Reply 20 of 41, by F2bnp
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- l33t
Well, let's say you wanna use a K6-III+ running at 600MHz, which would represent the absolute fastest CPU you could use on such a platform without resorting to extensive overclocking trial & error. If you take a look around here on Vogons, you will see that such a CPU will be trading punches with the Pentium II 350 and the Pentium II 400 for the most part. There have been many threads on the subject in the last 3-4 years especially, quite a few of them by me specifically. I don't have any links at hand, other than my own recent thread, so you can take a look for yourself.
Now, in that test, I used a Voodoo 5 for both systems. There are a couple of reasons why I, and most people on here, decided to use a Voodoo card on such this system:
a)3Dfx cards do not really use any AGP features, they merely use it as a faster bus (AGP=66MHz > PCI=33MHz). Early AGP implementations, especially in non Intel chipsets, such as the MVP3 in question and Ali Aladdin V, were pretty buggy (which is what you are probably experiencing). By not using AGP features, Voodoo cards rarely encounter the issues that other cards do (all Radeon and GeForce cards for example).
b)3Dfx cards seem to have less of a driver CPU overhead (AFAIK this may be related to 3DNow! optimizations in the drivers among other things). So, if you are not GPU limited, you can see a Voodoo3 performing faster than, say, a GeForce 3 on a SS7 system, because the CPU has that much more headroom to work with.
And most of the time you will be CPU limited.
In fact, for most games you'd probably want to play comfortably on the K6-III+, a Voodoo 3 will give you enough performance. I merely used the Voodoo 5 to remove any GPU bottlenecks and show a clearer picture when it came to how each CPU performed free of any GPU bound situations. It can help, but realistically, the games in which the Voodoo 5 will help, are already of questionable playability.
The Voodoo 3 was on par with the Riva TNT2, the Voodoo 5 was in between the GeForce 256 DDR and GeForce 2 GTS. The FX5900 came out 3 generations later! So, you'd be wasting its potential. The GeForce cards will help with TnL games though, such as MDK2 and Max Payne.
I don't know if you'll have any luck with the FX5900 XT. The general rule of thumb is to use as old GeForce drivers as possible, as well as Via. I think 4.35 works nicely for the MVP3, you might even want to go further back like 4.32 or even 4.28. Older GeForce cards like a GeForce 2 MX or GeForce 3 will allow you to use much older drivers, which the FX 5900 XT won't be able to use as it is much newer (it was released in late 2003 AFAIR?).
The Radeon 9250 you are using right now is plenty fast as well, but Radeon drivers can't do DirectX 5 table fog AFAIK, which means some games will end up looking a little weird. I don't recall any issues with VESA modes, but I haven't really looked into it, so perhaps someone's else's input would be preferable.
If you don't really need that much power and can find a Voodoo 3 for cheap, I'd say go for it, it's as plug&play as it goes for these systems. 🤣
What games do you want to play on your system and what CPU do you have right now?
