Just want to add this correction: I misread my sources when I said that the Geforce 256 cost $179 at launch. The script was supposed to say $279. So basically the Geforce 256 cost me a THIRD of, not HALF the price. Which means I got an even better deal. 🙂
Yeah, I liked MX420 and a lot of people say that thing sucked. In a vacuum, the FX wasn't bad, just not a technological leap when compared to even the low end cards from GF4 MX line. So in that context, the FX was a failure, but as a way of playing games from the early 2000s, it was fine. Just like the MX, The 5200 is great to use for a budget retro PC for playing stuff like NFS3, UT99, Quake3, etc.
Deserves more views. Interesting stories well told and good editing. I agree that the 6600 vanilla sucked balls compared to the GT variant. I was shocked at how slow the standard 6600 was when I was testing cards for a retro rig trying out Sin : Episodes and Age Of Mythology. Ended up never using the 6600 in anything! Eventually I settled on an X800GT for that rig. About the same performance as a 6600GT. Back in the day I saved up for months and bought a 6800XT, upgrading from my Ti4800SE, it was a huge leap. Doom 3 looked and played amazing. So did Chronicles of Riddick.
@@user-bs1lr8nx1h 6600 vanilla was faster than a 9600XT, especially in pixel shader games / synthetics. A 6600 vanilla was on a par with a 9700 Pro, but I'd pick the 6600 just because of the superior OpenGL performance in games like Quake Wars and Doom 3 etc. And yeah sure, the 6600GT was legendary. One of the best price / performance cards ever made, along with the HD4770 and R9 280X. A 6600GT was WAY better than a 9800XT. In fact, a 6600GT beat a 6800XT in lower resolutions like 1024x768. It was only when unlocking the masked pixel / vertex shaders on the 6800XT that it became better value, but it wasn't always successful. Only first released (rev A0) 6800XT's could be unlocked with Rivatuner. I tested a Medion 9800 XXL (aka a 9800XT) alongside a vanilla 6600 and I was shocked that the 9800 won. Even my 5900Ulta was quicker than the 6600 in certain games like Return To Castle Wolfenstein and Age Of Mythology.
My Gigabyte 7600GS AGP died the same way. And it was quite common back then. A fex years before, my Radeon 9600XT and the FX5700 i got 2nd hand for replacement died too. But after that, the fanless 9800GT i used (same model as yours) lasted 7 or 8 years (because i only play retro games)
Back in the xbox 360/PS3 era i got the ATI HD4850 and i thought it was the greatest card ever. I played so many games for such a long time it was well worth the money.
I clicked just because I wanted to say "I had all of them" and really, I had many of them. 😀 Here in Czech Republic, we were delayed like 5 years, but after like 2004, hardware started be really cheap, you were able to collect money for some ok GPU even from your pocket money, try it today with all those RTX cards which cost more than average person earns monthly. 😀 20 years ago, you could literally find 2 years old good GPU next to dust bins at street, it was that cheap that people were just throwing it out of windows and I mean it literally, it was such ritual, you bought a new GPU or CPU and you threw old one from window, ofcourse I always went down to check if it survived and if yes, I took that. 😀 When you had window too low, you at least used it as target for air gun. Good old days, now these old GPUs are selling on eBay even for higher price than 20 years ago. 😀 I always thought that MX440 was such a piece of shit, but then I tested FX5200 and I had to say sorry to MX440. 😀 My father's friend bought FX5200 and he said it's that bad that we can take it for free, so that's how I got my first GPU which was able to start some modern games, I mean modern in that time. I hear very often that opinion that "ATI was much better, you are stupid nvidia fanboy" but NO, ATI meant problems, nvidia meant it worked, I don't care if some ATI had better FPS, I wanted no problems. Now when I am testing retro HW (and I really have a lot of GPUs) I can confirm that I was not crazy, those ATI and early AMD cards were so unreliable, somtimes it doesn't work with driver which should work, sometimes one GPU doesn't work in one motherboard but works in other motherboard for no reason, I NEVER had any such problems with any nvidia GPU, NEVER! It always worked and you didn't have to instal net framework just to install stupid drivers like with ATI, it was ridiculous and flashing screen after boot......WTF? nvidia solved that in like 2005 I guess? But ATI/AMD cards were still doing that even in like 2008. I really didn't like ATI back in the day and if you call me nvidia fanboy, whatever, I don't care, I have my experiences. 😀 Ofcourse, FX series was not good, but you had pretty much no reason to upgrade to it in that time, some geforce 4 or even MX440 was still enough in that time and then after FarCry was released, you probably wanted to buy some 6600GT or something like that, which was pretty good GPU. After my 6800LE died (I accidentaly connected + and - on fan connector on GPU), I got some 7600GT AGP and I stayed with that for pretty long time, I finished even Crysis on that, but AGP and socket 478 was already really obsolete in that time, it made no sense to upgrade it more so I finally build a good gaming computer for the first time - with C2D and 9800GTX. 😀 I have some 6600 without GT and diffecence compared to GT version is really pretty high. For some reason, geforce 6800 mostly died fast, it's really hard to find some reliable in these days and those nvidia 8000 series, that's even worse. But when I remember what PCs people had back in the day....literally no outtake fan and very often even some pasive version of that GPU, I am not surprised that many of these GPUs didn't survive, especially those pasive 8400 and 8500GT were known for that. And Computer builders were really not honest in that time, they were saving money on everything, sometimes you had even glued free ram slots or PCI slots to prevent some upgrades, it was really weird time. BTW, that saying numbers like "sixty-six hundred" in English is super confusing for me, do you normaly say numbers like that in English? I always have to think about that for a few seconds, but it probably makes sense because to say six thousands and six hundred would be probably too long in English, we would probably say sixty-six zero zero in my langauge in such case 🤣 PS: I also killed my 7600GT, it's ridiculous when you realize that it has like 50W TDP and they still were able to make a cooler which can't cool it. I killed it by touching heatsink while benchmarking, it had just 2 point mounting system, you can guess what happened when I touched it. 😀
The main reason the mx got so much hate back in the day was you could often pick up far superior 4200 below msrp and the mx were often given a bunch of ram and sold for nearly the same price. Also it was basically a slightly crippled gf2 ultra
Yep, that is true. But I don't think that was Nvidia's fault. Nvidia told card manufacturers to not give the 4200 as much vram speed as their higher end models, which they ignored, thus by making the MX series a less sweet deal, and the Ti 4400 and 4600 seaming to feal over-priced. I'm not saying that's a bad thing because people that wanted a Ti model got more for a decent price. But that price was still too steep for me. However, even though the MX420 was slower than a GeForce 2 Ultra and Ti, the 440 I think was still faster, particularly when using newer drivers that got the card to run 25% faster, it really was that big of an improvement.
Yep. I too wish I had done that. In 2002 when we moved to the USA, I gave away my Sound Blaster 16 thinking that I no longer needed it. I was such an idiot.
I really wish I had preserved my CRT PC monitors, case and hardware too. At least I still got my PS1 but the plastic is yellowed and it's non-functional, I'll restore it one day.
That is true. I will admit that the MX brand is what started the low end cards that are worse in performance than high end cards from generations prior. I still like the MX because at least they were still gaming cards as apposed to the garbage low end stuff we got after, like the 210 and 710
Geforce FX was better because supported directx9. I had a FX5200 (it was bad i know) but at least games run, unlike geforce 4 MX. I could activacte motion blur on Need for Speed underground at time, and for me it was awsome (not possible on mx card). Running slow was better to no runing. I was poor like you, i was happy if games run. Later i had a 7600GS too, but still AGP. It was very cheap and amazing card. It gave more live to my old Athlon XP at time. It was a passive cooler model, and i can't remember what appened to that card, but maybe i sold it for a costumer or it died. And was the last AGP card i had... Later i buy my first PCIe Card, a GTX260 Black Edition. I still have it, i really like it. I will re-use it for sure if i assemble an socket 775 "Late XP Era" gaming PC.
Nvidias 8000 series had some good cards for sure, specially if you had some tweaks & overclocking done even on lowly cards as an 8500 gt with a tool like Nvidia inspector pushing that card up too 700 mhz core & 420 mhz on memory boosted performance nicely if you happened too have bought something like an arctic cooling l2 plus or gotten one for free too mess around with from another dead card like i did here.
I do really like the Ti4200. I would probably put that as Nvidia's 2nd greatest budget card ever made. Personally, I think the 8800 GT has a slight edge over the Ti4200 because of how close its performance was to Nvidia's flagship 8800 GTX while still being half the price. But again, it's very close.
-Bought the GeForce 4MX for $99. I bought Radeon 9000 for $60, full dx8. The FX was also effectually dx8, and terrible performance for budget MX, super cut down, removed functionally. Had one of those 7? GS cards, any Radeon was better. It took Nvidia dx10 to have good hardware, but they also had the worst drivers in Vista according to Microsoft themselves.
@@GTXDash For Nvidia users, up until dx11. The dx10 cards had good performance, but buggy drivers and also bump gate. Brother had one of those dx10 cards and it died. AMD then bought ATI, VLIW sucked and drivers went to hell. Dx11 was peak Nvidia. It took the 290/390 to have a better product again. Dx10 wasn't much of a win due to Vista and games skipping dx10 for dx9. Games ran dx9 even in the dx11 era. Nvidia dx10 cards played Crysis, and that was basically all it was good for. That and physx. Dx11 was then a cheat fest with gameworks, so people fell for marketing. Just turn off gameworks. Only recently have people woken up to how bad Nvidia screws hardware with VRAM, specs, and price. So it's coming around.
Not at max settings on a Pentium 3 @ 650MHz. I tried it on the Pentium 4 just out of curiosity and that made a huge difference. could maybe run it at 1024x768. The 256 is not overrated considering that the price to performance ratio was often in favor of the 256 over the TNT2 Ultra. And was definitely way, way better than the Voodoo 2. But even with, 2 Voodoo 2s in SLI or a Voodoo 3, I think it was actually worse when CPUs were much slower. Today however I think a Voodoo 3 3500 on a faster machine would beat the 256 since much of the work is done on the GPU, thus bottlenecking the faster CPU. So I kinda agree with you.
@@GTXDash I started 3d gaming on a k6-2, tnt2, which yeah. You needed a 1ghz p3 or athlon to max out stuff. There's no point in the slower CPU, BUT the voodoo 2 has massively better CPU utilization, and SLI could beat the GeForce. The ONLY POINT for GeForce was 32 bit color. It was overrated for everything else and literally did not have the horsepower to render any new feature it did over the TNT2, nor did any games support GeForce's new graphics. Doom 3 was it, and just for the 4mx. So literally everyone wasted their money on GeForce's until dx8. The voodoo 3 had 22 bit color, and the TNT2 did around 100 FPS in quake 3 under Windows 98. Nvidia killed performance in XP drivers though. Voodoo could not do high resolution natively, but there were OpenGL ports like Mesa FX that could. On a voodoo 2 no less. I've used a voodoo 2 on quake 3 with a pentium one 30fps, a voodoo 3 meh, and TNT2 up to the athlon 1ghz. I got around 100 FPS in 800x600. There was no point to GeForce. It was price gouged marketing with little functional value. Nobody tested it's competition with a tuned system. Not until the Kyro2, which benchmarks showed to compete. I tried a used Kyro2, and it was not that great. That just shows how biased the testing was against older hardware. There wasn't a clear upgrade until dx8, and Radeon was a better value choice. $60 for a 9000. Nvidia had nothing in that range. I was playing quake tenebrae, doom 3, and Halo on the 9000. Mostly UT series though. Which got upgraded to the 9800pro for Halo, x800 for half life 2, and x1900 for FEAR. Always saved massive amounts of money, and performed better. The FX was garbage, and the 6800 could not do sm3 games past 30 FPS. Maybe a cheap gf4 model had some value, but it was still more expensive than Radeon and never a necessity to run games.
What a horrible video. The Geforce 256 was NOT a budget card and was released in Dec 1999. It was the most expensive card ever released and offered little performance improvements over the TNT2. Of course it's going to be cheaper 2 years later and in 2001 there were superior budget cards. The amount of misinformation in this video is quite shocking. Nothing is period correct in this video. All he talks about is his personal story of buying video cards and has done zero research in creating a video that speaks of videos cards in the correct time period. Also the video has WAY too much rambling about his personal story of buying cards. People are not interested in that.
What this video is about is what I want it to be about: my experience during this time period. I think I made it pretty clear that the Geforce 256 that cost me $90 is cheaper than its original $200+ which is great for a budget gamer. So I don't know what you're on about.
I am still using an old Lancool case for my main PC but I guess I am not pushing the most high end parts with a R7 7700x with Thermaltight Peerless Assassin on it and an Asrock 6700xt Challenger D (would have gone for a longer card but yeah that is a shortcoming of my case. I found the biggest problem is if I don't let my GPU keep its fan spinning my NVME drive gets a little hot at idle. Otherwise everything is good to great. That being said my Retro 98se machine has moved from a single slot fan on my ATI 9600 pro to a 2 slot tall fan and that did help a lot especially in the summers.
Atari 2600 Sinclair 128K Sega Master System Nintendo NES Atari Jaguar Sega Saturn ------------------------------- Move to PC's) ------------------------------ ATI Rage Pro 8MB (PIII 450mhz Slot 1) Voodoo 3500 with TV dongle (PIII 450mhz Slot 1) Geforce 2 MX400 (PIII 450mhz Slot 1) Geforce 4 ti 4800 (AMD XP series I owned a few 1800+ 2500+ 3200+) Geforce 6600GT (AMD XP series I owned a few 1800+ 2500+ 3200+) Geforce 8800-GTX (died 13months old) Intel Pentium 4 65nm Hyper threading 775lga ruclips.net/video/L9ZsmORw51k/видео.html Geforce 260GTX Intel 2150, E6500, E8500, Q9400 ruclips.net/video/CEuo0albN3E/видео.html AMD 7870 (still have it) AMD A10 5800K, I5 2500K ruclips.net/video/qe5GsFrcb40/видео.html AMD 7970 (used, dead) AMD R9 380 4GB (Still use it in my HTPC) 2500K, 8600K, 9900KF Geforce RTX 3070 Suprim X 8GB (current GPU) 9900KF and current setup. ruclips.net/video/4geLXBKD15I/видео.html
Sweet. You seem to be from a similar era that I grew up in but with different tech: CGA - 186 10MHz Nashua IBM-compatible Famicom VGA - 286 10Mhz IBM PS/2 VGA - 386DX 33MHz ---> 486SX 25MHz ---> 486DX2 66MHz (all the same machine) SiS 6326 ---> S3 Trio3D ---> GeForce 256 32MB ---> GeForce4 MX420 64MB - Pentium III 650MHz (same machine) Nintendo GameCube GeForce4 MX440 64MB - Pentium 4 1.8GHz GeForce 7600 GS 512MB - Pentium D 915 2.8GHz GeForce 8800 GT 512MB - AMD Athlon 64 x2 6400+ 3.2GHz ---> Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66GHz (same machine) Family gaming PC: GeForce 9800 GT 1GB - Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 2.93GHz (actually a hair slower than E8200 because of less cache) G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 1080 8GB - AMD Ryzen5 2600X 3.6GHz (current machine)
@@GTXDash you missed the whole AMD Thunderbird/XP era? So popular it' was hard to miss 🙂 My sister runs the 2600X, 16gb 3200, 1660ti. Still pumps along pretty well. Edit: I missed 8086 but playec with 486 DX and DX2. Think the first PC I built my sister was a celron 333mhz
Just want to add this correction: I misread my sources when I said that the Geforce 256 cost $179 at launch. The script was supposed to say $279. So basically the Geforce 256 cost me a THIRD of, not HALF the price. Which means I got an even better deal. 🙂
My first gpu was a PCI 5200fx. I knew then it wasn't the greatest but I still love that card to this day.
Yeah, I liked MX420 and a lot of people say that thing sucked. In a vacuum, the FX wasn't bad, just not a technological leap when compared to even the low end cards from GF4 MX line. So in that context, the FX was a failure, but as a way of playing games from the early 2000s, it was fine.
Just like the MX, The 5200 is great to use for a budget retro PC for playing stuff like NFS3, UT99, Quake3, etc.
Great video! I definitely have fond memories messing around with budget cards, long before anything remotely highend was accessible.
Yeah, we make due with what we could afford, and now ironically we go back to them to relive it. XD
Deserves more views. Interesting stories well told and good editing. I agree that the 6600 vanilla sucked balls compared to the GT variant. I was shocked at how slow the standard 6600 was when I was testing cards for a retro rig trying out Sin : Episodes and Age Of Mythology. Ended up never using the 6600 in anything! Eventually I settled on an X800GT for that rig. About the same performance as a 6600GT.
Back in the day I saved up for months and bought a 6800XT, upgrading from my Ti4800SE, it was a huge leap. Doom 3 looked and played amazing. So did Chronicles of Riddick.
6600 was like ati 9600 xt and 6600 gt better than ati 9800 xt -
@@user-bs1lr8nx1h 6600 vanilla was faster than a 9600XT, especially in pixel shader games / synthetics. A 6600 vanilla was on a par with a 9700 Pro, but I'd pick the 6600 just because of the superior OpenGL performance in games like Quake Wars and Doom 3 etc.
And yeah sure, the 6600GT was legendary. One of the best price / performance cards ever made, along with the HD4770 and R9 280X. A 6600GT was WAY better than a 9800XT. In fact, a 6600GT beat a 6800XT in lower resolutions like 1024x768. It was only when unlocking the masked pixel / vertex shaders on the 6800XT that it became better value, but it wasn't always successful. Only first released (rev A0) 6800XT's could be unlocked with Rivatuner.
I tested a Medion 9800 XXL (aka a 9800XT) alongside a vanilla 6600 and I was shocked that the 9800 won. Even my 5900Ulta was quicker than the 6600 in certain games like Return To Castle Wolfenstein and Age Of Mythology.
My Gigabyte 7600GS AGP died the same way.
And it was quite common back then.
A fex years before, my Radeon 9600XT and the FX5700 i got 2nd hand for replacement died too.
But after that, the fanless 9800GT i used (same model as yours) lasted 7 or 8 years (because i only play retro games)
Also the cooler you put on your 8800 GT looks like the Chaintech logo!
Back in the xbox 360/PS3 era i got the ATI HD4850 and i thought it was the greatest card ever. I played so many games for such a long time it was well worth the money.
Such an awesome video...the memories i remember my golden years with pc parts 1998-2005 2013-2015 and 2022-->
I clicked just because I wanted to say "I had all of them" and really, I had many of them. 😀 Here in Czech Republic, we were delayed like 5 years, but after like 2004, hardware started be really cheap, you were able to collect money for some ok GPU even from your pocket money, try it today with all those RTX cards which cost more than average person earns monthly. 😀 20 years ago, you could literally find 2 years old good GPU next to dust bins at street, it was that cheap that people were just throwing it out of windows and I mean it literally, it was such ritual, you bought a new GPU or CPU and you threw old one from window, ofcourse I always went down to check if it survived and if yes, I took that. 😀 When you had window too low, you at least used it as target for air gun. Good old days, now these old GPUs are selling on eBay even for higher price than 20 years ago. 😀
I always thought that MX440 was such a piece of shit, but then I tested FX5200 and I had to say sorry to MX440. 😀 My father's friend bought FX5200 and he said it's that bad that we can take it for free, so that's how I got my first GPU which was able to start some modern games, I mean modern in that time.
I hear very often that opinion that "ATI was much better, you are stupid nvidia fanboy" but NO, ATI meant problems, nvidia meant it worked, I don't care if some ATI had better FPS, I wanted no problems. Now when I am testing retro HW (and I really have a lot of GPUs) I can confirm that I was not crazy, those ATI and early AMD cards were so unreliable, somtimes it doesn't work with driver which should work, sometimes one GPU doesn't work in one motherboard but works in other motherboard for no reason, I NEVER had any such problems with any nvidia GPU, NEVER! It always worked and you didn't have to instal net framework just to install stupid drivers like with ATI, it was ridiculous and flashing screen after boot......WTF? nvidia solved that in like 2005 I guess? But ATI/AMD cards were still doing that even in like 2008. I really didn't like ATI back in the day and if you call me nvidia fanboy, whatever, I don't care, I have my experiences. 😀 Ofcourse, FX series was not good, but you had pretty much no reason to upgrade to it in that time, some geforce 4 or even MX440 was still enough in that time and then after FarCry was released, you probably wanted to buy some 6600GT or something like that, which was pretty good GPU. After my 6800LE died (I accidentaly connected + and - on fan connector on GPU), I got some 7600GT AGP and I stayed with that for pretty long time, I finished even Crysis on that, but AGP and socket 478 was already really obsolete in that time, it made no sense to upgrade it more so I finally build a good gaming computer for the first time - with C2D and 9800GTX. 😀
I have some 6600 without GT and diffecence compared to GT version is really pretty high.
For some reason, geforce 6800 mostly died fast, it's really hard to find some reliable in these days and those nvidia 8000 series, that's even worse. But when I remember what PCs people had back in the day....literally no outtake fan and very often even some pasive version of that GPU, I am not surprised that many of these GPUs didn't survive, especially those pasive 8400 and 8500GT were known for that. And Computer builders were really not honest in that time, they were saving money on everything, sometimes you had even glued free ram slots or PCI slots to prevent some upgrades, it was really weird time.
BTW, that saying numbers like "sixty-six hundred" in English is super confusing for me, do you normaly say numbers like that in English? I always have to think about that for a few seconds, but it probably makes sense because to say six thousands and six hundred would be probably too long in English, we would probably say sixty-six zero zero in my langauge in such case 🤣
PS: I also killed my 7600GT, it's ridiculous when you realize that it has like 50W TDP and they still were able to make a cooler which can't cool it. I killed it by touching heatsink while benchmarking, it had just 2 point mounting system, you can guess what happened when I touched it. 😀
Great video thanks 🙏🏼
You're welcome.
wheee 12:40 ....It's the exact 7800 GT I owned in the first desktop I fully built myself. I miss BFG.
The main reason the mx got so much hate back in the day was you could often pick up far superior 4200 below msrp and the mx were often given a bunch of ram and sold for nearly the same price. Also it was basically a slightly crippled gf2 ultra
Yep, that is true. But I don't think that was Nvidia's fault. Nvidia told card manufacturers to not give the 4200 as much vram speed as their higher end models, which they ignored, thus by making the MX series a less sweet deal, and the Ti 4400 and 4600 seaming to feal over-priced. I'm not saying that's a bad thing because people that wanted a Ti model got more for a decent price. But that price was still too steep for me.
However, even though the MX420 was slower than a GeForce 2 Ultra and Ti, the 440 I think was still faster, particularly when using newer drivers that got the card to run 25% faster, it really was that big of an improvement.
I wish I had kept hardware from when I was a kid.
Yep. I too wish I had done that. In 2002 when we moved to the USA, I gave away my Sound Blaster 16 thinking that I no longer needed it. I was such an idiot.
I really wish I had preserved my CRT PC monitors, case and hardware too.
At least I still got my PS1 but the plastic is yellowed and it's non-functional, I'll restore it one day.
The problem with the GF4 MX is the name. It's nowhere near a real GF4 in performance, although the name suggests it is.
That is true. I will admit that the MX brand is what started the low end cards that are worse in performance than high end cards from generations prior. I still like the MX because at least they were still gaming cards as apposed to the garbage low end stuff we got after, like the 210 and 710
Geforce FX was better because supported directx9. I had a FX5200 (it was bad i know) but at least games run, unlike geforce 4 MX. I could activacte motion blur on Need for Speed underground at time, and for me it was awsome (not possible on mx card). Running slow was better to no runing. I was poor like you, i was happy if games run.
Later i had a 7600GS too, but still AGP. It was very cheap and amazing card. It gave more live to my old Athlon XP at time. It was a passive cooler model, and i can't remember what appened to that card, but maybe i sold it for a costumer or it died. And was the last AGP card i had...
Later i buy my first PCIe Card, a GTX260 Black Edition. I still have it, i really like it. I will re-use it for sure if i assemble an socket 775 "Late XP Era" gaming PC.
COD 1 was awesome
It was. Used to play it over LAN. Good times.
It was my first ever COD, shame I didn't have anyone to play it with on LAN but the campaign was awesome enough to keep me entertained.
Nvidias 8000 series had some good cards for sure, specially if you had some tweaks & overclocking done even on lowly cards as an 8500 gt with a tool like Nvidia inspector pushing that card up too 700 mhz core & 420 mhz on memory boosted performance nicely if you happened too have bought something like an arctic cooling l2 plus or gotten one for free too mess around with from another dead card like i did here.
Yep The 8 series was a triumph of performance to cost ratio, including the 8500. That thing wasn't so bad even before overclocking.
8800GT was great, but Ti4200 at his time was even better fotrthe price!
I do really like the Ti4200. I would probably put that as Nvidia's 2nd greatest budget card ever made.
Personally, I think the 8800 GT has a slight edge over the Ti4200 because of how close its performance was to Nvidia's flagship 8800 GTX while still being half the price.
But again, it's very close.
-Bought the GeForce 4MX for $99. I bought Radeon 9000 for $60, full dx8. The FX was also effectually dx8, and terrible performance for budget MX, super cut down, removed functionally.
Had one of those 7? GS cards, any Radeon was better. It took Nvidia dx10 to have good hardware, but they also had the worst drivers in Vista according to Microsoft themselves.
Those were rough times😄
@@GTXDash For Nvidia users, up until dx11. The dx10 cards had good performance, but buggy drivers and also bump gate. Brother had one of those dx10 cards and it died. AMD then bought ATI, VLIW sucked and drivers went to hell. Dx11 was peak Nvidia. It took the 290/390 to have a better product again. Dx10 wasn't much of a win due to Vista and games skipping dx10 for dx9. Games ran dx9 even in the dx11 era. Nvidia dx10 cards played Crysis, and that was basically all it was good for. That and physx.
Dx11 was then a cheat fest with gameworks, so people fell for marketing. Just turn off gameworks.
Only recently have people woken up to how bad Nvidia screws hardware with VRAM, specs, and price. So it's coming around.
60 FPS in quake 3 640x480. You know the voodoo 2/3 TNT 2 could also do that. GeForce was overrated.
Not at max settings on a Pentium 3 @ 650MHz. I tried it on the Pentium 4 just out of curiosity and that made a huge difference. could maybe run it at 1024x768. The 256 is not overrated considering that the price to performance ratio was often in favor of the 256 over the TNT2 Ultra. And was definitely way, way better than the Voodoo 2. But even with, 2 Voodoo 2s in SLI or a Voodoo 3, I think it was actually worse when CPUs were much slower. Today however I think a Voodoo 3 3500 on a faster machine would beat the 256 since much of the work is done on the GPU, thus bottlenecking the faster CPU. So I kinda agree with you.
@@GTXDash I started 3d gaming on a k6-2, tnt2, which yeah. You needed a 1ghz p3 or athlon to max out stuff. There's no point in the slower CPU, BUT the voodoo 2 has massively better CPU utilization, and SLI could beat the GeForce. The ONLY POINT for GeForce was 32 bit color. It was overrated for everything else and literally did not have the horsepower to render any new feature it did over the TNT2, nor did any games support GeForce's new graphics. Doom 3 was it, and just for the 4mx. So literally everyone wasted their money on GeForce's until dx8.
The voodoo 3 had 22 bit color, and the TNT2 did around 100 FPS in quake 3 under Windows 98. Nvidia killed performance in XP drivers though. Voodoo could not do high resolution natively, but there were OpenGL ports like Mesa FX that could. On a voodoo 2 no less. I've used a voodoo 2 on quake 3 with a pentium one 30fps, a voodoo 3 meh, and TNT2 up to the athlon 1ghz. I got around 100 FPS in 800x600. There was no point to GeForce. It was price gouged marketing with little functional value.
Nobody tested it's competition with a tuned system. Not until the Kyro2, which benchmarks showed to compete. I tried a used Kyro2, and it was not that great. That just shows how biased the testing was against older hardware.
There wasn't a clear upgrade until dx8, and Radeon was a better value choice. $60 for a 9000. Nvidia had nothing in that range. I was playing quake tenebrae, doom 3, and Halo on the 9000. Mostly UT series though. Which got upgraded to the 9800pro for Halo, x800 for half life 2, and x1900 for FEAR. Always saved massive amounts of money, and performed better. The FX was garbage, and the 6800 could not do sm3 games past 30 FPS. Maybe a cheap gf4 model had some value, but it was still more expensive than Radeon and never a necessity to run games.
i can haz geforce?
What a horrible video. The Geforce 256 was NOT a budget card and was released in Dec 1999. It was the most expensive card ever released and offered little performance improvements over the TNT2. Of course it's going to be cheaper 2 years later and in 2001 there were superior budget cards. The amount of misinformation in this video is quite shocking. Nothing is period correct in this video. All he talks about is his personal story of buying video cards and has done zero research in creating a video that speaks of videos cards in the correct time period. Also the video has WAY too much rambling about his personal story of buying cards. People are not interested in that.
What this video is about is what I want it to be about: my experience during this time period. I think I made it pretty clear that the Geforce 256 that cost me $90 is cheaper than its original $200+ which is great for a budget gamer. So I don't know what you're on about.
I am still using an old Lancool case for my main PC but I guess I am not pushing the most high end parts with a R7 7700x with Thermaltight Peerless Assassin on it and an Asrock 6700xt Challenger D (would have gone for a longer card but yeah that is a shortcoming of my case. I found the biggest problem is if I don't let my GPU keep its fan spinning my NVME drive gets a little hot at idle. Otherwise everything is good to great.
That being said my Retro 98se machine has moved from a single slot fan on my ATI 9600 pro to a 2 slot tall fan and that did help a lot especially in the summers.
Atari 2600
Sinclair 128K
Sega Master System
Nintendo NES
Atari Jaguar
Sega Saturn
-------------------------------
Move to PC's)
------------------------------
ATI Rage Pro 8MB (PIII 450mhz Slot 1)
Voodoo 3500 with TV dongle (PIII 450mhz Slot 1)
Geforce 2 MX400 (PIII 450mhz Slot 1)
Geforce 4 ti 4800 (AMD XP series I owned a few 1800+ 2500+ 3200+)
Geforce 6600GT (AMD XP series I owned a few 1800+ 2500+ 3200+)
Geforce 8800-GTX (died 13months old) Intel Pentium 4 65nm Hyper threading 775lga ruclips.net/video/L9ZsmORw51k/видео.html
Geforce 260GTX Intel 2150, E6500, E8500, Q9400 ruclips.net/video/CEuo0albN3E/видео.html
AMD 7870 (still have it) AMD A10 5800K, I5 2500K ruclips.net/video/qe5GsFrcb40/видео.html
AMD 7970 (used, dead)
AMD R9 380 4GB (Still use it in my HTPC) 2500K, 8600K, 9900KF
Geforce RTX 3070 Suprim X 8GB (current GPU) 9900KF and current setup. ruclips.net/video/4geLXBKD15I/видео.html
Sweet. You seem to be from a similar era that I grew up in but with different tech:
CGA - 186 10MHz Nashua IBM-compatible
Famicom
VGA - 286 10Mhz IBM PS/2
VGA - 386DX 33MHz ---> 486SX 25MHz ---> 486DX2 66MHz (all the same machine)
SiS 6326 ---> S3 Trio3D ---> GeForce 256 32MB ---> GeForce4 MX420 64MB - Pentium III 650MHz (same machine)
Nintendo GameCube
GeForce4 MX440 64MB - Pentium 4 1.8GHz
GeForce 7600 GS 512MB - Pentium D 915 2.8GHz
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB - AMD Athlon 64 x2 6400+ 3.2GHz ---> Intel Core 2 Duo E8200 2.66GHz (same machine)
Family gaming PC: GeForce 9800 GT 1GB - Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 2.93GHz (actually a hair slower than E8200 because of less cache)
G1 Gaming GeForce GTX 1080 8GB - AMD Ryzen5 2600X 3.6GHz (current machine)
@@GTXDash you missed the whole AMD Thunderbird/XP era? So popular it' was hard to miss 🙂
My sister runs the 2600X, 16gb 3200, 1660ti. Still pumps along pretty well.
Edit: I missed 8086 but playec with 486 DX and DX2. Think the first PC I built my sister was a celron 333mhz
Lol, this sounds similar to my video card journey.
Atari 2600
Colecovision
COMMODORE 64
Tandy 1000rl (Tandy graphics)
PC xt clone (Magnavox 8bit VGA)
386sx clone (same VGA card)
486dx2-66 (SAME VGA card)
486dx4-100 (new vlb VGA card)
(Later added Voodoo 2 card)
Pentium 100 (voodoo 3 3500)
(Later.added Nvidia card)
Various Pentiums/Athlons
(Nvidia 7800gtx)
(Nvidia 750ti)
i7-9700 (1650LP)
I get the Nvidia numbers confused, but these sound right)... 🧐