Graphics Card with the Best Picture Quality?

[quicksilver]

I've been doing a lot of reading on 486 to Pentium III PCs to figure out how I want to build one or more systems for 90s-00s Windows 98 and DOS games.

I know, boo PCs but I've got tons of old Macs and no old PCs - and I didn't expect parts to be so expensive.

When forum contributors can stop arguing over the fastest graphics card for a bit, questions on cards with the best picture quality come up.

Cards by Matrox seem to generally be considered to have the clearest picture even though they were getting trounced by competitors by the time cards like the nVidia GeForce4 were coming out. Matrox still makes products focused on video-editing, including for the Mac, but is essentially out of the graphics card business.

I haven't started my old PC builds or done any testing with graphics cards yet on a CRT or period-correct LCD. I'm curious to see if I'll be able to see a difference and decide to go with a slower card for 2D due to a better image.

Has anyone noticed cards that tend to produce clearer or more color-accurate images on the Mac side? I'm talking about a picture that looks particularly good compared to a common consumer card, not well-known Card A looks better than obvious piece of cheap junk Card B.

I no longer have any SGIs to test out but I used to think my Octane2 generally produced better images on a CRT than my classic Mac Pros or mid-range 2010s PCs.

 

[Byrd]

Vogons will keep telling you a Matrox card is best, I think they are good cards with nice drivers for fast 2D in Windows but IQ is no better or worse than quality branded cards with "cheaper" chipsets. Just look out for a nice branded quality card of the era that's well built.

For PCs:

- 486, anything you can get noting the cheap S3/Trident OEM cards often had issues with high gamma and crappy RAMDACS with horrible interlaced image at higher resolutions
- Early P1, a nice ET4000 or ET6000/6100 or later S3 Virge would be ideal
- PIII, branded Geforce 2/3/4 for compatibility with most older 3D titles, early ATI GPUs tend to get a worse wrap due to drivers not being as good. Often had capacitor plague in the mid-2000 era of many of these nicer cards, which can affect IQ.
- 3DFX in anything 200Mhz and up, for the fun, but they also produce pretty poor IQ especially passthrough cards and I'd say VGA output can be pretty poor overall. They are overpriced though when you can get a good GLIDE wrapper for a better card.

For Macs,

- With third party GPUs being "high end" for Macs at their release they're all pretty good, and driver support was consistent noting much slower 3D than the same card on a PC. A Voodoo 5 PCI card I borrowed for a while also poor VGA/CRT output quality compared to onboard video.

JB

 

[chelseayr]

I have to add that unless you specifically wanted the voodoo 1-or-2 physically due to your specific existing graphic setup it indeed does seem a lot cheaper to skip over the voodoo3/newer in favour of the newest setup-compatible single-slot geforce you can find as you not only get to wrap glide games onto it but also you can natively run opengl 1.x games too as a bonus

 

[quicksilver]

Vogons will keep telling you a Matrox card is best

Oh yeah that's where I'm reading it.

- 486, anything you can get noting the cheap S3/Trident OEM cards often had issues with high gamma and crappy RAMDACS
- Early P1, a nice ET4000 or ET6000/6100 or later S3 Virge would be ideal
- PIII, branded Geforce 2/3/4 for compatibility with most older 3D titles,
- 3DFX in anything 200Mhz and up, for the fun

I'm trying to focus on a PIII build first since I think that's going to be the most useful. I'd like to do a dual CPU build just because I've owned them before and still have some of SGI's unusual (and non- DOS, Win 9X, or XP compatible) multiprocessor x86 boxes. But I'm also looking for cases I could use/mod including those from Dell, IBM, HP, etc. If I see a case I like and its a 486 or Pentium, that may end up being the first project.

I haven't given much thought to 3Dfx cards. I never owned one in the 90s (I was excited to move from CGA to VGA) and they seem like an additional expense I don't need at the start. A GeForce 4 sounds good though I see the PC versions of the 4600 Ti aren't cheap though not as bad as the Mac ones.

With third party GPUs being "high end" for Macs at their release they're all pretty good,

That makes sense for everything being sold by Apple and I guess back in the Nubus to at least early PCI era with some companies solely making cards for Macs they had to put out a high end product.

 

[NJRoadfan]

Matrox did put higher quality DACs on their cards. My G400 looked nice and sharp on a CRT running 1280x1024 at 70Hz, vs a much newer ATI Radeon card. The ATI was noticeably blurry and smeary. Its a moot point if you are using a DVI connection though, which I eventually did with the Matrox since it had a daughterboard option.

 

[pizzigri]

There were some pretty wild cards in the 90s, I have an Intergraph Intense 3d Pro, these cards used a very high quality IBM ramdac and circuitry to basically compete with low end SGI graphic workstations. My card came in a dual Pentium Pro IBM Intellistation machine.
image quality was amazing on a Eizo 21” crt.
i find these cards are a bit off the radars and sometime sell for 30-50 $. Or 5-600 according to the moment….

ETA some info:

Intense 3D Pro 2200S

 

[Unknown_K]

Early LCD monitors suck for gaming because of ghosting, but they also didn't kill your eyes at 60 hz.

Matrox cards were among the early high resolution productivity cards, so they used great RAMDACS (which were separate chips back in the old days). I have a nice 4MB VLB Matrox card and high resolution looks nice. If you look at the better Mac Nubus video cards, you will see 3 RAMDACs (one for each color) which is one reason they were very expensive.

Most Voodoo 1 and 2 cards used solid state relays when switching from VGA to 3dfx video and that can get a little blurry. The original Orchid Rightious 3D Voodoo 1 used mechanical relays (you can actually here the click when they switched) and those cards didn't screw up the picture at all. Anything 3dfx is expensive on the PC platform for a reason (GLIDE games rock and messing with wrappers isn't fun).