And, as a side question, would the Voodoo2 16bit colouring improve significantly on a non-TN panel LCD monitor?

No, not noticeably. It's true that TN monitors are limited in their color reproduction, but they're still capable of much more than 16-bit color... so you're not even hitting the limitations of the panel in that respect. I think the problem is that 16-bit color at non-native resolution is going to look like crap on any LCD.

You always have the option of a Voodoo3. They're 16-bit as well, but they use use some tricks with it and also have a dithered output that gets you image quality pretty close to the 24/32-bit cards of the time. Due to the way the dithering works, it's not something that shows up in screenshots, so if you've never used one before, you might not know its capabilities.

There may have been PCI Permedia 3's, but the Permedia 3 sucked only slightly less than the Permedia 2 at gaming. You're still not going to get good framerates out of it.

Yes the best option for 16 bit color games is a Voodoo3-5.

The best OpenGL game cards are NV. A PCI Geforce of some sort would be a great option. They are in my experience almost as compatible as 3dfx cards with D3D as well and that is more than can be said for other options.

swaaye wrote:

The best OpenGL game cards are NV.

I guess that's probably true as I've seen it stated in plenty of places. But I have found that that a Wildcat VP870 will run glquake at 1600x1200 when anything else [nvidia or ati] just crashes out or infact crashes the OS. It seems bizarre, but it's my experience. It seems to make no immediately discernible difference to how the game looks whether you play it in 1600 or 640, so it's a little academic. I wonder however if glquake runs above 640 on anything else. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

iulianv wrote:

Is there any PCI implementation of Permedia3?

Forget about Permedia - it's NT only, OpenGL 1.0 compliant and lacks a lot of blending. no colored lighting on that thing. funny thing though, it was used throughout most of quake2's development

Well, it definitely looks better than Voodoo2 on my monitor (and there are Win98 drivers - at least for my Permedia2-based Elsa card)... too bad about the speed.

I guess I'll be looking for a "brand" PCI Riva TNT or TNT2 M64 (I'm thinking anything higher would be held back by the CPU) - a Creative CT6700 shows up on a quick search, if you have other examples please post them here.

Are you using WickedGL with Quake2 and the Voodoo2 cards?

Also you might need to turn down the gamma because Quake 2 sometimes is way too bright by default.

Use gamma 1.0 in Quake2, but higher gamma in your video control panel for best Quake2 look

leileilol wrote:

iulianv wrote:

Is there any PCI implementation of Permedia3?

Forget about Permedia - it's NT only, OpenGL 1.0 compliant and lacks a lot of blending. no colored lighting on that thing. funny thing though, it was used throughout most of quake2's development

Permedia/Permedia 2 did support Win95/98 IIRC, but anyway they were dog-slow for anything except professional apps and sucked at D3D.

And yes 3DLabs has a PCI variant of its Oxygen VX1 card, but it's pretty slow for games (compared to even a TNT, which was released a year earlier). Anyways a TNT/TNT2 may be up your alley. Doesn't really make sense to put anything faster on such a CPU. Another "brand" TNT card available in PCI is the Diamond Viper V550 (though not sure how common the PCI variant is)

Yeah check out the benchmarks in my 3D accelerator thread. Permedia 2 is barely usable for even Quake 2.