Hercules Stingray 128/3D actually has 3dfx Voodoo Rush for 3D part. It is slower then Voodoo1 but not by much.

V3 would be held back somewhat.

A V1 would be a good match to be honest for a Pentium machine. Or a V2 but that means more mucking around getting Glide games to work from that era.

I would choose to go for a period correct 3d accelerator (could be a Riva 128 / Riva TNT or maybe a S3 Savage4 PRO+ card. With a 3dFX one..
Those 3d Virge cards and other 2D cards, commonly are just worse performance cards..

heya!

i remember having a p1 166 with a voodoo 3 2000 pci performing very well, so i guess voodoo 1 might be too slow (besides, i dont have one).
i only have the cards mentioned in the first post so maybe s3 + voodoo 2 would be a good choice? the s3 is a great 2d card, or isnt it?

and wouldnt the voodoo 2 be too slow for the 233mmx?

Pentium machines are quite slow and will hold back V2 easily. But you do get the benefit for higher resolutions.

But CPU performance in general is important with 3dfx cards.

Very rough I would recommend:

Pentium: V1
Pentium 2: V2
Pentium 3: V3+

wow ok.. thanks!

well, as i don't have a voodoo 1 i'd have to stick to voodoo 2 on my pentium 1 (which resolutions can i expect to work flawlessly?)
my p2-333 would then get the voodoo 3 as the only voodoo 2 i own already is installed in the p1 rig
and my p3-1000 (so370) already has a v5 5500 anyway 😁

voodoo 3 3000/3500 would fit for amd k6-2/550 or is that card too slow for that cpu?

I never ever see any problem of using a faster GPU with a slower CPU. Voodoo3 is a very nice card with much better resolution options, better VGA signal quality and its cheaper to aquire.

V1: 640 x 480
V2: 800 x 600
V2 SLI: 1024 x 768
V3: 1600 x 1200 and maybe higher if you have a monitor that support it

ok thx, i'll think about it!

About the CPU limitation of Voodoos:

Voodoo Graphics / Rush -> Pentium 166
Voodoo2 / Banshee -> Pentium 2 400 / K6-3 500
Voodoo2 SLI -> Pentium 3 800 / Athlon 800
Voodoo3/4 -> Pentium 3 1000 / Athlon 1000
Voodoo5 -> Pentium 4 3GHz+ / Athlon XP 2GHz+

With these CPUs 99% games in the given time frame (V1, V2, V3, V4, V5) will run on full power.

havli wrote:

About the CPU limitation of Voodoos: […]
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About the CPU limitation of Voodoos:

Voodoo Graphics / Rush -> Pentium 166
Voodoo2 / Banshee -> Pentium 2 400 / K6-3 500
Voodoo2 SLI -> Pentium 3 800 / Athlon 800
Voodoo3/4 -> Pentium 3 1000 / Athlon 1000
Voodoo5 -> Pentium 4 3GHz+ / Athlon XP 2GHz+

With these CPUs 99% games in the given time frame (V1, V2, V3, V4, V5) will run on full power.

hmm thats interesting - i did 3dmark 99 with voodoo2/8mb and voodoo 3 2000 16 mb and got about 100 points more with the voodoo 3 card in my 233mmx system. what does that mean?

It just means that the that setup is faster in a few tests that are not that limited by the CPU. That doesn't necessarily translate to real-world performance, as games might be limited by the CPU in practice.

Actually, 3DMark 99 is CPU bound quite a lot. 100 points difference isn't that much - it can be caused by better driver optimalisation or maybe the Voodoo3's unified memory architecture (3DMark likes high memory bandwith). Here is an example how Voodoo2 and 3 scores in 3DM99 with strong CPU.

Voodoo2 @ 105 MHz -> 4016 points http://hwbot.org/submission/2348401_havli_3dm … doo2_4016_marks
Voodoo2 SLI @ 105 MHz -> 6215 points http://hwbot.org/submission/2348401_havli_3dm … doo2_4016_marks
Voodoo3 PCI @ 200 MHz -> 8124 points http://hwbot.org/submission/2348448_havli_3dm … _pci_8124_marks

This is another part of my CPU test.
3DMark99 is running with default settings and testing was done on Windows XP - so the scores may be lower than similar win98-based system would do. Still the scalling with more CPU power is very clear.

From what you have the answer is the Voodoo3.

whoa huge difference between the cpus...
as i have more than one retro gaming rig i decided to use my voodoo 2 + s3 virge 325 in my pentium 233mmx box (which card would you recommend instead of the S3 or is it ok?) and to use my voodoo 3 pci in my p2-333 rig as it doesnt have an agp slot (hp vectra desktop) and the voodoo 3 is my most powerful retro pci card (all newer rigs have agp and i have plenty of agp cards).

only downside is, i don't have a vga loop cable for the voodoo2, i've ordered a 0,5m vga extension cable, hopefully there won't be too much signal loss...

If you want some more Voodoo benchmarks check out this page on my site:

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/3dfx-voodoo-s … ut-project.html

With video analysis 😀

cool thing, but unfortunately my only system which compares to your test system is occupied by my voodoo 5 and its kind of "finished" so i don't want to mess around with it too much...

ok is there an alternative to 3dfx cards?
turns out that my voodoo 2 seems to be faulty, as well as my hercules stingray 128/3D

the V2 just disappeared from dxdiag (only s3 is shown now) and also 3dmark 99 doesn't see it, although i can see it in the device manager. that happened during the system ran (1st time i opened dxdiag the voodoo was there, second time it wasn't). reboot, driver reinstall etc. didn't help.
as there also were random lockups with the voodoo 2, i guess it really may be faulty (i used creative and also most recent reference drivers).

the hercules stingray makes a lot of image noise in 2D mode (desktop) and draws random horizontal lines (not through the whole display).

are there any easy-obtainable but decent performing 3d accelerators from that time period, comparable to voodoo 2/3?

thanks

It sounds like driver issues to me, the drivers are probably overclocking the cards.
At least I think this is what is happening to the Voodoo Rush.