PTherapist wrote:The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-5SMM. I do own 2 Socket 7 era PC Chips motherboards though and know all too well how poor they […]
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The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-5SMM. I do own 2 Socket 7 era PC Chips motherboards though and know all too well how poor they can be, particularly fake cache issues etc.
I used the Voodoo3 previously on a Beige Power Macintosh G3 Desktop. It was certainly an improvement over the onboard ATI 3D Rage Pro 2MB. I later replaced it with an ATI Rage 128 16MB PCI card though. The Voodoo3 is probably the better card of the 2, but the Rage 128 allowed me to play around with Mac OS X where the Voodoo3 is not supported at all.
Game performance is definitely skewed towards a decent GPU first. As an example, I ran "Tomb Raider - The Last Revelation" on both my Power Macintosh G3 and an iMac G3 Rev. D. The iMac CPU was 33MHz faster than the Power Mac, but had terrible onboard ATI Rage Pro 6MB graphics vs the Rage 128 16MB in the Power Mac. The game was unbearably slow on the iMac, even at 640x480, but played a little better at 640x480 on the Power Mac. When it comes to earlier games with Glide support, a Voodoo would be a godsend over having to use RAVE or OpenGL.
With regards to CPU performance, I tried running Tomb Raider 3 in software mode on a Mac Mini G4 1.25GHz and it was a horrible experience.
That Gigabyte mobo actually looks sensibly laid out, in part because it's not trying to cater to both AT and ATX specs (which is partly why my father must've picked out a cheap mobo for a cheap AT case and PSU back then). No CPU socket interference with long expansion cards, either. But of course, there's still the whole "deceptive AGP" thing that comes with the SiS 530 hogging the interface all to itself instead of a dedicated AGP card that deserves such a bus.
I don't have a Beige G3, admittedly; that would probably fill a gap between my 6500 and my indigo iMac G3 350 (Rage 128 Pro 8 MB), neither of which can run Driver worth a crap, but that game has unusual framerate dips even on my dual 1.42 GHz MDD FW800. (Yes, running OS 9 thanks to the Mac OS 9 Lives image.)
UT'99 just isn't an option on the 6500 (96 MB out of a possible 128 MB of RAM isn't helping matters one bit), and this one Descent II source port bogs down badly on the 6500 due to its use of SoundSprockets for A3D/EAX-esque reverb effects; neither have been tested on the iMac yet, but the MDD handles UT like a champ.
The 6500 was even bundled with RAVE-accelerated ports of Descent II and MechWarrior 2, though neither perform as well as I would have wanted, with very noticeable framerate drops. The Voodoo2 did help, but I just don't feel like the 603ev is up to the task when I remember how much better MW2 ran on a Pismo PowerBook G3 (which was basically a better version of the iMac I have).
Where the 6500 shines, funnily enough, is with games that were made with 680x0 or PowerPC 601 systems in mind, stuff like Flying Nightmares, A-10 Attack!/Cuba!, Absolute Zero, the Marathon trilogy... all of which share a common thread: software rendering. Anything that utilized 3D acceleration in any significant capacity had too many frame drops to deal with, enough that I just took the V2 out of it to free up a precious PCI slot for something else.
So why would I want a faster 3dfx PCI card in a Mac, anyway? Well, I wanted to try something crazy with the MDD: AGP for Core Image in OS X, PCI for OS 9 acceleration, since there's no one AGP card that can support both. I'd have tested this theory already using a PCI Radeon 9250 with the usual resistor and flash mods and an AGP GeForce 6600, but I have a major setback on flashing that 6600 in that I'd have to replace the ROM with a larger one (in some pretty tight confines, no less) - larger ones that are all out of stock, particularly with the SO-8 packaging generally used on these cards. I checked on Mouser, everything listed on The Mac Elite is out of production now!
And yeah, a Radeon 9200/9250 would be a hell of a lot faster than even the rare Voodoo5 5500 Mac Edition, but I figure that there may be cases where Glide looks noticeably better than RAVE, or perhaps RAVE won't even be an option at all, just Glide or software. I know of no Mac games where this is the case, though; the ones I've found that supported Glide also support RAVE.
