It depends on how a game has been made and rest of the system in my opinion. I remember interstate 76 being smoother and looked better in glide. That is just my opinion though and it depends on if you like the way glide looks personally. Also some games are designed for glide first and d3d is added later. Also how important a game that only supports glide is for you personally. Some of my favourite games were glide only back then so I am biased towards glide until games released before 2000.

When considering Voodoo, get at least Voodoo 2. I doubt Voodoo 1 can can run Nfs 3 smoothly. I have Voodoo 2 (cost me $2) but never use it and always prefer Direct 3d due to superior FPS. Voodoo 2 is quite slow, about equal to Riva TNT.

The texture quality of Direct3D "vs 3dfx" wholly depends on the developers themselves and how early generation of 3d hardware they care most about. Many just force 16-bit texture formats on D3D as the safest/only path and only do paletted texturing on 3dfx, which would look 'better' for some games - even if those D3D cards could do paletted textures. It's also a lot to do with the time and maturity of DirectX (stuff normalizes after 5)
then you have stuff like UnrealEngine1 which isn't even feature parity with D3DDrv vs GlideDrv (i.e. D3DDrv's precaching needs and additional detail layers and different approach to brightness). UnrealEngine games are often the 3dfx justifying yardstick only because they biffed D3DDrv/OpenGLDrv so bad, but that's not to say GlideDrv didn't have its own slipups across versions, like multitexture support=darker maps=sky mandela effects. 😀

The 3df is only for older games, which have no d3d support or not so good one. For everything else is my gf2 which is way better than v2.

I just want to know if 3dfx has benefits over d3d in thise early games.

As Leileilol said, some games do more fancy things with Glide than D3D. Some games also had effects that were only implemented for Glide. It was very difficult to get the most out of all the different D3D cards back then with varying driver quality and different featuresets.

So using a good AGP with a 3dfx-sli is perhaps the best thing. To my eyes the texturefiltering in glide is to blurry and the colors are washed out.

IIRC, one of the games where Glide looked noticeably better than D3D was Carmageddon 2. Same deal with anything based on the Unreal engine as well.

I think D3D kind of caught up with Glide by 1999, but even some later Win9x titles like Diablo 2 look and run better in Glide mode.

Also obligatory reminder that:

- 3dfx default gamma correction is 1.3 (Voodoo2+) or 1.7 (Voodoo Graphics), making the competition look "too dark"
- 3dfx has a video filter feature to smear the dither out.

Make sure the "it just looks better" isn't from one of these things.

Diablo 2's matter is more out of technical negligence. It started development while 3dfx were in vogue and didn't think a lot about the technological leaps after.

On the mac-side-of-things all I can tell is that UE1 games (unreal, rune, etc.) look best on rage128, much better textures and excellent colors! (RAVE-Mode forced to 32Bit)