I don't know how well the Voodoo 2 would work in cooperation with the Voodoo 3, but as a single card solution the Voodoo 3 gives very much combined:

- Great output quality
- High resolution support
- Glide & Direct3D support
- Good DOS compability

If you want to play with the Voodoo2 in SLI, then I would either go with the ET6000 or the Mystique 220. It all depends on what kind of resolution you'll be using Windows with and if you want to play a large array of older DOS games. The S3 Virge output quality is lacking compared to the Mystique above 1024x768, but it got a bit better compability with older DOS games. Personally I have good experience with the Mystique 220, so I would pick that with the Voodoo2's.

Thanks for the feedback. I think I'll go for the Matrox as I know it has good windows 98 support out of the box.

I'll be using it with a 15'' monitor so high resolutions are not an issue!

I'd second on a Voodoo3 3000 as well.

Higher end solutions (Radeon 7200, Geforce2) are rather bottlenecked by the early AGP motherboards and have less optimized drivers than 3dfx. A GeforceFX wouldn't be overkill, it'd be underwhelming, especially if it's the 64-bit ones in that case, much slower than Voodoo3.

Plus, you can use a Voodoo2 with a Voodoo3 when you absolutely need it with some of the pickier older carelessly developed games. I've done it once by installing V2 drivers first followed by V3 (to re-overwrite the system/ glide files) and just plopping the v2's glides in certain game binary directories when absolutely necessary. As for SLI, I wouldn't bother.

leileilol wrote:

A GeforceFX wouldn't be overkill, it'd be underwhelming, especially if it's the 64-bit ones in that case, much slower than Voodoo3.

Certainly not. GeForce2 MX200 was already enough for Voodoo3. But with weak CPU I would be happy glider.

A Voodoo 3 is performs like voodoo 2 SLI on one board, doesn't it?

I run a G400 matrox for 2d and V2 SLI on my 266mhz PII. I've used the G400 open GL on its own too and it's pretty on par with the 3dfx graphics. I just like using Glide. Both of these cards are honestly overkill for this CPU. For graphics intensive games, I've played SiN and Klingon Honor Guard, they were both quite playable but would have benefitted from a better CPU. SWAT 3 was just a hair too slow to be enjoyable.

I would say use the Mystique with the V2s or just use the Voodoo 3. You won't be disappointed either way.

If you want to play both DOS & win glide games, go with the V2 SLI plus Mystique. If you want a single card solution, which is only a bit faster, for playing most Win Glide games go with a single V3 3000 or 2000. I personally like having a v2 SLI because of it's "retro flavour" 🤣 and its compatibility with most early glide dos only games (such as fatal racing 3Dfx) and early win glide games(the ones which use glide.dll & sst1init; like MW2)

Most of these won't run on anything else besides a v1 or v2 , with some (actually 1 or 2 games) being V1 exclusive 😖

I'd go for Virge + V2 SLI. Virge is so standard, that you you will never have to bother with drivers. Its' SVGA dos support is superb, its' windows performance is decent (V3 and matrox are much better, but hey - we are speaking retro here), and some games really love virge (for example Balls of steel). Plus, on a 15" monitor you will probably stick to 1024x768, so the memory limitation (4mb) on Virge will not be noticeable.

Alternatively, V3 is also a very good, all-around choice... But for that machine, its an overkill.

I had a P2 as a kid (300 MHz) and got it because when I upgraded my V1 to V2 on my Pentium 133, I saw almost no performance boost. And magazines told me the CPU was holding me back. My main AGP card was a ATI Expert@Play, which had a Rage chip or something like that.

Matrox cards were also quite popular around that time. I thin the V3 came out later, more like Pentium 3, but not 100% sure...

If it is for gaming then I'd plug the trident card if it has 2 MB.
It is a local bus card, sufficiently fast for DOS games and even more compatible than the Virge.
All other cards are also just 2D cards compared to the V2 SLI backend. High frequency DAC probably doesn't matter, as it is plugged to a TFT anyway. With the Trident card you would use a card that most of the people owned and all of the windows 2D games of that era didn't required more than 2 MB.
For Windows and 3D you have the V2 SLI anyways, so 2D doesn't matter much.

voodoo 2's in a p2-333 would be a bit starved for power. Not much, but it would be a huge advantage to use a 100mhz fsb pentium 2 in that case. But thats a WHOLE 'nother can of worms.

personally I'd use the tseng card or the matrox. Tseng has a lot of dos credibility and matrox cards of the era were bar none in picture quality. that and they still have drivers for them on their site even today.

You probably mix ET4000 with ET6000, while ET4000 is really a fast and compatible ISA card the ET6000 has got already some VGA hardware features like hardware scrolling removed. The Matrox 2D core also doesn't support hardware scrolling. Try Commander Keen 4 on these cards and you'll see.
Also Jazz jackrabbit shows only garbage on an ET6000.

OK Machine_1760, so far one thing is certain: DO NOT USE GF FX 5200 - that seems to be the only thing the 9 of us silently agreed 😜 Almost everybody has their own favorites and flavors, but truth be told, you will be happy with any of those cards. If you end up with some incompatibilities, just swap the card for another one and enjoy 😀

...and also post the results here for us to have something to argue about 😜