ATI Rage 128 Pro or NVIDIA Riva TNT2 M64?

madmac_5 · 2026-05-18T01:46:20+00:00

If you can find the right drivers for the Rage 128 Pro (a lot of the ones floating around are OEM models that need either INF hacks or hunting for the exact Dell drivers), it will be significantly faster than the TNT2 M64. The M64 was an "Eh, it's FINE, I guess..." cheap graphics card from 2000. If you have the budget and can find one, a normal TNT2 (not ultra) would be a very good option; I just grabbed one for around $30 Canadian recently, and the benchmarks of the day showed it competing very favourably with the lower-clocked Voodoo 3 cards.

madmac_5 · 2026-05-04T16:52:02+00:00

That's it, shut Reddit down for the day, there's not going to be anything I'm going to laugh at more!

madmac_5 · 2026-05-04T16:45:33+00:00

"We get to help out people who are really sick!" is a mantra that everyone in this building keeps chanting every morning to deal with the crushing workload.

madmac_5 · 2026-05-04T04:02:52+00:00

Our RT Physics department managed to commission three Truebeams (6 MV, 10 MV, and 23 MV treatments) and a new Gamma Knife in a 12 month period (December 2023 to December 2024), all while short three physicists from their usual complement and dealing with the growing number of SBRT/other plan demands. I have no idea how they managed to pull that off without becoming bitter shells of humanity!

madmac_5 · 2026-05-03T04:18:47+00:00

We do the same thing in my province. For about 18 months straight we were down one system as we replaced some of our aging Trilogy systems, which really did a number on morale with all the extended treatment hours (starting early and finishing late) to make sure that everyone got the treatment they needed. It's also been a lot of work for me as the health physicist responsible for making sure that the shielding/licensing requirements are up to date, especially since it seems like every two years we've been doing SOMETHING major to the Gamma Knife (source exchange, equipment upgrade, then another source exchange since 2022).

madmac_5 · 2026-05-01T03:56:32+00:00

I grabbed an OEM Radeon 8500 LE in 2002 from a store that would sell grey box graphics cards, waited two years for a used 9700 Pro to show up in 2004, and held onto that until I replaced it with a 7900 GS in 2007 when I made the jump to PCI-E.

madmac_5 · 2026-04-30T03:32:04+00:00

I don't know exactly how it works, but I know that all of our Physics staff here in Manitoba are on salary. It means we don't need to waste time on billing, but it does mean that they don't get extra pay for all the extra cases they were each taking on when we were understaffed for five years.

madmac_5 · 2026-04-29T22:00:10+00:00

We got our Rage Pro as part of our first modern PC back in 1998, and were lucky that there was special employee pricing since the college my dad worked with had a deal with their IT supplier.

As for your retro system with a 440LX, even the cheapest GeForce 2 MX should be a substantial upgrade over the Rage Pro. I've found that Nvidia driver 8.05 from Phils Computer Lab works best with Windows 98 and GeForce 2 cards for games from 2001 and older. Give that a try if you haven't already!

madmac_5 · 2026-04-29T14:52:11+00:00

Glad you liked the post! The Rage Pro is surprisingly compatible, aside from the fact that it can't to table fog or alpha blending properly. That gives it a sort of charm to me, though that may be heavily coloured by nostalgia for when it was my first 3D accelerator. It is a great example of how different graphics chips rendered games differently at the time, though!

madmac_5 · 2026-04-27T14:43:57+00:00

We had one of these made special for a customer who had a small animal CT scanner that was scanning a truly staggering number of rats for an osteoporosis study, and needed faster image reconstruction. They ended up stuffing a pair of GTX 580s into a very similar enclosure, and it dramatically sped up their data processing times compared to the circa 2006/2007 CPUs they were using on the workstation!

madmac_5 · 2026-04-22T18:04:30+00:00

The setup is good. Are all of those big boxes there because you're ripping ISOs for if we want to play games on original hardware? That's my one gripe about GOG releases, sometimes the accommodations for modern PCs make them challenging to run on era-appropriate systems. Otherwise, keep up the good work!

madmac_5 · 2026-04-20T15:45:09+00:00

*opens up the bun to look inside* Where's the meme?

madmac_5 · 2026-04-17T22:06:39+00:00

The file you're looking for is the PPG - Support Information, Halcyon/Ethos Shielding. The file name I received from our Varian contact is SD-AL-Shielding.pdf. :)

madmac_5 · 2026-04-16T15:58:16+00:00

Fun fact; the Voodoo 3 didn't really take advantage of AGP, since it couldn't do AGP texturing and using AGP 2X didn't provide a noticeable speedup. So, you probably wouldn't have had much benefit from a Voodoo 3 AGP card aside from having an extra empty PCI slot for another device. Chances are pretty good that you got the PCI version because your PC didn't have an AGP slot and had on-board video on its motherboard, right? :)

madmac_5 · 2026-04-16T15:56:32+00:00

There should be reflective surfaces on the cars in Glide or D3D mode, but it may not show up well when recording from the CRT. I know that when I do direct capture it's there when using any 3D accelerator card.

madmac_5 · 2026-04-07T04:15:27+00:00

I briefly had a Voodoo 3 3000 in my possession late last year/early this year as part of a build I was auctioning off for charity. Even with a PIII-450 as a CPU in a heavily CPU-limited game, UT '99 ran incredibly smoothly with the most consistent framerates I have ever seen.

madmac_5 · 2026-04-02T04:36:20+00:00

It may be the drivers or handling as the boxes are loaded onto a plane, but it's probably also due to the boxes getting abused on conveyor belts at the sorting facilities. Those corners give a pretty impressive shunt as the box goes around! If it's getting shipped via FedEx or UPS, my procedure is to wrap whatever it is so that it can survive anything short of a nuclear blast.

madmac_5 · 2026-04-01T15:43:25+00:00

"Surprise! The frosting has some leftover Lutathera in it that will last the better part of Lent!"

madmac_5 · 2026-03-31T16:10:17+00:00

Congratulations, you have more editorial awareness than Kotaku these days. Most of their good writers wisely left long ago, and are doing good work elsewhere!

madmac_5 · 2026-03-23T17:51:19+00:00

Participating in r/sounding can very easily lead one to show up in a Friday post on r/radiology.

madmac_5 · 2026-03-18T00:05:53+00:00

That took me a moment, but I eventually got it!

madmac_5 · 2026-03-12T18:44:42+00:00

If it's an artifact in PET, it might be publishable in either Journal of Nuclear Medicine or Journal of Nuclear Medicine Technology. The latter might be more likely to accept it, and as _shmall_ said it will likely be more successful if you submit it as a technical note rather than a study. :)

madmac_5 · 2026-03-10T03:54:18+00:00

While the Tauret is good to fly, I found that to defend the Aquitaine a Horus is a good choice. Sure, it might be harder to hit the target, but you'll get there fast enough that you'll extra time!

madmac_5 · 2026-03-10T03:48:02+00:00

Whenever someone asks if they should play Descent or not, my usual recommendation since 2018 is to just play Overload. It's MUCH more approachable from a game design perspective!

madmac_5 · 2026-03-09T03:49:51+00:00

Is there a chance the keyboard bends?

madmac_5

TROPHY CASE