I was recently gifted a 2003 Acer TravelMate 290 to use for windows 98 game development, but sadly it does not support D3D hardware acceleration under Windows 98 with the only available drivers for the integrated GPU, Intel's own drivers. It has an 855GM chipset. Acer's official drivers do work, with tremendous performance, but require the NT kernel.
But then I started thinking... these days people use mini-PCIe adapters to connect PCIe graphics cards to laptops as an external GPU solution - but I've never seen anyone do it with old-school MiniPCI slots and PCI graphics cards - I've seen one company that produces adapters, Amfeltec ( https://www.amfeltec.com/products/flexible-mini-pci-to-pci-adapter/ ) - but I don't know enough about the MiniPCI standard to know if it would even be possible to put a PCI GPU in there. Has anyone done it before?
With the modern mini-PCIe slots, the cards have reduced performance but they still work (sometimes) and can greatly accelerate a laptop.
But then I started thinking... these days people use mini-PCIe adapters to connect PCIe graphics cards to laptops as an external GPU solution - but I've never seen anyone do it with old-school MiniPCI slots and PCI graphics cards - I've seen one company that produces adapters, Amfeltec ( https://www.amfeltec.com/products/flexible-mini-pci-to-pci-adapter/ ) - but I don't know enough about the MiniPCI standard to know if it would even be possible to put a PCI GPU in there. Has anyone done it before?
With the modern mini-PCIe slots, the cards have reduced performance but they still work (sometimes) and can greatly accelerate a laptop.