GPU-Z: Default Clock: 6770MHz. I wish... 😄 There are no dedicated drivers of course, but the card will work via VESA BIOS extensions, which every card with a VBIOS has, including the latest RTX 5000 series. Software OpenGL will work in games like Quake II and on a faster CPU will deliver way more frames than the card can with its original drivers.
No edits, this is how my PC boots into MS-DOS 7.0 (the one bundled with Windows 95 in 1995), then loads CD-ROM support, then goes into Windows 3.1 on a very modern PC - Ryzen 9 9900X.
Getting CD-ROM support wasn't easy, but a combination of GCDROM.SYS and a PCIe to IDE controller with a JMB368 chipset made it possible.
I managed to get Windows 11 running on a DDR1 motherboard with the Intel i865PE chipset (originally released back in 2003). The motherboard (an ASRock ConRoe865PE) actually supports 65nm Core 2 Quad CPUs, so I used a Q6600. Having 4 cores definitely helps overall.
With some "hacking"... AGP 8X is fully functional and H.264 hardware decoding is active. I used an ATI Radeon HD 4650 AGP with Windows 7 64 bit drivers from 2012.
The best part? It’s completely stable.
So what we have here is a PCIe 1.0 ATI Radeon X700 GPU running in a PCIe 5.0 slot. No compatibility issues, except we do need to turn CSM on. This was also the last generation of ATI cards with official Windows 98/Me drivers. It was about $150 in 2004, roughly $250 in today's money, so more like an RX 7600 in the current lineup.
While running Prehistorik 2 is awesome on its own, seeing DOSBox operate inside Windows NT 3.51(released all the way back in 1995) is just as cool.
And yes... you can still install Windows 98 on bare metal on just about anything with a BIOS or CSM. If you want the full Glide gaming experience, it's best to stick with Windows 98, as most Glide games will simply run without any tweaking.
Unlike the Voodoo 1, the Voodoo 2 doesn't suffer from CPU speed limitations or other compatibility issues when paired with a fast CPU. It just works. Installing Windows 98 on AM5 isn't quite as straightforward, but it's absolutely possible.
Definitely not the usual environment for playing UT, but seeing the game run alongside the classic Windows 3.x UI is just wild.
Windows 11 on a DDR1 motherboard? Yes. With AGP 8x support? Well, that too. This part is a bit tricky since Microsoft cut off AGP support in 2016, but since the original Windows 10 still had it, it can be hacked back in.
It's not instant, but I would say very fast.
Encarta 94 and Video CD playback in Windows 3.1, running natively on a modern 4.4 GHz PC in Full HD. The irony is that these videos looked better on a 640×480 monitor back in the day.
Windows 3.1 used cooperative multitasking, so apps had to voluntarily share CPU time. On a 33 MHz 486, one busy app could make everything stutter. On a modern CPU, those handoffs happen millions of times faster and the multitasking feels smooth.
This is an ATI Radeon HD 4650 1GB DDR2, released around 2009, running on the AGP 8X interface.
A few things you might find interesting: Windows 11 never had AGP support, but it can be hacked back in using files from the initial Windows 10 release. The last drivers with AGP support were designed for Windows 7, but they work on Windows 11 too, most importantly with H.264 hardware decoding and apparently no issues with supported games.
x86, PCIe and Windows: probably the most backward compatible things in the world, right after the 3.5mm jack. And someone actually released an NVMe driver for Windows 98 last year.
Turns out you can install Windows 11 on a DDR1 motherboard (i865 PE chipset), and everything works: ACPI, onboard SATA (IDE mode), AC'97 ALC850 codec, and the AGP 8X slot! Getting AGP to work is the trickier part, since Microsoft cut off AGP support in 2016, but since the original Windows 10 had AGP support, it can be hacked back in...
I recently installed Windows 11 on some ancient motherboard with a Radeon HD 4650. The very last version of Firefox works with hardware acceleration, while Chrome works only with software rendering and is basically unusable for video playback. The Catalyst drivers from 2012 seem to work very well in Windows 11, with H.264 hardware decoding support.
Windows 98 on a 486 is not exactly the best experience, even with 64MB RAM (which is kinda insane for a 486), but having an FM tuner on an ESS1869 ISA card that doesn't eat CPU cycles at all makes the whole thing enjoyable. (And yes we can get 1920x1080 even on a 486.)
What happens when you plug an NVMe SSD into Windows NT 4.0? It works now..., thanks to a driver written from scratch by Dominik Behr (aka Techomancer on GitHub). Tested on an Intel Coffee Lake PC, bare metal.
After installing an NVMe SSD on my Pentium II 350..., I decided to add an ISA sound card (ESS1869) with an FM module.
If you haven’t worked with one of these before, you might wonder how you actually interface with the radio module. It turns out you need to track down the exact tuner software - it's not a part of the standard drivers. Next, the radio software expects the FM module to be accessed at the standard I/O port (0x30C), which can easily cause conflicts if that address is already taken or the card is manually configured (via jumper) to a different one. It’s a bit of a puzzle, but definitely doable...
For this build, I (almost) went with period‑correct hardware for Windows 98: a Pentium II 350 MHz on a Soyo SY‑6BA+ IV (Intel 440BX) board plus a Sound Blaster 16. But I couldn’t resist… I had to add an NVMe SSD into the mix just to see if it works...
This particular card comes from an OEM batch, so the manufacturer is kinda difficult to trace. It's the SDR version, nothing special about it, but I'm super happy to have it in my collection, especially now that these cards are getting pricey.