cover everything, or the video never gets finished. There is always another video when you can put that in. I'll cover the S3Tweak tool in the Savage 2000 video then :)

I remember seeing bins full of that back in 2005-2007... i mean...full of it.

This channel is such a huge overdose down memory lane!

So funny to see these old cards with tiny passive heatsinks or even no cooler at all (like voodoo2). And now we got these huuuge triple slot 2kg multifan-cooler designs :D:D

Ahh, Phil -- THESE are the benchmarks I was looking for! I should've known you had more S3 videos. :) What a shame that these cards couldn't keep up in performance -- the texture compression tech is frankly amazing for the time. It's also awesome to see that a card from 1999 has such flawless compatibility with (2D/VESA) in DOS games extending all the way back to early 90s. Do these cards also support the earlier S3 DOS APIs (like for Tomb Raider)? Whew.... the performance of these cards.... what are those 32MB of RAM even doing?! Hahaha. I wonder if the later released Extreme versions are any better? They seem to have about a 50mhz boost over the Pros... although the only ones I can find are with 16MB... but the 32MBs on this card doesn't seem to be doing much anyway!

This is one of my favorite videos :)

@philscomputerlab

7 жыл бұрын

Interesting, can ask why?

7 жыл бұрын

Because it reminds me of the time in 2011 when i had a Duron 1.2GHz and a S3 PCI card, i played the heck out of half life on that system. It just fills me with nostalgia :)

@philscomputerlab

7 жыл бұрын

Ok :)

The first GPU I've ever had! Surprisingly, I've found about the model I had not too long ago though, funny that :) My brother sad that the QIIIArena was lagging a lot and your benchmarks confirm that :) Then I've got a MX440, then 6600GT, (VERY briefly the 6200 TurboCache which was such a pile of garbage), then GT220, then HD5670, and now the GT 740M...yea, no high end cards :( But now I also have a 98SE rig with the FX5600 Ultra Rev.2 128MB DDR, which I'm pleased with, as it supports older, better drivers as it's as good as a high-end GeForce 4 Ti. Also, some modern games have worse quality textures than the S3TC ones :P And who said old games have crappy graphics? :)

Wow! Never knew that compressed textures is something good, I've always think like many did that it's something bad something that do less detail textures and this supposed to weak videocards that cannot do ultra graphics, but how was I impressed when I saw this video. It's almost HD textures and even S3 do this very good. Wow! If I knew this in 1999-2001 with my Voodoo 4 4500 :). Great Vid!

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Thanks! Yes this option confused me too. For ages I thought it was bad, but then, well this was like 10 years ago, I saw in the game Call of Duty in the options and it mentions that texture compression is better quality. So I read up on it and now I know :D They could have really called this options something else. Like "sharper textures" or "larger textures" :D

i still own one of the fastest agp cards ati radeon x1950 pro

I like these old systems, it reminds me of my childhood computer which had a core 2 duo e8400, leadtek winfast a340 128mb agp, and 3gb ram.

I bought one of these back in the day at a computer fair just to try it. It was £25 new because it was an old card by then. Was the 32mb version. Wish I still had it, was cool to try the extra UT textures.

You should do a review of some Trident and Cirrus Logic cards just to show people how it was during the early and mid 90s :)

I have the same ATG one!!!! $20 from ebay new, works awesome on my pentium 3, many games work well.

@philscomputerlab

7 жыл бұрын

Nice :)

My motherboard would crash running Nvidia Riva TNT, so bought the Savage4 which worked great. Nvidia was at one time smaller than S3, amazing how far they come.

I've had this one and played Unreal on it back in the days...

Awesome video, this graphics card would be great for an Ubuntu office desktop PC! :D

cool review, I had an integrated ProSavage4 DDR in my first computer in 2001. I remember the disappointment when Max Payne did not start, requiring D3D8.1, the chip did not support hardware t&l. Also, I was running on 133MHz or 166MHz SD RAM first and when I upgraded to 233mhz DDR the fps gain was amazing. I played with GTA3 for a year like around 15FPS in 640x480 on minimum, then I added an fx5200 in 2003 and I felt my 1200mhz Duron became a stallion.

@VarietyGamerChannel

8 жыл бұрын

The fx5000 cards were terrible in directx 9 titles, radeon 9000 series ate them for breakfast :)

@tf7426

8 жыл бұрын

Yep, had the 9700pro then upgraded to 9800xt which ran rings around my friend's 6600gt. How times have changed :(

@feamatar

8 жыл бұрын

well, the fx5200 was the cheapest card available that I could afford at the time, and it was definitely better than the cards my friends usually had(that is gf4mx)

those textures are pretty cool, but yes... good DOS card and that's it, also it highlights once again how bad the tnt2 m64 was, because I never regarded Savage 4 as a good card, and the m64 is barely faster, ouch...

This is the first 3dfx card I ever got, the bang for buck was unheard of, and from what I remember it took Voodoo 3 and Riva TNT2 to soundly beat it in terms of all aspects of performance and even then it wasnt by all that much (edit: from what I read in the comments I'm not too far off my mark in that regard) I ran this on a P2 333mhz MMX w/ 60mhz bus and 128mb ram and 2gb HDD, an average gaming PC at best even for its time, mind you I ran CFS2 and Max Payne (!!) at near full blast with this meagre setup. Probably one of the most stable systems I've ever had until recently too. Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 3 costs 350 bucks on Ebay, and even then requires a bit of expertise/fiddling to wring the best out of them. You can get the S3 Savage 4 for 1/10th of that price and it'll run anything that came out back then. Perfect for building a neat little retro Windows 98 all-aspect pc (For playing DOS games AND W98 games). I came over a 350 w/100 bus and 512mb ram at the recycling station, and got that up fired up tonight, needed to replace the cooling bits on the CPU cassette (ironically from an AMD 600mhz Cassette, they used the same components lol) but other than that it works like a charm, I suspect the broken cooler was the reason it was discarded in the first place. So instead of rebuilding the old 333 I got the 350 working, and no decision time was wasted ordering a used 30 dollar S3 Savage 4 on ebay and expect to have it all working within a couple of weeks.

For a second, I thought this was a SiS 6326. This card even has the same, little green heatsink my Diamond Speedstar A50 uses.

I looked in my parts bin. I have one of these, I'd completely forgotten about.

i had one of these at the time it was ok this was the first video card i bought also

Hi Phil. Great video! I had a Savage 3d (with PII) in '99. Remembering times when I used to make games like AvP work on different drivers mods. That was fun :) Today I have S3 virge 3d for my PII agp machine. Great card except video quality. I wish I have some DVI AGP card that's compatible with DOS smooth scroll. I also have some early radeon, but it's not good for that. Does the nVidia do any better in dos with their AGP lineup ? Keep the awesome vids!

@SasaPaunkovic-camplus2

7 жыл бұрын

I did manage to find GeForce 4 with DVI, but it scales all to my monitor's native resolution unlike one ATI I have. I just don't love bilinear filter so I will look further :/

Thanks for the Final Fantasy 7 8 bit texture support test on that demo awesome game and that looked amazing verses the software version.

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

I plan on doing this test with all cards in the future. At some point newer cards won't work with it.

@spidermcgavenport8767

8 жыл бұрын

+PhilsComputerLab thank you I've been interested in when that 8-bit texture pallet was phased out, cheers you deserve a pint! oh and I like that you chose unreal gold I thought that game had specific software for that savage card.

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Yea without that DLL file it wouldn't work. UT has Metal support out of the box though.

@spidermcgavenport8767

8 жыл бұрын

+PhilsComputerLab yes it most certainly does good find.

I had this GPU back in 1999. Its main attraction was great performance with 32bit color. The drivers were crappy though and it was not compatible with Intel 440LX chipset under Windows 98 (it had conflicts with Intel AGP GART drivers which caused constant freezes). That’s why I was still using Windows 95 OSR2 until 2001 when I switched to Windows 2000. Under Windows 2000 this GPU was rock solid and outperformed Nvidia TNT2.

So did the Savage 4 have the same Stochastic dithering that the Savage 3D had? Cos as a result of that 16-bit looked pretty much as good as 32-bit in most games and ran significantly faster for it. I seem to recall they'd dropped it by the time of the Savage 2000 (which was but one of the issues with that card) but not sure about the Savage 4 ....

In the VSync test in case of results like 72-73 FPS, you should re-check that the driver has not switched to 75Hz on its own during the game, i.e. confirm via the LCD monitor menu that the game runs in 60Hz.

I know I had an s3 of some sort in my first machine it was a Packard bell. Not sure if it was on board It seemed to work well but I dont remember. I had it from 95 to 00 I played half life, tomb raider 1 through 4, and quake on it. That's about the most demanding games I played on it. The rest were ID and 3drealms games. I almost forgot I would muck with all those cgm and pc gamer monthly discs thoses were the days.

Had the 32Mb, AGP version of this back in the day. Performance was meh in some games but it made Half Life look and run beautifully.

I cry when i remember we used to pay £299 for that tech when it first came out so many years ago. Today we pay £600 for gtx1080 - when its like 2025 i will cry again. lmao

@antonhei2443

2 жыл бұрын

Hello, halfway into the future, US$ 2000 for a GTX 3090 🤧🤧

Hi Phil! Great video! I've purchased a Savage 4 and I wonder how I could get the Unreal Tournament second CD. I only have a 1 CD version. Is there a legal way to get it or is it free? Thank you! ^_^

I still have that driver CD in my collection. The card died years ago 😢

I had one of these

Oh yeah, had that and similar cards in my early 2000's Linux machines.

I had this card as a kid...had tough time running Thief the dark project.....

That was my first PC's first VGA card in the summer of 1999. with a celaron 366 Mhz CPU, 64 MB ram. It was ok.

Watching these videos, now i miss my Creative Banshee, wondering where did i place it, or did i throw it to recycle :\

i had this card diamond stealth III S540 agp version... S3 had almost to zero good driver support, same went for the S3 Savage200... ( i owned them both ) Best thing was really the S3 texture compression for amazing textures wich none of the other brands had.

Back in 2001 S3 released SuperSavage for mobile markets, the 3D core of which was derived from Savage4. With this mobile variant, games that utilizes DirectX 8.1 usually fail to start, or have corrupted textures. Also, it lacks the "image filter", when upscaling games of 640x480 to a LCD of 1024x768, the image quality sucks.

It was a savage all right a savage on your pocketbook rim shot

For some reason I remember S4 to have unfixable T&L issues. MDK 2 wouldn’t render right with one of the settings on. It was documented on wiki too. Sorry for being lazy here.

Are we sure that we need to modify the ini file? I had a S3 savage 4 16Mo, (combined with 2 voodoo 2 12Mo in SLI), I remember that I was able to make appear the metal API into the unreal config executable file list without modifying any .ini file (maybe I'm wrong, it's a long time ago).

@philscomputerlab

7 жыл бұрын

Who are you talking to and what is the context? I don't remember modifying any INI files?

So is a intel i740 review coming soon? That's something I'd be interested in seeing.

I found a savage 4lt by accident by unassembling scrap, taking out the heasink by prying i found out what i did, it broke my heart

I had an integrated ProSavage4 which was a bit slower than the agp Savage4. For some reason I couldn't use the s3 metal in Unreal engine games. Now when I think of it it could have been the drivers fault, but we all know how crappy s3 drivers were. However for a cheap card it produced a fairly decent performance, a TNT1, Voodoo 2, or M64 match up. It played most games back then at about 640x480 or 800x600 with decent frame rates. It was cheap and not that pretentious, you get what you pay for right? :)

An S3 Savage 4 was the first AGP card I had. I remember spending a lot of time getting it to work in games like Half-Life and the like. I even managed to get somewhat newer games to be playable with heavy tweaking. The minigl driver that came with early Half-Life versions seemed to work best if memory serves. It was MUCH faster than D3D at the time. I had an 8mb version of the card, but it didn't have the LT anywhere in the name from what I can remember. I kinda wish I had the 16mb version though, because some games ran out of memory before frame rates dropped to unplayable. 32 might have been too much, but 8mb was too little. Also, the drivers I had for it had a fair number of options, I wish I remembered which version. I remember messing around with different settings to get the most out of it. Starting and closing games over and over making tweaks one at a time.

@c88rrado

3 жыл бұрын

same here. had the 32 mb tho

I know this is late but I found a newer version of the drivers. DriversCollection has version 4.12.01.8228-8.20.33 from October 2000. Hope this helps.

I know! I know that you will do this video :D Had this card in my collection, but from Diamond Multimedia ;-) Waiting for Radon 9000-s review! And sorry for my crappy english...

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

All good :) Radeon 9000, that will be a while, but will definitely review the ATI 9000 cards :)

@modernandretrogaming

8 жыл бұрын

I have a Radeon 9000 PRO and is faster than 9250 and have 275/550 clocks.

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

These are very very fast cards. Not sure were I draw the line for Windows 98. Also not sure if I have that card. Got a 9700 though :)

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Yea XP is much better suited for such a card...

@modernandretrogaming

8 жыл бұрын

You can install linux from dvd drive very easy. DVD drives are very cheap today.

Is there some sport to this?? Im just curious because I noticed your not** comparing some of the later/last PCI cards. And you havent yet attempted the PCI to PCI-E adapter.

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

This is the project: www.philscomputerlab.com/p4-306---w98-se-benchmarks.html I review cards over time. Started with the Voodoo 3 and TNT2 and slowly working my way forward in graphics card history.

Intel i740 is where it's all at :-P

@MrKillswitch88

8 жыл бұрын

Not far from where all those Atari ET game carts were buried ;)

@adz929

8 жыл бұрын

I managed to salvage one :-P

@jhonnyxyz

4 жыл бұрын

I own a I740 aswell. Maybe one day I'll use it again.

@dyslectische

4 жыл бұрын

A shit card. The demo from intel wash nice .but the card it's nothing .

I have this card in a box in storage... I wonder what its worth

It would be good if you put texts in your videos so that the google translator would translate them into another language with a little more precision, this way you would help the retro gaming of other regions, it would even be easier to understand what you are saying, a hug from Colombia

How can you install Audigy LS under Win98??? On my original CD from this card i didn't find win9x drivers, only for Win2k-XP. What drivers are you using, and where it can be downloaded? Thx

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Check the Creative site...

What about the TNT2? Can you test that with Win3.x and DOS? You did say it was compatible.

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

I've already reviewed the TNT2. Win 3.x doesn't interest me the slightest, sorry.

I remember very negative reviews of this card back in the day. Mostly the drivers were terrible, many games didn't run properly or didn't support it. Most of reviews said to stay away. Some games worked well, but not enough to justyfi the cost.

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Yes that is one benefit of doing reviews in 2016, you can use mostly working drivers :)

you should do a video of 3dfx 4500

I really cant get s3metal working on thinkpad t22 which has savage IX 8MB. Drivers are latest 7.15.something from 2/2001. Did the metal.dll -> unreal\system and edited unreal.ini. It just runs on software rendering.

hey Phil. I don't remember original Unreal to have an Unreal Tournament style main menu. is this special to the Unreal gold version?

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Yes that's because of the Gold version. It has a newer UI.

@ChrisR3tro

8 жыл бұрын

Thanks!

Phil, I detect both a German and an Australian accent...are you originally from Germany or Austria and moved to Australia? Maybe you've answered this before and I missed it, if so I apologize.

First 3d accelerator card I had

is it me or is there a small but noticeable bit of reverb/echo on your voice in this video? i have gone and checked other videos just to double check that it wasn't my headphones or sound settings and found it's only this video i'm hearing said audio weirdness.

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Small? The room has echo in spades :/ Not much I can do at this point. Tiled floor, bare walls. Still working on some sort of voice recording area for my main microphone, but for "live builds" like this one I don't think there is much I can do :(

I have a S3 something card but I get a weird black bar on the right side in dos and dos games Windows 95 works fine.

I remember that card from a review in PC Format 1999 , the card wasnt very fast. Is there any chance that your going to look at a Sis6326 , its a real stinker but it flooded the market in South Africa, every OEM manufacturer had one just so they could stick a "supports 3d" sticker on the case XD

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

I do have a card or two from SIS actually. I'll have a look and report back.

@FaSMaN

8 жыл бұрын

Thanks Phil :) your awesome :)

@FaSMaN

8 жыл бұрын

Ps if its not a 6326 I can allways post you one :)

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

HA! I do have one :) Must be a bit older, it has a single memory chip, so likely just 4 MB or 8 MB?

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

HPZeta The chip is dated 1998. A tiny card, very simple. Yes that could be a fun review. Would you have any links to drivers?

s3 dominated consumer market with packard bell in the 90's with their s3 virge series, wonder what happend to them

the first vga that i literally throwed in the thrash.

I installed the Metal API but the game crashes at startup. How do i solve?

I'm looking for a fast graphics card (AGP or PCI) for my 3-in-1 Retro PC that has good Windows 3.1x drivers. I currently have a Matrox G100 but it's just way too slow for Win9x games (thankfully a have a Voodoo2 as well). What cards do you recommend? PD: Wow, Apple is really original naming its new Graphics API... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_(API)

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Sorry I know little about Windows 3.1 and it's not something I'm interested it :/

@armorgeddon

8 жыл бұрын

Why do you care about 3D-speed of your main graphics card when you have a Voodoo2 in the same machine?

Really weird they didn't implement vsync / swap_control for OpenGL. It is easy thing to implement usually, I usually played with vsync enabled on 75Hz to help a bit with tearing.

How did you stop the desktop colour showing through your wallpaper behind the icon text in w98?

@philscomputerlab

7 жыл бұрын

Install that unofficial W98 service pack 3.

@TheDeeplyCynical

7 жыл бұрын

Thanks

@grzegorz2606

7 жыл бұрын

Is there any way to get the colored text back after SP3? I installed it and noticed that the text blends with the wallpaper and I can't read through it :P

Hey phil i was wondering if you would know what the model of this graphics card i found is. It has a Matrox MGA chip with MGA-2064W-R2 on it. Also the serial number is VIDPCI007ADWW ST. Also it comes with what i think is a memory upgrade chip that slots on to the card.

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Just paste the model number into google. Looks like it's a MGA Millennium.

@Ray-dx2pf

8 жыл бұрын

PhilsComputerLab Yeah i tried doing that but there were so many different types. I assume they all have the same chip just different board designs? Well anyways im thinking about putting this with a Pentium 2 for a dos gaming machine.

@TheDeeplyCynical

8 жыл бұрын

+raven still I'd avoid a matrox card for DOS gaming. I tried a G450 but it suffered with jerky scrolling in Jazz jackrabbit and getting a blank screen on some cutscenes in Duke Nukem II. I'm now using a TNT2 which works much better with DOS.

@Ray-dx2pf

8 жыл бұрын

TheDeeplyCynical Ok thanks for the advice. I also have a geforce 2 MX 200. Also i have a TNT2 Vanta so i will use one of those instead.

I bought one of those for a much cheaper price then a m64 back in early 99, and it's probably the worst computer hardware buy I ever made. It was a creative PCB and they had drivers you could download from their site. the latest driver from the s3 website had serious compatibility and performance issues with direct3d games the creative driver was much better in direct3d but had no opengl icd in it. so every time I would like to play a direct3d game I would install the creative driver and every time I wanted to an opengl game I had to use the s3 driver. On top of that the I tested the metal api and it had deep frame drops every couple of seconds in both drivers. And on top of that I remember reading that the s3tc has adverse affects on image quality and only in the last couple of graphic card generations thare is a real advancement in texture compression technology that doesn't degrade image quality.

Hey Phil, what do you think about retro notebooks?

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Hmm, not my cup of tea to be honest. There isn't much to do, it's all ready to go :)

omg did he bend the manual?

Please do Nvidia Riva TNT2 M64. I had that on my Socket 7 AMD K6-2 back in the day and got extreme performance out of it.

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

I've done a review on the TNT2 and the M64 is included in the charts in this video.

How did the moving go? Everything settled in?

@philscomputerlab

8 жыл бұрын

Yea, pretty much :)

Imagine that graphicscard heatsinks have been that small. ;)