Sorry for the necro, but how did you make Quake 2 work with Virge?

quake2 has a software mode

that's not why. software mode would be at least four times faster

There is some sort of Virge minigl out there.

Quick google shows this thread....
http://forum.beyond3d.com/archive/index.php/t-49398.html

... and a link to this file (also attached)....
http://www.gamefront.com/files/s3quakezip/;94 … ;/fileinfo.html

Yep, I've tried it with a Virge 325. It's kinda cool to actually see the Virge accelerate Quake, but there are a lot of missing textures as I remember it and it is slow as hell.

Yikes it sounds like some sort of OpenGL to D3D 5 wrapper. The biggest problem I can see is that Virge couldn't really do D3D either. 😉

Yep, I've tried it with a Virge 325. It's kinda cool to actually see the Virge accelerate Quake, but there are a lot of missing textures as I remember it and it is slow as hell.

I had an S3 Virge AGP back in 98 or so, and this was basically my experience, any game I tried to use hardware acceleration just had white/grey surfaces instead of textures, and was actually slower than software mode.

How would a Savage 3D or Savage 4 work? It might be overpowered for the CPU, but it should run Quake fast enough without glitching out, and use S3 texture compression right?

Here's a vid of a laptop with a PIII 600 and S3 Savage playing Q2. I'm not sure what CPU the original poster has, but it doesn't look glitchy to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ihg3xXABHjc

Savage cards are dead cheap now so there's no reason not to just get one.

sliderider wrote:

How would a Savage 3D or Savage 4 work? It might be overpowered for the CPU, but it should run Quake fast enough without glitchi […]
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How would a Savage 3D or Savage 4 work? It might be overpowered for the CPU, but it should run Quake fast enough without glitching out, and use S3 texture compression right?

Here's a vid of a laptop with a PIII 600 and S3 Savage playing Q2. I'm not sure what CPU the original poster has, but it doesn't look glitchy to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ihg3xXABHjc

Savage cards are dead cheap now so there's no reason not to just get one.

Savage3D or Savage4 would be alright as long as you stick to lower resolutions. The Savage4's performance is roughly close to that of a TNT. Works nicely for Q2 and Q3A. Savage 2000 is just balls though. In later integrated versions of VIA/S3's chips, they used the Savage 2000's 2D part and instead used the Savage4 for 3D.

As for the ViRGE, I wouldn't use that for anything 3D unless you want to play those one or two S3D-only games.

Savage4 should work fine granted it's not 3.3v AGP1x/2x.
InControl99 sucks though

leileilol wrote:

InControl99 sucks though

Not to mention a major pain to completely get rid of from the system. Just don't use Diamond's drivers; the reference ones seem to work okay.

Pippy P. Poopypants wrote:

Savage 2000 is just balls though.

I can vouch for this. S2000 has performance problems with even games using S3 Metal. It's awful. It also has weird issues like having 2D acceleration die when you exit a game (2D goes ultra slow).

If you force-enable the T&L you can see through walls in Q3A. 😉 The geometry isn't rendered correctly and so you can see through the map.

But I'm not sure if a Savage 4 is better.... I have a hard time believing that S3 made good drivers or good hardware at any point. 😁

swaaye wrote:

I can vouch for this. S2000 has performance problems with even games using S3 Metal. It's awful. It also has weird issues like having 2D acceleration die when you exit a game (2D goes ultra slow).

If you force-enable the T&L you can see through walls in Q3A. 😉 The geometry isn't rendered correctly and so you can see through the map.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, enabling T&L also worsens performance, much like the 3D decelerator that the ViRGE was. Perhaps a good market for S3 would be in the biomedical industry - find some way to slow the aging process 😉.

swaaye wrote:

But I'm not sure if a Savage 4 is better.... I have a hard time believing that S3 made good drivers or good hardware at any point. 😁

Savage4 is mildly better, but lots of bugs still show up in newer games (post-1999). Once 3D acceleration became mainstream, S3 just couldn't keep up. Although there are plenty of videos on youtube demonstrating somewhat-modern games on the VIA/S3 Chrome integrated chipsets.

downgraded DX7 cards group:
savage2000
radeon7000ve
matrox g550
powervr kyro2
😎

^
I had a Kyro II card until earlier today. A kid came over to check out my old Micron P200 box and buy it from me and he spotted the Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 I had and he just had to have it so I just gave it to him.

I give credit to that card because it tries so damn hard to impress but, unfortunately, it was born in a time in which the GeForce already existed. As much as I love the GeForce 256 DDR, it almost seems nVidia was just being unfair to the competition.

GXL750 wrote:

^
I had a Kyro II card until earlier today. A kid came over to check out my old Micron P200 box and buy it from me and he spotted the Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 I had and he just had to have it so I just gave it to him.

I give credit to that card because it tries so damn hard to impress but, unfortunately, it was born in a time in which the GeForce already existed. As much as I love the GeForce 256 DDR, it almost seems nVidia was just being unfair to the competition.

there are still some Hercules4500s around here, but i am just too lazy to get one. 😎
kyro2 is somewhat a regarded chip. it has very low theoretical specs(similar to the tnt2pro) but excellent efficency, and actual performance is near the gf256ddr. shame it has no T&L and is therefore thrown into the downgraded DX7 cards group.

The Kyro II took no time becoming obsolete (mainly thanks to it's tile based rendering) but never the less, in 2000 and 2001, it was a great chip. The 3D Prophet 4500 was a great performer when new. It's like comparing a K6-2 to a Pentium II. While new, it performed great and provided awesome value for cash spent but, ultimately, software and standards pushed it to the side.

I have both DX5 and DX6 wrappers, but they work only with first quake.