Help with some ancient Graphics card stuff

[HMS Sophia]

Hey
Found a box from a Graphics card.
It's labelled as 2 things:
RIVA TNT2 M64 Graphics accelerator
and
GA-662C

I think it's NVIDIA...
Anything I can actually do with it? Too old to be worth using for anything?
Any answers would be cool...

[Narkis]

It's an Nvidia card from a bit more than a decade ago. ATI didn't even exist as a serious competitor back then. I guess you could use it on a computer with Windows 98, or maybe XP, but not much more.

[Executor32]

That's an NVIDIA card, all right, a Riva TNT2 to be exact. It's Gigabyte brand, hence the other model number. It's only got 32MB of memory, has no hardware transform and lighting capability, and no shader support at all, so it's pretty much worthless for anything nowadays.

[Collossus]

Wow I remember playing on a variant of that card, maxi gamer couger I believe? that was hot stuff back in the day, I think I bought it to play Star Trek Armada with.

[Marcus Aurelius]

That's an NVIDIA card, all right, a Riva TNT2 to be exact. It's Gigabyte brand, hence the other model number. It's only got 32MB of memory, has no hardware transform and lighting capability, and no shader support at all, so it's pretty much worthless for anything nowadays.

It's also the slowest version of TNT2 cards often found in inexpensive systems that still had some pretension of being able to play games. The "M64" means that the memory bus is only 64 bits wde, whereas the better TNT2 cards had a 128 bit memory bus. Nvidia sold them to OEMs long after TNT2 had stopped being a state-of-the-art card; I remember seeing them in systems made in 2002 (TNT2 was launched in 1999). So even for playing games made in 1999 or 2000 it's far from optimal.

I think Vista and 7 have basic 2D support for TNT2 out of the box, but of course you won't be able to use the Aero desktop. XP of course was still fully supported by Nvidia and you can find the drivers on the legacy driver pages on Nvidia's site.

So like Executor32 said, it's not really useful for anything, because you can easily find better AGP bus cards for free or for nominal sums even if you happen to need one for some old system.

[The Kernel]

Just to give you an idea, here's how that card compares to a modern INTEGRATED graphics card like those found in Sandy Bridge.

TNT2

Fillrate: 250 MT/s (MegaTexels per second)
Bandwidth: 1.2 GB/s (Gigabytes per second)
DirectX Support: DX 6

Intel HD 3000 Graphics

Fillrate: ~5200 MT/s peak
Bandwidth: 21.3 GB/s
DirectX Support: DX 10.1

So yeah, pretty much useless.

[Jawawithagun]

And it will probably be AGP. So it won't fit in any newer board.

[Sarevok]

Modern games make extensive of shaders. Things like fill rate may not matter if you notice enemies and ground missing textures. If your card does not support at least shader model 2.0 chances are it would fail to run even a 2D game from 2011.

As for what you can do with it ? A very good question. The card itself is not useless. Do you like playing old games ? If so you can put it in an old late 90s computer running 98 or win2k. And then enjoy classics like Mechwarrior 3 that are a pain to play on modern computers.

[Edi]

Just toss that piece of junk. It's worthless. Just the time you spent trying to get it to work is worth more than the cheapest graphics card that you could buy and which would kick the crap out of that ancient relic.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Just toss that piece of junk. It's worthless. Just the time you spent trying to get it to work is worth more than the cheapest graphics card that you could buy and which would kick the crap out of that ancient relic.

Actually, if it's not broken on the hardware level, making it work on a system running Windows XP (or older down to 95) or Linux will not be difficult or time consuming at all. TNT2 supports AGP 1.0 and 2.0, which means that it will work on every AGP motherboard ever made (AFAIK, they never made boards that would support only AGP 3.0). Unless of course it's PCI (possible, but not very likely), in which case it might work even on modern boards.

But using it would still not make much sense, unless you have a specific need for such a card.

[Edi]

Just toss that piece of junk. It's worthless. Just the time you spent trying to get it to work is worth more than the cheapest graphics card that you could buy and which would kick the crap out of that ancient relic.

Actually, if it's not broken on the hardware level, making it work on a system running Windows XP (or older down to 95) or Linux will not be difficult or time consuming at all. TNT2 supports AGP 1.0 and 2.0, which means that it will work on every AGP motherboard ever made (AFAIK, they never made boards that would support only AGP 3.0). Unless of course it's PCI (possible, but not very likely), in which case it might work even on modern boards.

But using it would still not make much sense, unless you have a specific need for such a card.

Well, if the OS has the drivers included so that you don't need to download them from anywhere, but all too often nominally standard kit has some twist to it that requires specific drivers and good luck finding them...

In any case, it's stone age stuff, so it would have to be a very specific need indeed. As well, the card would be a bottleneck for performance in a major way even for stuff like web browsing, because its ability to render things on the screen is so slow. I remember several years back when I gave my old Geforce 4200 to my friend so he could install it on his then old machine for his current ex, it speeded that computer's performance up in a major way because its old card was something ancient.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Well, if the OS has the drivers included so that you don't need to download them from anywhere, but all too often nominally standard kit has some twist to it that requires specific drivers and good luck finding them...

In any case, it's stone age stuff, so it would have to be a very specific need indeed. As well, the card would be a bottleneck for performance in a major way even for stuff like web browsing, because its ability to render things on the screen is so slow. I remember several years back when I gave my old Geforce 4200 to my friend so he could install it on his then old machine for his current ex, it speeded that computer's performance up in a major way because its old card was something ancient.

This is a silly thing to argue about, but I have never seen any Nvidia (or ATI/AMD) chip based graphics card that wouldn't work perfectly with the reference drivers in supported operating systems. Mostly the manufacturers just slap their own logo on reference drivers without any code changes. Some major manufacturers like Asus add some functionality such as hardware monitoring, but if you don't need that, the reference drivers will work just as well and fast, and in any case they are likely to be newer than the manufacturer's drivers. I do know there were cards in the 1990s that required manufacturer's drivers, because they had things like discrete RAMDACs, but that was before anyone had even heard about Nvidia (ATI was already around, but I don' have much experience with their cards before circa 1997).

As for being a bottleneck for 2D graphics, that might be true depending on the display resolution. TNT2 already had a pretty good 2D engine with all the relevant 2D acceleration for Windows 9x/2k/XP, but the slow memory bus of the M64 card might be somewhat of a bottleneck at higher resolutions. A bigger problem in reality would probably be that most of the inexpensive TNT2 cards had a badly implemented analog side with RFI filters that limited the video bandwidth seriously and gave a very blurry image at resolutions above 1024x768. There was a big commotion about this at the time. Cards back then of course had no DVI connectors, so it was VGA or nothing.

[Jawawithagun]

This is a silly thing to argue about, but I have never seen any Nvidia (or ATI/AMD) chip based graphics card that wouldn't work perfectly with the reference drivers in supported operating systems.

The problem does exist with some laptop graphics. Not relevant here though.

[Mr Bean]

Jawa is correct it's a laptop only issue because laptop graphics drivers are tricky and most GPU's are custom built for the laptop chassis in question. There were for example nine different designs I knew about for the Geforce 4200 TI laptop video card, not nine different designs as in the same PCB with more or less features built in (As seen in desktop cards) but as in nine different shapes of which there were three different layouts and you had to use OEM specific drivers because Dell for example had flipped the PCB and thus changed the timing on my old Insperion 4200 and using stock Nvidia drivers resulted in a blackscreen every single time. I've also seen it on some Radeon's and even current Nvidia's in the smaller cases things like the Nvidia 560 for laptops which just launched I know of one standard PCB layout and one used in HP's which takes the board and at the midway point L-Shapes it 90 degree's.

[Marcus Aurelius]

Jawa is correct it's a laptop only issue because laptop graphics drivers are tricky and most GPU's are custom built for the laptop chassis in question.

Yes, laptops are a somewhat different matter. ATI/AMD for example did not (and still doesn't) provide end users Windows XP reference drivers for mobile GPUs at all, probably in order to avoid any potential support issues. They do provide drivers for Vista and 7, so presumably it is less of an issue with newer Windows versions.