VGA Legacy MKIII

Monday, 16 May 2016 20:32

NVIDIA GeForce 210

Low-end card from the end of 2009 surpassed by Radeon HD5450.

Published in NVIDIA Corporation

Sunday, 18 October 2015 08:43

Trilinear filtering

Trilinear filtering is an extension of the bilinear texture filtering method, which also performs linear interpolation between mipmaps.

Published in Technology corner

Saturday, 17 October 2015 09:35

Bilinear filtering

Bilinear filtering is a texture filtering method used to smooth textures when displayed larger or smaller than they actually are.

Published in Technology corner

Sunday, 17 May 2015 21:28

Many of you maybe already noticed, that we missing good graphics card info software. There are only few ones and almost all of them are not usefull for people with retro cards. Lets see what we have....

HWinfo - http://www.hwinfo.com - its free, but shows only basic info and usefull only for modern cards.

GPU-Z - http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/ - well known free software used everywhere. Sadly it works only on Win XP SP3 and never OS, requires installed card drivers to show all info and its useless for anything older than year 2000. Author won't support older cards in future. It will be pointless anyway, because most of these cards won't have drivers for these modern OS.

PowerStrip 2.78 - http://entechtaiwan.com/util/ps2.shtm - very old shareware, that is supported only in Win9x/2000. New version drops support for old cards. It was most common software used for overclocking less known cards. But many cards missing info and clocks are not always right.

Aida64 - http://www.aida64.com - being still developed shareware info tool. Today its best available software showing not only info about your cards, but also DirectX functions and OpenGL extensions. Another great thing is that its still working in Windows 98. Sadly also this sofware isn't perfect, because it still have sometimes blank info pages at some old cards. And thats why i writed this short article.

I was doing recently small tests of 1st generation 3D cards (43 of them) in mine collection compared with some other mostly OEM chips. So i also saved and updated reports from these cards on site. Not all cards were supported by Aida so i sended one report to Aida developers to see their reaction. They thanked for report and said, that support of pre GPU (=anything older than Geforce 256) cards is mostly accidental and they are not planning to extend it for any old not supported cards. This means that we probably never see any software capable of showing clocks and info about old cards in our collections and retro PC. Aida was mine last hope, but its lost now. Chances for finding someone new doing info software are next to none.

Here is mine email and reply i got.

Hi Vlask,

Thank you for submitting your reports to us. Quite frankly, the GPU page
was originally designed to show information on GPUs, just as the name of the
page suggests. We never intended to add legacy video chips on that page,
although to some degree we've added a few of those a few years ago, just for
completeness, but stopped at a certain point and instead focused on new
chips. And I'm afraid we have no plans to expand the list of supported
legacy non-GPU video chips, or legacy video chips in general.

BTW, when it comes ATI/AMD video chips, AIDA64 should support all of them
starting from the Rage128 line. So anything preceding that line will not be
supported.

Best Regards,
Tamas Miklos

FinalWire Ltd.
http://www.aida64.com

-----Original Message-----
AIDA64 Extreme 5.20.3407 Beta (c) 1995-2015 FinalWire Ltd.

Report file submit on 8th April 2015, 13:59

Full Name: Vlask
E-mail Address: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Computer Name: V6F3S8
User Name: .

CPU Type: Intel Pentium IIIE, 1000 MHz (7.5 x 133) [Coppermine]
Motherboard Name: Gigabyte GA-6OXET(-C)
Motherboard Chipset: Intel Solano i815EP
Video Adapter: ATI Xpert 98 AGP2X Video Adapter [1002 4742] [1002 0084]
CPUID CPU Name:
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 98 SE 4.10.4.10.2222A (32-bit)
PCI Devices: 8086-1130 8086-1131 8086-244E 8086-2440 8086-244B 8086-2442
8086-2443 8086-2444 1002-4742 10EC-8139
USB Devices:

Award BIOS Type: Award Modular BIOS v6.00PG
Award BIOS Message: Intel 815 AGPSet BIOS for 6OXET F7

DMI MB Manufacturer: Giga-Byte Technology Co., LTD
DMI MB Product: i815-ITE8712
DMI MB Version: 1.x
DMI SYS Manufacturer:
DMI SYS Product:
DMI SYS Version:
DMI BIOS Version: 6.00 PG

[[[ Comment ]]]

Missing all info about card - ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP 2x 8MB SDR clocked to
74,8/99,8 MHz according to Powerstrip. Reply if you're interested in sending
reports of other retro cards missing info in Aida. From recently tested
cards you also missing info (blank screen GPU) about Cirrus Logic 5465
(Laguna 3D), Chromatic Mpact2, 3Dlabs Permedia 2V, Permedia 1, ATI RAGE
II+DVD, Rage LT PRO, Number Nine Revolution 3D, Revolution IV, SiS 305.

Published in Short news

Sunday, 10 May 2015 08:11

S3 Savage4 GT

OEM version limited to 16MB and AGP 2X.

Published in S3 Graphics

Monday, 30 March 2015 21:17

ATI FireGL 8800

Fully active R200GL core. Professional card. Based on Radeon 8500.

Published in ATI Technologies Inc.

Monday, 23 March 2015 22:33

Matrox Parhelia

Hi-end Matrox card with 512-bit GPU, triple-head (VGA only) support and 10-bit per color channel.

Published in Matrox

Wednesday, 25 February 2015 16:29

Exchange list

Published in Trade

Tuesday, 24 February 2015 15:59

History tree

Published in Text articles (comments on)

Sunday, 22 February 2015 16:32

Benchmarks

Various benchmarks done by me (Vlask) on my testing PC Athlon XP 2200+, Soltek SL75-KAV (Via KT133A), 512MB SDR CL3. Motherboard could limit some AGP8X cards, because supports max AGP4X mode. Here are most images of graphs you can see in submenu. These require Flash, so here i post also images of all tests for all visitors with devices not supporting Flash.

DIAG ver. 4.61, PCPlayer Benchmark - DOS benchmarks, usefull for comparing old DOS games performance. DIAG tests cards only in low resolutions, but is able to test also EGA and Hercules cards. PCPlayer Benchmark is tested with fastvid program enhancing DOS performance of PCI and AGP cards in higher resolutions (640x480 and higher). Toms 2D is windows benchmark aimed at 2D speed.