I'm just being a completionist. If I can upgrade all of my cards to 32MB then I'm going to to do it!

Kahenraz wrote on 2024-07-16, 03:33:

I'm just being a completionist. If I can upgrade all of my cards to 32MB then I'm going to to do it!

Fair enough! I also have some 16MB PCI M64s, so I'd be interested to see what you come up with. 😁

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-07-16, 03:02:

IMO that seems to apply across a lot of video cards, the "premium" RAM capacity never seeming worth it over ordinary or middle one, since by the time the games need it, the gfx engine is too slow for it to count.

I agree. Thinking back to some of the graphics cards I have owned personally, the 16MB Voodoo3 seemed pretty well suited to the games that were out at the time. Next I had a 32MB Geforce 2 GTS and I never remember having VRAM issues with that. It was a really great card. Next was the Geforce4 Ti 4400 128MB which also never gave me any VRAM issues. When it died suddenly I was sent an FX 5600 (non-ultra) 256MB as a replacement and it was a big downgrade, so I sold it and bought a 128MB 9600 Pro which was a huge upgrade from them both despite the RAM capacity. At some point after that I had a 1280MB GTX 470 which was a furnace so I upgraded to a much cooler running GTX 560 Ti 1GB which was faster and never had any VRAM issues, despite having less than my previous card.

So yeah, top of the line VRAM quantities seemed to rarely make a lot of difference. I can't really speak for newer cards because there seems to be a lot more variance in game requirements and uses for graphics memory these days. I'm sure lots of people are maxing out the VRAM on their 24GB 4090s somehow and are chomping at the bit for a 48GB card.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-07-16, 06:48:

Fair enough! I also have some 16MB PCI M64s, so I'd be interested to see what you come up with. :D […]
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Kahenraz wrote on 2024-07-16, 03:33:

I'm just being a completionist. If I can upgrade all of my cards to 32MB then I'm going to to do it!

Fair enough! I also have some 16MB PCI M64s, so I'd be interested to see what you come up with. 😁

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-07-16, 03:02:

IMO that seems to apply across a lot of video cards, the "premium" RAM capacity never seeming worth it over ordinary or middle one, since by the time the games need it, the gfx engine is too slow for it to count.

I agree. Thinking back to some of the graphics cards I have owned personally, the 16MB Voodoo3 seemed pretty well suited to the games that were out at the time. Next I had a 32MB Geforce 2 GTS and I never remember having VRAM issues with that. It was a really great card. Next was the Geforce4 Ti 4400 128MB which also never gave me any VRAM issues. When it died suddenly I was sent an FX 5600 (non-ultra) 256MB as a replacement and it was a big downgrade, so I sold it and bought a 128MB 9600 Pro which was a huge upgrade from them both despite the RAM capacity. At some point after that I had a 1280MB GTX 470 which was a furnace so I upgraded to a much cooler running GTX 560 Ti 1GB which was faster and never had any VRAM issues, despite having less than my previous card.

So yeah, top of the line VRAM quantities seemed to rarely make a lot of difference. I can't really speak for newer cards because there seems to be a lot more variance in game requirements and uses for graphics memory these days. I'm sure lots of people are maxing out the VRAM on their 24GB 4090s somehow and are chomping at the bit for a 48GB card.

I own a 4090 and the closest I have managed to get to 24Gb was a little over 16gb and that was not in a game, games by and large are very efficient with Vram usage which is understandable as most popular GPUs are still somewhere between 8 - 12Gb for Vram. The most popular by the Steam survey is still the 60 series which are 16Gb at the top end and *6gb at the low end. (Steam has the 3060 at the top with 12Gb and the 1650 in second place which only has 4Gb)

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

Though I suspect there may have been a little sarcasm in that part of your post 🤣

*if you count the 1060 then it goes lower to 3Gb .. but none would be using that junk of a card in a modern Gaming PC.

Just picked up this beauty 😍. 5900 ultra. One of the fans needs some grease but should be fine. 👍 Only two cards left to go in the FX series for the collection.

I also picked up a Pristine Ati Rage Fury Maxx for the amazing price from eBay... except I didn't.... because even though I bought the listing within 2mins of it being posted, the seller said it was out of stock and didn't send it to me. 🙁 🙁 mega sketchy....

How much did you pay for the Fury Maxx? Seller probably realized they could've sold it for more. Happened here as well. It was a 9800 pro hercules I really liked.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2024-07-16, 06:48:

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-07-16, 03:02:

IMO that seems to apply across a lot of video cards, the "premium" RAM capacity never seeming worth it over ordinary or middle one, since by the time the games need it, the gfx engine is too slow for it to count.

I agree. Thinking back to some of the graphics cards I have owned personally, the 16MB Voodoo3 seemed pretty well suited to the games that were out at the time.

I started writing timeline ...

-1994 512KB or even 256KB was fine for a very long time all the way to Windows 95. Only 4 mayor 640x480 games got released up to 94: Links 386 Pro, Simcity 2000, Transport Tycoon, KQ7, and even those four would start on 512KB ISA card.
1995-96 1MB. With Windows 95 developers started taking 1MB video memory for granted, but it was long after every new computer shipped with PCI SVGA already.
1996-97 2MB. 3D accelerated era went thru short lived 2MB minimum phase full of Virge, Ati Rage 1/2, Matrox Mistake joke cards. Everything looked bad or/and ran at 5-10 fps.
1997-1998 4MB Voodoo1 era. Every game optimized for 2MB of up to 256x256 textures.
1998-1999 8MB Voodoo2 era. Every game optimized for 4MB of up to 256x256 textures.
1999-2000 16MB Voodoo3 era. Every game optimized to run well with ~10MB of up to 256x256 textures.
Texture compression showed up in 1999 with painful start when S3?or devs?or Microsoft? still had the idea of shipping uncompressed textures and compressing on the fly. Took couple of years for S3TC to start working and looking properly. Its still only 4:1 compression ratio so doubling resolution.
2000-2004 32MB. Pretty much any game that would need more textures than Voodoo3 could support required DirectX7 anyway.

.. but then I realized that yes, I dont remember ever running out of VRAM without cranking settings to high/max. The only time on that timeline you would hurt for Video memory would be owning one of joke cards from 1996. Seems speed and feature support were more important, with textures tuned to what was currently on the market.

Wes1262 wrote on 2024-07-16, 14:13:

How much did you pay for the Fury Maxx? Seller probably realized they could've sold it for more. Happened here as well. It was a 9800 pro hercules I really liked.

They accepted an offer barely over 2 digits. 🙁

So $100+. That gives me an idea how much to price mine at when I find and test it. I try to find the lowest price things have sold for on eBay, then take a little off, for quick sales. Most of my cheap cards (I have boxes full of them) will be sold untested, as I have far too many and no space to set up test systems. Selling most of my large collection of CPUs, motherboards and graphics cards, primarily to pay off my most expensive credit card before I hit pension age (gives me a few years to sort out as much as I can)

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-07-16, 07:10:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

Yikes ... the first Radeon to be found on that list (and way down at that) is a RX580? I knew Nvidia had the upper hand there but AMD is downright getting slaughtered in terms of market share. Good thing they have the console market.

I've been at team Red for most of my GPU's ... i really hope RDNA5 can keep up. And honestly i find it a shame they are getting the sort end of the straw because of RT and now AI. Otherwise these cards are on par with Nvidia. But each review they get beat because RT was the new hotness and now it's AI.

Sporting a 6700XT since launch and have been happy with it so far.

I have quite happily obtained a very modern (I think) device that seems to have solved my problem of not being able to use gamepads or joysticks when booting into DOS on my TP300LD laptop. With no USB1 support (and hence no hope of using existing DOS USB drivers), no interest in installing Win9X, and no ports except USB for peripherals it seems chances were slim for comfortable couch gaming, the laptop being hooked to a TV via HDMI. However, I became aware of a 2.4GHz-based gaming controller from China, that presents itself to the system as a composite USB device with a mouse and a keyboard. To my
delight the device actually gets detected just fine by BIOS/EFI on my machines, including the laptop, and this makes it fully available to DOS games when legacy USB support is on.

The device offers:
- an analog stick bound to WASD, pressing which produces Ctrl press,
- dpad bound to 1-4 numeric key (5-8 with with modifier button)
- Shift and Space as triggers
- Q and E as bumper keys
- VCFR as buttons that go where ABXY go.
It also has Z, X and Alt as additional buttons, and Tab, M, G, B and Escape too, the latter switching to F1, F2, H, T and Enter with modifier key.
Mouse is a trackpad with left and right buttons as triggers and mousewheel sitting next to VCFR.

The device is not small, and sits in hand nicely. It has gyro features - but I have not bothered testing them - and is charged via a type-C port.

I have immediately tested it with Gods using built in key remapper to try both analog stick and dpad options and both worked great. Going to see about Doom controls remapping next.

Now, the downsides are obviously lack of ability to redefine key mappings, and absence of buttons that map to the normal keyboard cursor keys. The reason I listed the buttons above is exactly that these are the ones you can use - no more, no less. Also having analog stick as mouse instead of WASD could probably be more helpful for Tie Fighter and such. I expect it that games without key remapping built into the game or in the configuration utility will require some form of TSR for comfortable play (Adventures of Robbo for example) and am actually considering throwing together a WASD to cursor keys and 1234 to cursor keys mapper for real mode games based on this other keyboard TSR I wrote couple a few months back.

Not giving a store link to avoid this being seen as product placement, nor trademark, as it's a not a known brand anyway, but of course will be happy to share details if there's interest.

ludicrous_peridot wrote on 2024-07-16, 21:17:

I have quite happily obtained a very modern (I think) device that seems to have solved my problem of not being able to use game […]
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I have quite happily obtained a very modern (I think) device that seems to have solved my problem of not being able to use gamepads or joysticks when booting into DOS on my TP300LD laptop. With no USB1 support (and hence no hope of using existing DOS USB drivers), no interest in installing Win9X, and no ports except USB for peripherals it seems chances were slim for comfortable couch gaming, the laptop being hooked to a TV via HDMI. However, I became aware of a 2.4GHz-based gaming controller from China, that presents itself to the system as a composite USB device with a mouse and a keyboard. To my
delight the device actually gets detected just fine by BIOS/EFI on my machines, including the laptop, and this makes it fully available to DOS games when legacy USB support is on.

The device offers:
- an analog stick bound to WASD, pressing which produces Ctrl press,
- dpad bound to 1-4 numeric key (5-8 with with modifier button)
- Shift and Space as triggers
- Q and E as bumper keys
- VCFR as buttons that go where ABXY go.
It also has Z, X and Alt as additional buttons, and Tab, M, G, B and Escape too, the latter switching to F1, F2, H, T and Enter with modifier key.
Mouse is a trackpad with left and right buttons as triggers and mousewheel sitting next to VCFR.

The device is not small, and sits in hand nicely. It has gyro features - but I have not bothered testing them - and is charged via a type-C port.

I have immediately tested it with Gods using built in key remapper to try both analog stick and dpad options and both worked great. Going to see about Doom controls remapping next.

Now, the downsides are obviously lack of ability to redefine key mappings, and absence of buttons that map to the normal keyboard cursor keys. The reason I listed the buttons above is exactly that these are the ones you can use - no more, no less. Also having analog stick as mouse instead of WASD could probably be more helpful for Tie Fighter and such. I expect it that games without key remapping built into the game or in the configuration utility will require some form of TSR for comfortable play (Adventures of Robbo for example) and am actually considering throwing together a WASD to cursor keys and 1234 to cursor keys mapper for real mode games based on this other keyboard TSR I wrote couple a few months back.

Not giving a store link to avoid this being seen as product placement, nor trademark, as it's a not a known brand anyway, but of course will be happy to share details if there's interest.

Sounds pretty cool! Honestly, I don't think there is any concern of it being seen as product placement here for a one-off comment... but that may just be my view.

G-X wrote on 2024-07-16, 15:45:

Trashbytes wrote on 2024-07-16, 07:10:

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/

Yikes ... the first Radeon to be found on that list (and way down at that) is a RX580? I knew Nvidia had the upper hand there but AMD is downright getting slaughtered in terms of market share. Good thing they have the console market.

The only ones getting slaughtered are consumers. This pricing stinks.

I ended up getting the Novint falcon controller, i was aware of its existence at the time of the orange box but somehow i completely forgot about it even though i always loved the idea behind it.
I got lucky, the seller wanted to get rid of it and sold it for cheap, there's only one thing missing now, the damn pistol grip, it seems to be impossible to find it.

iraito wrote on 2024-07-17, 15:27:

I ended up getting the Novint falcon controller, i was aware of its existence at the time of the orange box but somehow i completely forgot about it even though i always loved the idea behind it.
I got lucky, the seller wanted to get rid of it and sold it for cheap, there's only one thing missing now, the damn pistol grip, it seems to be impossible to find it.

You can still buy them new from the company if you want to shell out 200$ it looks like.

AGP4LIfe? wrote on 2024-07-17, 16:49:

iraito wrote on 2024-07-17, 15:27:

I ended up getting the Novint falcon controller, i was aware of its existence at the time of the orange box but somehow i completely forgot about it even though i always loved the idea behind it.
I got lucky, the seller wanted to get rid of it and sold it for cheap, there's only one thing missing now, the damn pistol grip, it seems to be impossible to find it.

You can still buy them new from the company if you want to shell out 200$ it looks like.

That's pure insanity!
I imagine they know they are not really gonna sell 1 every day so they hope to make the oh so rare guy needing it to splurge that amount for a 19$ product.
I might haggle and see if they can lower the price to a saner price (also if anybody has it i'm open to offers)

smtkr wrote on 2024-07-17, 03:14:

The only ones getting slaughtered are consumers. This pricing stinks.

Yeah ... i don't think that trend will go away anytime soon. I remember buying a new Athlon64 3500+ for €400 back in the day and that was hardly midrange ... the same money gets you a pretty decent CPU even today. The graphics cards on the other hand. The GPU's have gotten quite big and complex though but still ...

iraito wrote on 2024-07-17, 15:27:

I ended up getting the Novint falcon controller, i was aware of its existence at the time of the orange box but somehow i completely forgot about it even though i always loved the idea behind it.
I got lucky, the seller wanted to get rid of it and sold it for cheap, there's only one thing missing now, the damn pistol grip, it seems to be impossible to find it.

Never knew this existed. Pretty neat thing!

A friend needed a PII 450, I had a spare so I traded it for an Argon 700 Athlon he didn't need. My second Slot A and first Argon CPU. Boy, this thing runs HOT.

I bought a lot of scrap PCB's a little while back and the only possibly savable board was a Slot A board. My first one. It needs some repair work though.

Now THAT needs a full recap to say the least but some of those ports look damaged too. Why somebody would cannibalize a ¢20 battery holder is beyond me.