Graphics card candidates [Retro-PC series]

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In my journey building a Retro-PC, I also evaluated options for graphics. Having good retro graphics support is quite easy as in principle you can use almost any modern gaming graphics card for SVGA/VGA/EGA/CGA games in DOS, and also enjoy hardware acceleration with your favourite DirectX flavour. Only if you want something special like Hercules, you might need to do other arrangements.

The motherboard I had in hand was unfortunately very limited, so I had a little harder times experimenting a good set up. The first ThinkCentre model (S50 8183-43G) I had come with an integrated Intel 865G chipset on board, and the other one (M52 9210 CTO) comes with a slightly more performant Extreme Graphics 2 (G950 / G945). For MS-DOS games, they both are powerful enough, and Windows games of the 90s requiring DirectX 7 or less also will run smoothly on both. DirectX 8 and 9 titles will also run on these integrated circuits, but the performance you get might not be as good anymore. The newest game I have in my collection is Knights of the old Republic from 2003, which is very sluggish on 865G and somewhat playable on G950 with a low resolution and limited details used.

In general, MS-DOS games are likely to work with almost any graphics circuit manufactured within last 20 years. For Windows, you might need something a bit more modern, especially if you want to play those DirectX 9 games. Windows XP is still supported pretty well, and even the newest graphics cards might bundle XP drivers. If you your fallacy is also to support Windows 98 or even Windows 95, you have to be more careful when bidding for the monster card for your retro-PC. The latest Nvidia series supporting Windows 9X is the GeForce 6 series. On the other hand, if you want to play DirectX 9 titles, you need to have at least GeForce FX or 6-series card, so GeForce 6800 plugged into a PCI-e slot might be the best Nvidia card for Windows 98. If you don’t need Windows 9X, choose the latest card that will work with your Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10 to be able to enjoy games released after the year 2000.

I wasn’t entirely happy with the integrated graphics performance, so I spend some time investigating what could be done. I only had a PCI slot and PCI-e slot with 1x bus speed that would not eat normal PCI-e 16x graphics cards. I took my chances and bought a PCI-e 16x to 1x adapter, a low profile GeForce 6200 card and hoped that the combination would work. Miraculously the combination booted up just fine, and even picky ThinkCentre recognized the new graphics.

I used some legacy versions of 3DMark to compare the performance of GeForce 6200 and Intel G950. To also compare the performance of different DirectX versions I used these versions of 3DMark:

• 3DMark 99 for DirectX 6 on Windows 98
• 3DMark2000 for DirectX 7 on Windows 98
• 3DMark 2001 for DirectX 8 on Windows XP
• 3DMark 2003 for Directx 9 on Windows XP

I also tested the performance of some games with the help of Fraps displaying the framerate of the game I am getting on Windows XP. The games I used were Knight of the old Republic (DirectX 9 in Windows XP), Half-life (OpenGL on Windows 98/XP) and Quake (SVGA on MS-DOS).

To my slight surprise, Intel G950 beat GeForce 6200 on all the tests I tried. This also happened with DirectX 9 which is software based on integrated Intel graphics compared to hardware of GeForce 6200. My guess is that the limitation of bus speed (PCI-e 1x) was giving a substantial performance hit on GeForce. The same happened on MS-DOS side as Quake running 800x600 pixels was smooth with integrated Intel graphics, whereas GeForce 6200 struggled on 640x480 pixels. With Intel G950, I am not able to enjoy some DirectX 9 features, such as anti-aliasing, but better performance with integrated graphics leaves the GeForce currently unused my retro-PC.

For further testing, I could also try one of those PCI-e x1 cards produced by Zotec, but the limitation of bus speed could still be a serious bottleneck (not to mention the bottleneck of these speciality cards being more expensive than I ever spent on the rest of the hardware I currently have). On the other hand, I am happy with the performance the integrated Intel graphics in almost all the games I have – the goal of my retro-PC was to run PC games from the 90s and it does it pretty well. If you want also want to play games released after 2000, you should make sure you PC has a PCI-e slot supporting any modern graphics cards, so be careful to check the facts with any “small factor” PCs out there.

My current Retro-PC set up is running at ThinkCentre S50 with integrated Intel 865G (which is a bit slower than G950 I conducted the tests with). Intel 865G is still great for games released the 1980s and 1990s. Half-life runs great on Windows 98/XP, but Knight of the old Republic on XP is barely playable, and all the MS-DOS games play wonderfully (despite some of them has to be run under emulation with DOSBox due to the sound and speed issues).