The 440BX with a PIII 550 (or 600) is perfectly fine for a Voodoo 2 SLI setup 😉. What model is the motherboard?

The board is a P2BXL ( or P2XBL ?) I don't have it here right now.
That is a good thing because I was sad to leave my first computer.
Thanks for your reply 😉

A P3 600 will definitely be a bit of a bottleneck in some games. But with SLI you can run 1024x768 which is nice regardless of CPU. At 800x600 a P3 600 has little hope of saturating V2SLI.

However, V2SLI does run into texture memory constraints (yes including the 12 mb cards) in some games and can stutter as a result. I see it in Unreal at times. SLI doubles the framebuffer capacity but the texture memory stays equal to a single card. I prefer Voodoo3 or higher as a result with more advanced games.

I think the CPU dependancy gets very overblown with these old accelerators... Even though you can squeeze a few more frames out of them (in situations that had fluent framerates already) at 1024x768 the video card will limit you pretty much all the time.

I moved from PIII 500 Katmai to PIII 900 Coppermine and don't notice any difference in UT at all when not benchmarking (V3), it dips down in firefights equally with both CPUs.

If you want to get period accurate I remember people using P2 400 with V2SLI. P3 600 is pretty nice compared to that. Personally I would run a P3 1400 these days. Chop doesn't entertain me much.

I agree with d1stortion. A P3 550 is fine imo.

Well it's nice to see agreement on marginal CPUs.

On a P1400 I would run with a faster card. Like a Voodoo 3 or Voodoo 5. A Geforce 256 or 2 would also work pretty well.

Reminds me of that guy on youtube posting videos of newer games running on V2 SLI (8MB 🤣) with his dual Xeons, like NFSU2. He claims to be using 3D Analyze.

Seems legit, especially when compared to the quality and framerate of Doom3 running on V2 SLI 12MB... 😉 He also states that two V2 cards "configured right" will outperform a V5.

d1stortion wrote:

Reminds me of that guy on youtube posting videos of newer games running on V2 SLI (8MB 🤣) with his dual Xeons, like NFSU2. He claims to be using 3D Analyze.

Seems legit, especially when compared to the quality and framerate of Doom3 running on V2 SLI 12MB... 😉 He also states that two V2 cards "configured right" will outperform a V5.

Some years ago someone was selling a widget that would allow SLI with four V2 cards all at once. That config, at least, outperformed a V2 for Glide 2.x apps, apparently.

Outperformed a Voodoo5 you mean? I could see that. Multi GPU scaled pretty well back in those days of simple rendering with minimal inter-frame dependencies. Voodoo2 has a lot of caveats compared to 4-5 though, such as max texture size, and the need for a minimum of two texture layers for max utilization.

I meant running NFSU2 at this quality and what seems to be almost 30fps (can't judge by the bad quality of the vid). I may buy into one CPU running the game and the other doing the missing functions through 3D Analyze, but 8MB for a game that requires a 32 meg card? Seems a bit far-fetched, but if it's really running on the Voodoos it'd be quite impressive, while of course still defeating the point of using Voodoo cards for such a game.

That guy is known for being a total asshat and he refuses to approve ANY comment that says anything against his video. Just try posting one sensible word about how it is not possible and see it never appear..

But what's the point of making such videos? In the comments he claims he had "proven" it runs on the Voodoos by pulling the cable out in another of his vids or something, haven't watched all of his crap though. This guy must really have too much time to waste 😉

d1stortion wrote:

I meant running NFSU2 at this quality and what seems to be almost 30fps (can't judge by the bad quality of the vid). I may buy into one CPU running the game and the other doing the missing functions through 3D Analyze, but 8MB for a game that requires a 32 meg card? Seems a bit far-fetched, but if it's really running on the Voodoos it'd be quite impressive, while of course still defeating the point of using Voodoo cards for such a game.

Oh I was referring to Jorpho's comment about quad Voodoo2. 😀

The NFSU2 guy is indeed probably crazy. I have a lot of capture videos on Youtube and get some really wildly strange comments sometimes. Youtube is the nexus of all forms of human life.

d1stortion wrote:

I think the CPU dependancy gets very overblown with these old accelerators

just for fun I did a little testing of graphic cards vs cpu, could not run GP500 on 1GHz / i815 / 512MB SDRAM / Ati Rage Pro , which run smoothly on 350MHz / 440BX / 256MB SDRAM / single 8MB Voodoo2

EDIT: the first setup runs Deus Ex fine.
EDIT EDIT: sorry I meant Rage 128 Pro 😊

Jorpho wrote:

d1stortion wrote:

Reminds me of that guy on youtube posting videos of newer games running on V2 SLI (8MB 🤣) with his dual Xeons, like NFSU2. He claims to be using 3D Analyze.

Seems legit, especially when compared to the quality and framerate of Doom3 running on V2 SLI 12MB... 😉 He also states that two V2 cards "configured right" will outperform a V5.

Some years ago someone was selling a widget that would allow SLI with four V2 cards all at once. That config, at least, outperformed a V2 for Glide 2.x apps, apparently.

What?!? It's possible to do quad SLI with Voodoo 2s? I must know how this was possible!

Dant wrote:

What?!? It's possible to do quad SLI with Voodoo 2s? I must know how this was possible!

This is how its possible:
http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/q3d_mercury_brick.htm

Quantum 3d mercury brick. Eight Voodoo IIs with up to 96mb RAM.

elfuego wrote:

This is how its possible: http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/q3d_mercury_brick.htm […]
Show full quote

Dant wrote:

What?!? It's possible to do quad SLI with Voodoo 2s? I must know how this was possible!

This is how its possible:
http://www.thedodgegarage.com/3dfx/q3d_mercury_brick.htm

Quantum 3d mercury brick. Eight Voodoo IIs with up to 96mb RAM.

Oh... I knew about those. I thought he meant with consumer cards. That's still awesome, although, I thought the only performance gains the heavy metal systems got was with Anti-Aliasing turned up to some extravagant amount.