Test of 11 video cards for a retro system (27.02.2022)

Test system configuration:
Processor Intel Pentium 4, 2000 MHz;
Motherboard EliteGroup P4VMM2 ver7.3;
RAM 512 MB (256x2) at 266 MHz;
Hard drive Seagate 40 GB 7200.7

It all started with the fact that such a mother card fell into my hands:

It would seem unremarkable (with the exception of the luxurious color of the textolite), completely unsuitable for modern tasks, the card is old, but not so old that I would classify it as "retro" hardware. There is really one "but" - a wonderful, universal connector that allows you to plug almost any AGP video card into it, regardless of the generation! And then a thought appeared in my head: "why not test on it, those of my accelerators that were lying around in the cherished box?!!!". I installed a processor, cooling, a couple of 256 MB RAM sticks, connected a 40 gig hard drive, and assembled a stand. I rolled up Windows 98 as an operating system, installed benchmarks, and it started ...

I did a lot of testing with 11 graphics cards in the 3DMark 2000 Pro and 3DMark 2001 SE synthetic benchmarks. I deliberately did not use the famous 3DMark 99 test, since many cards were released in 99 or later, and the results of tests using the new graphics "features" of the turn of the millennium were much more interesting.

Also, when choosing video cards, one more condition was put forward - the presence of official drivers for the Windows 98 operating system and the absence of problems when working in the MS-DOS environment. These conditions from my box of video cards were satisfied by the very 11 copies that I drove

The final results were surprising, but also provided food for thought and answers to some questions. For clarity, everything is summarized in the following graph (at the end of the article, the exact numerical indicators, for your convenience, are given in tabular form):

The undisputed leader is the expected GeForce FX5700, which is not surprising, here we are dealing with the youngest and most powerful chip, moreover, the card is equipped with a fabulous 256 MB of video memory by those standards. And a lot depends on the amount of memory in 3DMark tests, confirmation of which we will receive later.

The weakest variant is the built-in video chip of the motherboard - S3 Savage Pro DDR (but in our test it is so far as...). Conclusion - for the late games of the late 90's and early 00's, this option is not acceptable.

Further, everything is simpler, almost a direct dependence of performance on the year of manufacture, except when it comes to models with the "Ti" index, they can still give odds to younger (budget solutions), which we see on the graph between the 2nd and 4th generations and between 4th and generation "FX" from NVidia.

The result of the first Radeon model from ATI (model R6 or later marked as Radeon 7200) is very interesting, which in tests proved to be an analogue of the first graphics accelerator from NVidia - GeForce256. Thus, if you want to install a GeForce256 in your system (which is very difficult to find now and often very expensive), then you can choose a full-fledged alternative in the form of the ATI Radeon 7200 and enjoy the excellent quality of the original graphics of those years.