Do you use an x86 based machine?

[DonnyEMU]

Good Choice on the Geforce FX5900 Ultra. I got one of these at a DX9 show. It is truly the most state of the art consumer gaming card out there.

What it can do in realtime with 3d and pixel/vertex shader technologies such as CGShaders and HLSL shaders is amazing. It makes for a truly amazing cinematic experience in games that support shader technology.  The GPU is arguably the best and supports more instructions than any of the others out there including ATI's recent cards.

[DonnyEMU]

OMG what a very weird viewpoint... No one runs NT anymore it doesn't even support  DirectX (the windows gaming  API wasn't introduced into NT technologies (beyond direct draw) till Windows 2000).  So no NT 4 isn't even a choice for gaming. NT at that time was soley for file servers and enterprise useage.

And frankly if you are talking PPC edition of NT 4, I don't even think anything outside a very old PPC from IBM would even boot it up.  There were never really any talk of  PPC based computers anyway after the Mac went to the PPC chipset, like the Dec Alpha version of NT it was more of a prototype for a platform that never took off. However I owned a Dec Alpha NT box for a short time.. It was a full NT 4 implementation.

Hmm 64-bit windows, who can afford an I-A64 based machine right now anyway.. And who would buy it as a gaming platform. Doesn't intel make this hardware specifically for server class machines right now.  Mac OS9, don't you mean OS X?  

64 bit windows has yet to be really made a mainstream platform and I doubt it really will be until the "next" version of windows which is at least 2 years away.

[DonnyEMU]

No good graphics programs for the PC? What kind of graphics programs are you looking for?

[DonnyEMU]

I was very aware of that back in 1994 during Microsoft Multimedia Developer Training in Redmond itself. But 99% of the games people run are direct X based games. I would imagine though that even though Quake will run, how OGL interfaces with Onscreen/off screen buffers that it's is just not optimal. Direct X 1.0 (which they are up to v 9 now) wasn't really available beyond a service pack hack to open a direct draw surface.  The on and off screen buffer writes on direct draw and Open GL under NT would kill any decent frame rates.

The point is just that most people who are gamers wouldn't even try to game on such a system. At the time Microsoft considered NT to just be enterprise server and workstation class products with NO need to run games on it.

OpenGL was hillarious under NT 4 the PIPES screensaver just crawls. Even Microsoft admited it was just there to say that NT could compete as a graphics workstation (and went on to inspire an industry that competed well against SGI)...

-Don

[DonnyEMU]

For anyone who uses XP hates their boot times thinks XP sucks, I suggest that you do the following..

1) Download and buy Tweak XP Pro, besides booting your machine faster it will tweak every aspect of your computer for better performance. I really can't recommend this piece of software enough.  It stops pop ups optimizes your net connection overclocks your graphics processor etc..

It can be had at:

Total Idea Software's Tweak XP Pro  

[DonnyEMU]

A cyrix 300 Mhz WOW what an antique.. I'd just keep the puppy and install linux in it and use it soley as a firewall..

[DonnyEMU]

I am being serious, this was during 1994 during the hey day when this came out as being new..  Yes it does draw without acceleration but it's pretty darn slow.

I know for a fact that OpenGL opens a screen buffer using a direct draw style surface. I learned this in Redmond back in 1994 itself.. If you want me to grab the documentation to this stuff provided at multimedia bootcamp 1994 I will gladly go ahead and scan in the documentation and the block diagrams so you can read through it.. I remember someone from the OpenGL team commenting they needed to find a better interface to the graphics cards.

NT 4 Workstation was never designed as a games workstation. Microsoft added Direct X to Windows 2000 (NT 5) to change all that and attempt to reposition that away (to move people away from dos based windows (the last incantation of that being Windows ME).

Microsoft advised against playing games on NT 4 and kept developers away for the longest time. They stuck to open gl cause it was there (but that version was intended to stick NT in the visualization workstation market, not with games.

Quake 3 that you mention is a windows 2000 product that just happens to run, cause 3rd parties went in and wrote drivers that did this, but never because microsoft wanted it, they just wanted a visualization workstation to compete with SGI/Sun..