How Bad was AMDs First Graphics Card? 

Another big thank you to our channel artist with some more Retro Radeon Renders: ru-vid.comH3Lo-yvjD4A?si=Py9WdrNBnVkSl6Yb

Hearing "way back" and "2018" in the same sentence hurt way more than it should have...

2006 seemed like such an optimistic time for tech. now 18 years later things are kind of bleak

Should also mention, AMD/ATI abandoned the X800 and X1800/X1900 series cards and everything associated with them fairly fast also. It was kind of a trend for them back then to do this.

Considering this was around the same time NVIDIA introduced CUDA, yeah I'd say this is about when it all went wrong for Radeon as a GPU brand. They never recovered from the 8000 series as far as the market share graph is concerned.

A year and a half after the 2900 XT hit the market AMD released the HD 4830 for $130 and was over 50% faster with less than half the power consumption. Many of us bought them with rebates to drop it to $99 at launch.

3:17 turn hte screw counter-clockwise first, until you feel the thread "click" a little. Now start screwing into the opposite direction. That way, you'll always find the start of the thread easily.

I realy liked the old ATI cards, but also kinda forgot i used Omega drivers (third party).

I expected Vega lookig at the title.

Regardless of what ATI/AMD would have put out in 2007, the actual main take away is that for a very brief moment, console gamers had a superior experience over a high end PC, until Nvidia came along and shut that shit down with the Geforce 8 series. :P As is though, back then I was using a Radeon x850 XT AGP card during my first jump into AM2 with the Athlon 64x2. I went from that card to the X1950 XT AGP. But after the first Phenoms were released, I ended up doing a Phenom X3 Crossfire setup with two HD 3850 cards. I looked at buying two used HD 2900 cards, but it just would not have made sense due to the used market prices on them and the heat they generated. I did end up setting up a Athlon 64 FX-62 SLI system also for Physx stuff, and my first GPU pair in it was two 8800 GTS, before swapping out for two GTX 280.

The BIG problem with Terascale wasn't that it wasn't powerful enough to keep up its that AMD's drivers struggled to deal with the fact most games PC games were not that well optimized put its power to any real use. Basically games had to be capable of constantly giving the GPU multiple things to do and the hardware would shuffle between what was most optimal based on what resources are available, if a game isn't giving multiple batches of draw calls at a time so the card fails to live up to expectations but when the game is doing that it was a powerhouse, the rub of all of this is Microsoft was meant to fix this with DirectX 10 and did fix it with the Xbox 360's version of DirectX. Terrascale 3 mostly fixed this but still depended on game developers to implement efficient draw call batching and multi threading the GPU workload and AMD updating drivers for game spesific fixes. Thats where the Hardware Scheduler of the GCN cards came from and the AMD Radeon fine aged wine came from, what Mantle showed was possible and why DirectX12 and Vulkan were so badly needed. Nvidia had exactly the same goals with Tesla based GPUs but they relied on you having 4 or more CPU cores to have the driver software do the draw call batching on the fly, it was part of the reason AMD dominated in a lot of DirectX 12 and Vulkan games and Nvidia lagged behind for a while but still won if the game was DirectX 11. Funnily enough a GPU bound DX11 game on something as modern as a 1060 on a dual core processor will run slower than on a quad core where as the GCN equivalent would run about the same on dual or quad core.

I've never used terascale gpus under windows, but I did under GNU / Linux for many years, and the open source drivers (radeon ddx + r600g) were great for their time. Easily the best end user experience with open source drivers on the platform until GCN support finally started coming together years after GCN 1.0 launched. So it's interesting to hear that they sucked under Windows when they were my preference under GNU / Linux for ages.

I have a BFG 9800 GX2 in my collection, I would love to lend this card to you for you to explore it on the channel.

I had a 2900 pro card back in the day and that could be unlocked to XT. The card would run Bioshock just fine and crysis with a mix of Med/High settings. Not bad really and was ok as a cheaper option.

This card is about as good according to techpoweredup as the 59 watt 67 dollar budget card 4670 that launched in 2008. AMD really messed up with this card and did really well with the 4000 series. To see a budget card perform as well that soon after.

You really need to do a "Top Gear-esque" video series about older cars along side this main channel. I can only imagine how much fun and agitation you'd get from doing it, and if your mid video rant is anything to go by it would be massively popular.

Doom might have been released in 1993 but Budget-Builds Official is Eternal!

AMDs issue with GPUs has never been the hardware its always the drivers, its nice to see how even the RX 470 still holds up today but when it launched the drivers were bad.

All the DX10 cards where an awful mistake a path chosen for profit that affects us today. That includes NV's. The reason they existed was to bridge the gap and make a useful jack of all trades card for both gfx and enterprise which lead to what we have today. These first gen cards could often be beaten by DX9.0c cards in DX9 games and so few DX10 games were ever made it was pointless to grab one till the dx11 era to upgrade, if you already had a 7xxx or x19xx.

I think the problem in Black Skylands was that if it is there, that FSR was active. Not supported GPUs like the 600 Series from Nvidia will just show a black screen

"Only fixed with driver updates that these cards never got" - I wonder if it would perform significantly better under Linux with Mesa, since there've likely been significant updates. May be limited to dx9 and opengl3.3 stuff though, since it won't be able to do dxvk.

I remember I had a 2600XT and it was my first gaming graphics card. I asked my friends what card to get and somehow ended up with it, even though they all deny that they ever recommended it. It was a terrible card, but was absolutely amazing when I got it. Compared to the crappy entry-level or onboard graphics I was used to, it was like a whole new world. I upgraded to a 4850 a couple years later, which restarted the amazing feeling.

It's been noted elsewhere online that AMD had issues with integrating ATI into the larger corporation. That happens a lot in the tech world, usually to the detriment of the one or more of the parent corporation's product lines. I can still remember the absolute nightmare of working with HP as a US based laptop & desktop warranty repair services provider after HP purchased Compaq. The whole Compaq & DEC merger hadn't happened too long before that which only made everything worse. In my personal experience the driver situation did get better with the Radeon 4000 series of cards. I had a 4850 back then which was pretty solid in Vista and later in Win 8 (had 2 OEM machines that were purchased at the worst times for Windows!) AMD's drivers have gotten a lot better over the years, but they're competing directly against Nvidia who's drivers have been outstanding since the mid 2000s. These days I think AMD's biggest issues with GPU sales are a lack of a true high end GPU to compete with Nvidia with (obviously) as well as a lack of a truly spectacular mid-range card. In the 7000 series there's nothing priced less than $250 new and the 6000 series cards below the 6600 are all gimped in some major way. Nvidia can afford negative press on gimping their lower end cards, AMD can't IMO. I personally own a RX 6600XT which I was able to purchase in the summer of 2022 for almost $40 under MSRP at a time when pretty much all Nvidia cards were running 25-50% above their MSRPs. Driver wise that card is quite good, but only about 95% as good as the 1060 3GB and 750ti I had before it as the drivers for both of those cards were usually outstanding!

I had one of these back in the day. It was absolutely brilliant in the winter. It also seems this card is haunting your video, as you've got some odd audio stutters in a couple of locations. Probably nothing I'd reupload for, but worth mentioning.

terrascales magic is in windows xp only , i love the hd 2000-6000 cards on xp , i make ultra versatile xp system setups in these use cases they launch 3d mark 2000 on xp flawlessly , they play a ton of windows 98 games on windows xp with these cards with the right drivers they are very valuable

*DON`T SELL IT*

A few historical fixes, the Tessellator in the 2900XT was not D3D compliant. Microsoft wouldn't finalize the spec until the Radeon HD 5000 series came along. ATi/AMD had their own developer tool to implement their tessellator but due to the poor performance of the 2900XT, no developer that I know of implemented it. The Radeon HD 5000 series as the first GPU capable of tessellation. nVIDIA did not have a GPU capable of this at the time. nVIDIA's answer would be an even more powerful Geometry processor capable of extreme levels of tessellation performance (beyond what was even visible to the Human Eye in terms of image quality difference). nVIDIA would go on to attach obscene levels of tessellation to their "The way it's meant to be played" and other such titles in order to win benchmarks against AMD. AMD would answer with a tessellation slider in their driver to fix that in those titles. Eventually AMD would go on to implement a very high performance Geometry processor of their own negating nVIDIA implementing obsene levels of tesselation in their sponsored titles. Once that performance edge went away, those titles disappeared. In some of them, even the area bellow ground, that a player could not see, were being heavily tesselated. We're seeing the same with RT today. We also saw the same with PhysX. All of those technologies have or will largely die once nVIDIA's edge is lost. CPUs have replaced GPUs for Physics. Tessellation is now down to reasonable levels. Adaptive Sync beat G-Sync. Etc.

People are just biased to NVIDIA, GCN 1.0 and 2.0 was mutch better then Kepler, people still got NVIDIA.

Heh I was stuck with an Fx5200 on a desktop and 8400 GSM on a laptop at the time :D Wouldn't have minded one of these bad boys to be honest with you.

The 2900xt was actually a pretty good card, a very standard generational leap, the 8800gtx was just exceptional. AMD hasn't really had many bad releases, it's only whenever nvidia releases an exceptional generation that it's viewed as "bad". The 2900xt was a massive increase in complexity and they had a lot of issues sorting drivers out on launch, this is made a lot worse by it being dropped for the highly simplified version of it, the hd 3870 that was released very shortly after, so many outstanding bugs never got fixed since getting a competitive version out the door was all hands on deck. The 2900xt with modern drivers in linux is actually really good to this day.

I love that you're not just commentating recorded footage, you're essentially doing a let's play and go in-depth on the performance

GTA IV is still borked to this day on pc. I can get around 80fps with a RTX 3070.

Sitting in middle England in my tent, on my cycle trip, it's passing it down. But a budget build video always makes me happy :)

I had their last true flagship card. The Radeon HD 1950XTX 768MB VRAM. It was a night and day difference from any other GPU I had at the time including a GTX FX 5950 Ultra. I was playing Oblivion and I had a GT 5700. Too slow. Went to a 5950, getting better but still not there. Went to an HD 1300. The 5950 was faster. Finally dumped em all and got the fastest and most expensive card in CompUSA that day, the HD 1950 XTX. An OC version with a beefy cooling system. First triple slot card I had ever laid eyes on let alone owned. I loved it. I could not believe how beautiful Oblivion looked maxxed out at 1280 x 1024. The walls inside the spires in Oblivion itself breathed. Something I never noticed before. They actually were animated to look like the spire was a living thing. I loved it. That card made that possible.

I love channels like this used a 512mb sapphire 3850 AGP card for years because well i was stuck on a single core scoket 462 athlon xp 1900+ M (1.6ghz) clocked overclocked to 1.8-1.9ish ghz (cooked itself after about 2-3 years of usage) 3GB of DDR 400 it got me around 70-80 fps (with dips down to 40ish) in shooters like americas army, Warrock, Combat arms, CS. Later was relocated into a 3.0ghz socket 478 p4 with 4gb(3.2gb) DDR400 which lasted me for years till i bought a 2.8ghz Tri-core Phenom II 720 BE - which i finally got a GTX 8800 (also 512mb) and the system was gifted to my fater......it still runs btw.

The 2900XT was designed by ATI. AMD's first high-end graphics card was the 4870, following up on the actually-good 3870 that was still an ATI design. The 4870 was just twice as fast, and the 5870 that followed was twice as fast again, bringing them to about 50% market share against nVidia.

Glad you changed this from the community post from ATI to AMD.

i know these cards are kind of terrible but i personaly love them. Just bought my thrid one yesterday funnily enough. Now one may ask why three? i got the first one because of your original video on it (just fell in love with the red transparent shroud with the flame prints). after that i decided since i had no use for it to build the "ultimate" 2007 windows xp machine around it. about 150 bucks of retro parts aquired over the internet later i realised the only thing missing now was crossfire, so after the second gpu turned out to be fried the obvious move was to buy a third one 😂

Man, were all these uploads in the works during your hiatus? Loving the consistent uploads!

It's definitely a space heater with that TDP. You can get cards with much less low power draw that produce higher results. Good video mate, I won't be getting one of those cards anytime soon lol.

Man who remembers watching the original video and doesn’t remember that it’s been 6 years 😢

How does it compare to the gallium r600 driver (with both nine and wined3d)?

Like these videos as always man. I do want to point out though. 8:15 Weirdly enough. I have had this issue always with Black Mesa across both Nvidia and AMD GPUs and different CPUs across multiple Windows and Linux OSs. Black Mesa always crashes at the beginning stages. Then suddenly it starts working just fine for hours then crashes all over again. Hardware and Software being: Xeons, i5-2400, i5-3570k, i5-8400, i7-8700, Ryzen 7 1800x, Ryzen 5 3600, GTX 1050, RX 560, RX 470, GTX 1070, RX 5500 XT, 8gb Ram, 12gb Ram, 16gb Ram, 32gb Ram, 1TB SSD for Ext4, 4TB NTFS HDD, 6TB BTRFS Enterprise HDD, NVMes, all across Windows 10, Windows 11, Linux Mint, Fedora, Debian, and Bazzite. It doesn't matter. It just crashes. I finally did manage to see a dialogue box pop up on Bazzite though with the saying "Insuffienct Ram" which is weird cause I have 8gb Vram and 32gb of DDR4 at 2933mhz. I looked up a solution. Tried it out. As usual, it did not work. Now, I am halfway through with zero crashes all over again. Now, I love Black Mesa. I love the Half Life series. But Black Mesa as a game absolutely has issues. It such an amazing looking remake with all its extra details in even the characters from animation to sound. Gameplay is as awesome as any Half Life game. And the saves in the game help pick back up whenever it crashes. I'm just wanting to point out that the issues with Black Mesa from my experience is beyond just hardware and software. Saving is absolutely essential in playing the game. I know I'm not the only one with these issues. But still. I don't think your issue in this specific title at least stems from the ATI card. It's just something weird with the game is all. Great game though.

The Linux AMD/ATI drivers are open source and are directly integrated into the Linux kernel. HL2 has a Linux-native version. You might want to test that software combination, it very likely works better than the Windows drivers and might be a glimpse of what the card could have done.

I miss the days when amd/ati's worst mistakes were just trying to compete against a strong nvidia generation. Vs today where they're almost constantly shooting themselves in the foot.

GTA Online has a simplified physics system vs single player mode, there are some graphical reductions too, LOD, render distance, NPC movement etc, it is lighter to run until you hit a high player count so for older cards it typically runs better, its honestly amazing how bad GTAO on the 360 ran overtime but considering the hardware, its a damn miracle it even kept up..i think the heat this card has sat at for a long time has hurt the core and memory since they bleed the heat throughout the PCB horrendously bad. These once overclocked were the fermi/pentium 4 of its time..this is a key showing of the poor early PWM fan curves being so poor, Nvidia cards would suddenly screm at 86C, these cards would just cook and cook. They require a very thick paste to tame them..for example, i have one with a passive cooler that full bore ran almost 110C (curious me wanted to see where it tapped out) but in games it sat at the high 80s you saw on this air cooled card, which ran in the mid 60s with a tickled fan curve, it didn't take a lot, an earlier ramp made a world of difference. The pump out on cheap paste is insane.

am i the only one that noticed a few audio stutters in specific parts of the video though the audio bugs are perfect for this bad amd card video

There is a reason why the GT 8800 Series are so rare and high priced: The 90/80/65nm Cards from Nvidia have the soldergate Problem when they start breaking the solder joints. When you want a GT 8800 don't do it go for a GT 9800GTX+ 1GB which is the G92b Chip in 55nm which got the solder problem solved. They run for around 40€ here. For the Problem on the HD 2000 Series, the Problems already started with the X 1xx0 series. Many may denie it, but it's the reason why i sold my old ATI X1650 pro 512MB which was pretty fast, as fast as possible as i had plenty Problems with her. The Problems got worse for the HD 2000 Series and for the HD 3000 Series with the drivers. Then AMD took full over the Drivers Team and with the HD 4000 Series the drivers got better for the 3000/4000 series. But the Damage was done and the HD 2000 never got their drivers fixed. I have several 4000 and nearly the complete range of 5000 which work fine and with the Adrenalin Drivers the cancer which is called catalyst is finaly over. But everybody remembers those drivers.

185Watts!!! that was nuts back then, and for me it still is today - but nowadays thats called a low power budget.

3:12 you could re paste two cards with this amount of thermal paste. Also, you should pre-spread it. Anyone doing/saying/thinking otherwise is just wasting thermal paste (which isn't a problem today with non-conductive thermal paste, but back then most high performing thermal pastes available were highly conductive)

Truly a graphics card of all time. I also built a 150$ brand new system too. Thanks for another video, love your content :)

the more I watch this channel, the more I know the why AMD have had quite a bad reputation for many, many years... And Sony Vegas not being stable on old AMD hardware kinda makes sense now

As someone who used to work on modded drivers for TeraScale the final drivers or even the last few versions are a mess. The last version that properly works on TeraScale 1 is 11.11C. Every driver released after made it worse and worse and worse

I remember the R350 range of cards getting the community (Omega) drivers, which amongst other things, let you softmod the 9800 se to 9800 Pro. Might be worth looking into... also, wasn't the 2900XT supported on macOS as well? or was that the 2700XT???

lmfao 11 seconds ago. Never seen a that before.

Early gang rise up, at first i thought i was watching another video of yours from years ago 😂

I love how RU-vid subtitles always writes "Terror Scales" instead of terascale 😂

I love your videos, thank you for reutring to making them more often! Yoy were truly missed. However I have one question. Could you start also making them at 60 fps. Because game look laggy at 30.

Another great video! This is why I have always been an nVidia fanboy! They support their cards for a long time! I love that! By the way are you a 198 CM red head? Because I am! You just look so tall in your videos!

Is the background music from SimCity 2013? It sounds eerily similar.

This card was AMD's modus operandi for many years, a smaller cheaper die, with a wider memory bus than the die size would suggest. I was not surprized when the ~250mm² 256 bit 5700XT was launched, it was on 7nm after all. What did surprise me was how good it was, when i bought one for ~$360 USD, it was somehow beating the RTX 208p in several games, sure the 2080 still won in most games, and soon Nvidia would release drivers that would make the 2070 faster than the 2080 a month earlier, but still for a 250mm card, to compete with a 500mm+ card, from a company that never seemed to focus on GPUs was a wild surprize from me.

Would you say, Terrascale drivers are Terrable ?

From 2004 to 2016 i only used ati gpus.Had 9600, hd 3650, hd 5670, hd 7750. At the end of 2016 i bought gtx 1050 2gb. Then i got a laptop with a gtx 1050 3gb version in 2020. And now got a laptop with an rtx 4060. So since i chnaged to the 1050, i went with nvidia. Im very happy with my purchase. At 1080p it runs everything superwell

The R9 Fury and R9 Nano definitely deserve to be at the top of the list for cards that destroyed AMD. Every time they have produced an HBM2 card, it has been over-promised and under-delivered in actual performance.

Those retro 3d video edits look awesome, how did you make them?

Power consumption at 6:05 ... 🤨Also yay, more Budget-Builds!

Ahh, AMD/ATi's Pentium 4 Netburst moment for Radeon. My friends' 8600GT and 8800GTXs were making me envious versus my HD2600Pro. They eventually did succeed with the HD4000 series and HD5000 series. The HD4830 and HD5770s were bang for the buck cards. Driver-wise, you can still make these run in modern systems using modded drivers from Leshcat or Amernime. HD7000 with the GCN architecture was the start of "modern" Radeon cards though. Still working today with Vulkan and DX12 in my fiance's system as a HD7770.

Hey, just a quick question but..... how do you feel about terrascale drivers?

I wonder if there are any custom drivers made by the community that could better utilize this graphics card. Either way this video was pretty interesting, well done!

Have you ever used and tested a Nvidia Quattro card before? I have a K2200 4GB one.

Hey, budgets, do you test the card with multiple hdd/ssd windows/drivers installations, because swapping windows installations on boot would probably make it faster to test different drivers and having games on a separate partition is what you're doing already, I bet. Like, if you reinstall drivers, you need to restart anyway, idk if there's a better way.

They were only two legendary GPUs from AMD and Nvidia in the last 20 years, and that was the 8800 GTX, the 1080 TI, the 4870 and the 7890. Nothing else even came close.

16:57 THAT MADE ME LAUGH TOO MUCH XD

I bought a 2600 XT because it was the only modern graphics card offered for AGP. My friend got a 8800 GT and it absolutely crushed the performance of my card. I expected it as I was using an already wildly out of date platform and just thought I could get away with not upgrading yet, I was wrong. But then I upgraded to the Radeon HD 3870, and still got crushed by his 8800 GT and then he upgraded to a gtx 260. I didn't buy another AMD graphics card for a decade after that I was so burned.

This card definitely didn't ruin AMD... Despite it's rocky original launch, TeraScale would go on to be ATi/AMD's most financially successful GPU architecture family in its entire history of making graphics processors thanks to the world conquering HD 3000-5000 series run. It was the only time they've had majority marketshare.

They where still impressive - both camps back in that time. I remember working in a online shop and actually holding one fresh one in my hands. That feeling, smell and sensation, never to be seen again with such leet high end hardware.

GTA IV plays best on Linux in my experience. 60fps capped-or 30 depending on your hardware-to stop physics wackiness, smooth as butter.

Still haven't had a 2900 XT (or Pro) to this day. I had a 2900 GT as a temporary card though and at least it ran Dirt3 surprisingly well. :D

That sounds like EA. Banning you from playing a single player game because of drivers 🤣

Have you ever tried these cards on Linux? I know those drivers are still getting the odd fix and even perf boost for older AMD cards (though I don't know if they go back to TeraScale or it's more GCN-era..) and you might see some improved OpenGL perf at least.

0:15 right! right! Nice to have you uploading again regularly

According to my understanding, the HD 2000 AMD 3000 series had issues with ROP hardware resolve for anti-aliasing, having to use shaders killing the performance

Just wonder why you don't install the mod driver you did install in the last video festuring hd4890, which should be compatible given the same GPU architechture.

16:28 “But still-ill,-“

15:30 Ubisoft antycheat always had problems with AMD drivers, I remember probably like 7 years ago, my friend's rainbow six siege game crashed all the time by antycheat detecting his drivers as malicious

I had one playing star wars jedi outcast.I used to have a quite a few old cards like the msi MX420 now I have a legacy rocker with Titan x in SLI And i use that with a R7 3700x to play all my games RDR2 and earlier.I got my titans to not stutter it is beautiful.Had to roll back drivers for the to run right.

I remember buy 3 old Dell workstations and surprise to see inside had ATI FireGL V8650 which is HD2900XT with 2GB VRAM. I just take it out tested and cleaned after verify it's still working well, still on my GPU collection shelf.

Love those old Radeon graphics tests. Rant on the state of AMD drivers back in the day is so true, yet they didn't learn anything and made the same thing later for HD5000 and 6000 series, where drivers were also far away from being at least good compared to NVIDIA. I still have old Geforce 6600 GT, which is probably one of the earliest PCI-E cards available, using it sometimes as something to display output when servicing PC's, and with old Windows 8 drivers, it works just fine on Windows 10. It even installs fine on Windows 11, though things are starting to get a bit glitchy here (probably due to support only for WDDM 1.0), but it installs and works. Try this with even slightly newer AMD cards. Also having HD6950 in my "collection", and it's basically a nightmare to configure it on modern operating system, and despite being kinda a powerhouse it's just giving up on titles, that should work on it just fine. It's just such a shame, cause this bad reputation is still "sticked" to the AMD and many people avoid these cards to this day cause of being afraid of bad drivers. If they just only, back in the day, give a chance for those cards to just work properly with proper drivers, even the current GPU marketshare could look completly different

I had this card back in 2008 and I loved it. It was my first high end PC and I held it for a long time.

And today we have the 4090 and the 7900 with AMD still playing catchup. Too busy with their CPUs I guess.

Might just be on my end, but I'm hearing a lot of audio glitching in this video. In the same places, consistently. Editing issues?

First AMD cards were the 6000 series. ATI Radeon 5000 was followed by AMD Radeon 6000!

The reason AMD stopped working on the drivers so fast is because terascale 1 was unworkable. Most of the issues you ran into are inherent in the GPU architecture and drivers can't fix that

Hmm If had to ask would this be a perfect fit for a windows XP build with an amd or intel dual core build maxing out at 4gb of DDR2 ram? I get that driver support is a huge issue but I'm just looking for a card that will run most late 90's and 2000's games with no issues at all. My questions aside, great video as always and yeah this makes sense why AMD such a rocky start when they bought ATI.

interesting to se this,because this gpu is same old like me, do you plan testing xtx is version of this card?

Always funny looking back at tech we thought was great at the time and seeing how bad it looks now. In 2009 I bought a PC with an AMD HD4350 graphics card (which is so much worse than the 2900xt) back then I only use to play counter strike source, and I thought it was fine...I used the PC and GPU until 2014 when I upgraded and went with a R9 290x, that was a massive jump in performance.

Okay I think you might have solved my issue with my 2600 xt, because I have a laptop that I was going to use as a gaming time capsule, and most games I can play for a little bit and then they crash. And I was using the drivers installed by windows. I didn't realize this generation of cards was that bad with the drivers.

Thanks for the insight into the Radeon 2900XT! I'd say it's a decent card to put into an older system if you want to play retro games... it's just a shame that the last AMD drivers for this were a flop. This probably also explains why the HD3000 series and HD4000 series could also never play GTA very well without modded drivers, due to the awful final release drivers!

I wonder what the drivers are like on linux. I know running games through proton will take a performance hit but source games running with display compositing turned off in the OS I have found usually run a tad bit faster than on windows

I mean they made one hell of a comeback since then