swaaye wrote:

You could get ugly texture aliasing (swimming) out in the distance. It would be as if you turned off mip mapping, like with some of the early awful 3D cards that couldn't do mip mapping at all (see Mystique).

Yes, this is true - its also called "shimmering effect" but I found it a small price to pay for more detail. There are some games where this is only marginal, and some where its more visible. In those ones choose value between -5 and -6 and u'r set 😀

BTW, this shimmering effect can also be a nice thing to have, if you are looking at a grassy terrain. Try 3Dmark 2000, helicopter test @ high quality - shimmering might actually look like moving grass 😉 (dont ask about adventure test 😜 )

Reminds me of GeForce FX, 6 and 7. NVIDIA cheated with texture filtering. If you leave the driver on the "Quality" mode you can enjoy texture shimmering in some games. I've seen it in Half Life 2, Oblivion and KOTOR. The GPUs don't do quality texture filtering as fast as ATI's competing products could so they cheated to get a few extra frames per sec. If you put the driver on "High Quality" it goes away, but of course the card gets slower too.

Apparently it's still happening with the current DX10 cards, but I can't see it anymore. They've really improved things. Some say that ATI is actually worse than NV now, but I'd call it hairsplitting. 😀

^^ Not only FX, 6 and 7, but also GF, GF2, GF3 and GF4 too. the fact that GF3 Ti/4Ti had DX8 support doesnt change the fact the least. Oh well... At least they got GF 8 right. After how many? 6 generations? 😀

So, @Manic (O.P.), what did you end up by getting? Did you get a V5, or a V3? I noticed a few days ago, a V3 (3000 model) sold for a staggering £56.

retro games 100 wrote:

So, @Manic (O.P.), what did you end up by getting? Did you get a V5, or a V3? I noticed a few days ago, a V3 (3000 model) sold for a staggering £56.

OMG. And I got my 3500 TV for 7€ 😁

🤣 @ people paying big bucks for Voodoo3?! Come on! I got two of them for free from friends who were done with them. Most of the V3 models were anything but rare so they shouldn't be fetching any kind of high price IMO.

"hand me downs" are good value for money! 😉

Manic wrote:

I`m looking to buy a 3dfx voodoo 5 PCI off ebay, i see one that is in excellent condition with manuals, box, cd etc.

Is it worth getting it for £100?

Or should i just consider a cheaper alternative for a retro PC Pentium 3 system i have.

Boxed V5 PCI is worth around 75 quid. When I say around is that you never know when you race a die hard collector with a maximum bid twice of your budget. To just play Glide games all you need is a bare card worth around 50 quid.

retro games 100 wrote:

So, @Manic (O.P.), what did you end up by getting? Did you get a V5, or a V3? I noticed a few days ago, a V3 (3000 model) sold for a staggering £56.

My maximum bet was J56 so it could have gone higher if I had tried a little harder. The card was rare and in excellent condition. Usually fetch high price amongst the collectors.

It was a late revision, Boxed Voodoo3 3000 PCI 16 MB SGRAM.

2) 4X FSAA Glide games make it worth the trouble.