/vr/ - Retro Games

>>10927605
One. Exactly One time.

>>10927605
That generation was the only generation where they unequivocally had the upper hand. The next generation was pretty neck-and-neck and it only went downhill for them from there.

>>10927605
ati/amd was budget shit, so no. I never thought any of that. more like how the fuck do i stop lagging

>>10927605
That was the main one, but there were a few other times that AMD was a great option. From the HD 4000 to 6000 series they had more VRAM, similar performance, and much better power efficiency. That makes them much better to use today than contemporary nvidia, and were still a good choice back then. i believe the 4000 series narrowly outsold nvidia's offerings that generation. In particular, the 6970 was by far the best card released in its year although it was completely outmoded by the 7000 series after that. The only real problem here was the horrible opengl drivers (6970 can't maintain 30 fps in neptunia rebirth at any resolution)
There was also a period from the gtx 480 to 780 ti where the amd hardware was better and more modern, but you wouldn't see the benefits for a few more years in most games.
After the 980 came out and followed up with the 1000 series, AMD was basically left in the dust. I'm still using my 1080. I would consider buying AMD next time because I don't care about ray tracing and the drivers have improved a fair bit, but I'm still not sure. If nvidia 5000 is reasonably priced I will probably go with that.
Also, in the early days before 3dfx, ati cards were the BEST for 2D acceleration on DOS games. It doesn't really matter anymore, as even the motherboard graphics from the 3D era equaled those 2D cards. A lot of people playing DOS games on real hardware are using late 90s/early 2000s stuff like that. If you want a contemporary DOS gaming PC, any cheap ATI card is a good choice.

>>10927605
I can't remember a single time. ATI was always known for it's image quality in comparison to the competitors not performance really.

>>10927605
ATi was the superior option through 2004 from what I remember. I recall upgrading my PC in 2003 and the only viable offering from nvidia required buying two cards and running them in SLi, which I was against doing because of micro-stuttering and driver issues. The 9800Pro for example was considered so good that it ended up losing ATi money as they couldn't come up with an enticing enough successor for people to justify replacing.

>>10927605
I was a victim of being poor and had to settle for the AMD poverty option. I remember trying to justify my AMD Athlon XP over the elite Intel chips with cope such as "AMD was more efficient per cycle while Intel just brute force with higher clock speeds". The AMD processors had to use marketing numbers like "2600+" when it really ran under 2GHz while Intel broke the 3GHz barrier. The only time ATi ever shined was the 9k Radeons but it was always their crap drivers holding them back. While they were the brand for still image quality while nVidia was for those that prefer performance. The drivers would finally show the true capabilities of ATi/AMD graphics once it is 2 or 3 generations later, but by then graphics would have progressed 2 or 3 generations. I remember being really impressed with the marbles at night demo nVidia had for the 3090 which has that realistic vibe with all the materials and lighting.

>>10927798
Nobody asked.

>>10928113
For a while now running UT99 on AMD cards requires nothing more than grabbing an alternative driver off a site that a modder made, and it works like a charm. My 6700XT and my previous rx580 were solid cards with great graphical software that blows Nvidia's out of the water and never being problematic. Can recommend.
Integrated AMD graphics RULED the late 2000's, though. They really popped up in practically every single laptop that any teen had been given as a hand-me-down and made up a huge part of the gaming scene because of it. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that it meant more support for AMD down the line by third-parties to cater to that demographic, and I'm putting in people making their own renderers/options for cards by hand themselves.

>>10928401
Does UT99 not work fine on modern AMD with the normal drivers? WTF? I remember it working fine on my 6970 and 7970.

>>10927605
lotta zoomers in this thread.
>9700 pro
>hd5970
>r9 295x2
and amd absolutely spanked nvidia these generations
I didn't have the 9700 pro, i got the 9600pro free with Half Life 2, and it was awesome.

>>10928317
Anon... i know ur trolling
Intel went full Retarded with the late pentium 3 and subsequently the P4Era, when AMD Raped them hard with the Athlon XP and later Athlon 64 and the Early Dual Cores.
The 2000's were the golden age for AMD processors until Intel caught them with the new C2D's and C2Q, and AMD went full retarded with the Bulldozer.

ATI, they began 2000's better than Nvidia and S3, when the later Delivered the wonder that was the MeTaL API that became DXT compression later on.
Then they developed Real time tessellation with the ATITruForm which is possibly the biggest loss in gaming and graphics history since only a few games supported the idea, then nvidia finally quit trying to fix the FX series and released the GT series, and the rest is history.

>>10928474
>>r9 295x2
>muh crossfire

I've never used Crossfire. Was it really double the juice?
If so that's kinda cool in a "just put more rockets on it" kinda way

>>10928436
UT99 did frame timing wrong. It goes slow-fast-slow-fast-slow-fast on modern hardware. Basically it's UT99 saying "can I have async buffer swaps please?" and at the time all the drivers were like "su-u-u-re you can, here's synchronous swapping pretending to be async" and so the UT99 coders made their frame timing code based on lies and bad assumptions. Well, now AMD cards actually support the thing UT99 says it wants and it's completely borked. nVidia also supports it, but they had the wherewithal to say "anything made before 2005 probably doesn't ACTUALLY want it."

>>10928502
Crossfire and SLI were benchmark winning technologies more than actual things gamers could use. Having two GPUs crunching frames meant that you could literally double frame rates but you have to remember that if you got 30fps on one GPU which is 1/30s per frame, then adding two means you get 60fps but still 1/30per frame per GPU. So to make it work the driver had to lie to the game and withhold frames to buffer them and retime everything leading to even more input lag than 1/30 (similar to DLSS frame generation).
There was a split frame rendering method that meant both GPUs would do the same frame at the same time, but it was not nearly so much of a benchmark winner because trying to split workload 50/50 like that was nigh impossible and you always had one GPU doing 70% of the work. There was also nasty artefacts caused by stateful shader code relying on values that would not and could not be shared between GPUs.
The benchmark wars were the dark days of PC gaming. Because all that mattered was your 3dmark score and AVG fps on Tom's Hardware, nVidia and AMD both would play silly games where they'd take all the draw commands and rejig them however they saw fit to improve framerates leading to inconsistent graphical fidelity and wildly varying frame times and input lag. When it started bleeding over onto single GPU setups there was a rude awakening as gamers started asking what all this framestutter was all about and benchmarking sites had to scramble to claim that THEY were the clever people who always understood this and how THEY don't just blindly trust averages and would measure frame times and 1% lows.

>>10928474
>amd
zoomer

>>10928530
Isn't Nvidia's SLI completely different from the original 3dfx implementation? Did 3dfx's design also suffer from the same frame pacing issues later versions had?

>>10928340
op did and I answered. cry some more

>>10928113
Ati cards have scrolling issues in dos games like commander keen

n̳o̳

>>10928484
It was essentially my Windows 2000 time. It was what I had to deal with. The Tualatin was very efficient and the P4 era was dominated by Intel due to the very high clock speeds that AMD just couldn't reach. ATi was fine since they had the all-in-1 solution if you wanted connectivity to standard broadcast TV, but for computing, aside from the 5 generation of nVidia which was the FX line, they moved on quickly to the 6 series and immediately overtook any ATi offering. Being stuck with the cheaper options, I will admit it was nice to get marginal improvements with driver updates, but it was taxing on the one contracted person jumping between AMD and ATi to program the drivers across both companies stack of products. To this day, AMD drivers are notorious for crashing systems with instability, a friend had to learn the hard way with Dragon's Dogma 2 and spent the extra on nVidia becoming much happier. Tessellation is pretty much a standard implementation these days, with enough information from normal maps. AMD seems to cook the numbers for benchmarks, but in practical use it is an extremely unhealthy diet disproportionally affecting impoverished communities.

>>10929297
Intel DIDNT dominate anything during the P4 era
Everyone rightfully mocked Intel and Nvidia for delivering SUCH A SHITTY HARDWARE that even Microsoft considered dropping AMD half to full support because of how SHIT in capital words Intel was.

People have no idea of how shit it was to be AMD's rival back then because AMD cockslapped Intel Hard, they only took control of the situation the moment they finally dropped P4 into Dual Core

ATI was the same case, S3 quit making GPU's and sold their API tech to Microsoft to develop DXT Compression for DirectX, ATI took full support of the Idea while Post Merge with 3dfx Nvidia went full retarded with the FX era of cards until they manned up and created the GT series.

>>10927605
unrelated but i've always liked colors on amd/ati cards much better than on nvidia ones, they're just punchier, more vibrant. always dreaded switching to nvidia because of colors looking dull and washed out by comparison.

>>10928317
I was similar, though never thought about it as cope, I couldn't afford intel, well I guess I could have, but it would have been a slower piece of shit. My Athlon was great for the price, and so was my Athlon XP that I upgraded next. Even my next CPU's, an Athlon 64 and an Athlon X2 seemed like the right choice when it came to performance to cost. I was also always behind in upgrade cycles. I don't think I ever paid more than £200 for a CPU until I bought my 4790k (which I still use today in my second PC)

>>10927605
When they released the 9700 Pro.

That lasted until the 9800 XT, I believe.

The X series sucked.

Anything released by them after that is irrelevant.

>>10927605
Almost never. It was considered the budget brand to go to if you couldn't afford an Nvidia.

>>10927605
The Radeon 9800Pro. It blew open Morrowind and you could play Oblivion on the card as well.
The Radeon HD5970. It had great performance for the price for when I got it. And I later sold the card for the same amount that I had purchased it for a couple years prior.

>>10930812
>The X series sucked.
Not true, it was still competitive with the 6xxx generation

>>10927605
ATi's biggest issue back then is their drivers sucked ass and games were usually optimized for nVidia anyway

>>10930789
Yeah, they did serve the low end market well enough back then, which I wish were still the case as it has disappeared now. The Athlon CPUs were decent enough with tempered expectations since they were behind in innovation. Maybe if their 3Dnow! instruction set caught on, but the industry continually chose to support Intel. Still, I liked my time that I had when AMD was at least decent.

>>10929456
I guess it was different in your region, as I remembered P4 systems were sold everywhere. All the Redhat Linux and BSD loyalists preferred Intel+nVidia. I do miss ATi more now that they are gone because AMD just doesn't have any bright minds behind graphics.

>>10928502
Crossfire is micro-stutter hell. On top of all the heat, it was barely supported. You cannot expect double, but at best maybe 180% of a single if the drivers did not crash. Got this card hoping to relive the joys of my Voodoo 5 days, but it is just not the same and replaced with regret.

>>10933382
>the industry continually chose to support Intel
Not least because of the gargantuan bribes paid by Intel to other companies. both large and small.
>Got this card hoping to relive the joys of my Voodoo 5 days, but it is just not the same and replaced with regret.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I remember 3dfx using a completely different multiprocessor method than what was later implemented by nVidia (who used the name, but not the tech) and ATI.

>>10929297
Hnnnf. I have no use for any of that shit, but looking at it.... I want it. I don't know why I've been developing a weird boner for computer hardware lately. Please help

>>10927605
>128MB of DDR memory
This card was released in 2002? I just ordered a RX 6600, which is one of the cheapest Radeon cards in 2024, and it has 8GB GDDR6. Hard to imagine what kind of graphics cards will be relatively cheap in 20 years from now.

>>10927605
the xbox 360, lol. it was better than anything on PC at launch, and was better than the RSX on the ps3.

>>10933401
I suppose you're right that there is no winning timeline in catering to the entry or low-end side with the thin margins. It's just that the focus on the high-end to enthusiast leaves a lot out to dry unable to enjoy PC gaming. I was considering trying out DifferentSLI Auto to make two 750ti cards in making an amazing small form factor low power consumption retro XP time machine. While I don't expect double 750ti, I hope it could still maybe be suitable for the games of the time, but the issue is having the airflow for the two low-profile cards next to each other.

>>10933815
I think it is because it was more experimental where we did not know how to make coolers so they were all sorts of shapes/sizes and they used to plaster 3D rendered ladies on the graphics cards. I still want to get the ATi cards with peak Ruby before she hit the wall around the early 2000s, like the Radeon X1950. Here are Sapphire's own vampire mascot, which who knows what that's about. As you stated, you have no use for it, and keep in mind the headaches of needing to replace capacitors. Without access to expertise, it is a minefield of costs and the people who can do such repairs are just getting older and eventually die leaving the retro outdated technology to fade away. It is my punishment for keeping these things from their heyday; hope that convinces you about the cons to a time machine.

>>10934151
Man those are some majorly mangled SATA ports. Was trace real estate really that expensive back then?

>>10928474
You mean you got HL2 free with the 9600?