So, I upgraded my Athlon XP Win98 PC's graphics to a 128mb ATI Radeon 9000 Pro. This card thankfully works, unlike the R9250 I had gotten before. I'm using the latest Win98 ATI Catalyst drivers, which is version 6.2 from 2005. They work, and the performance is still miles ahead of the pretty awful S3 integrated graphics, but I have a feeling the performance isn't quite as good as it could be with this card. For example, Unreal Gold, Microsoft Train Simulator, Deus Ex, etc. drop frames and aren't constantly over or near 60fps at 1024x768 like they seemingly really should be with this card.
Phil from PhilsComputerLab mentioned one time how performance under Win98 can fluctuate depending on the driver version you use. The performance isn't generally quite as good as it is in his R9000 Pro review. Can anyone give some more insight into this and/or recommend what version is best to use under Win98? I'd be very interested to hear some responses. Thanks.
ati radeon rv250 driver 12
In my experience, there isn't a "best" Radeon R300 driver for Win9x. There isn't even a good one. They're all mediocre. The Omega drivers might be an improvement, but I found those to be only slightly less flaky than the official Catalyst drivers.
Under WinXP, the final few revisions of R300 Catalyst drivers re-enabled table fog and 8-bit palletized textures. I have had much better success with Radeon R300 cards under WinXP. My Radeon 9600XT and 9800XT cards work quite well under WinXP, in fact.
With that being said, if you're confident you won't be playing any titles that need 8-bit palettized textures, maybe try a driver version that's somewhat period-correct for better performance (I normally use Catalyst 3.1, but any driver version from 2002-2004 should be usable).
How ironic. I remember hearing someone having a better experience with the Radeon 9xx0 cards than the Geforce FX-series cards a long time ago (then again, I think he also mentioned not bothering with the 4x.xx drivers because he thought they would be too old to work with his Geforce FX cards), maybe consider a Geforce 2-4 video card as an alternative just to be safe.
+1 for the Omega drivers. I used them back in the day on my Radeon 9700pro. I didn't have many problems from what I remember. I did have some problems more recently when I was using my ATI cards with a VIA chipset, disabling fast writes fixed it though. I'm pretty sure the 9000pro is RV250. Try this link, I think they are the cat 3.1 -33694184-78312486-76576249.html
ATi M9-CSP64GL - Mobility Radeon 9000 mostly found in ThinkPads T40p, has 64MB DDR 400MHz memory on BGA package connected with 128-bit bus for space saving. This card is sometimes detected as ATi FireGL 9000, its same as normal mobile Radeon 9000, it does have more OpenGL optimized driver. 2ff7e9595c
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