melbar wrote:

Wow, just one hour ago i've seen the highest price ever i've seen for a used, single Voodoo 2:

A Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo 2 3Dfx 12MB, coming complete with the original box and all content...... for incredible 97€

Not bad...

OMG that price is cancer, could build a whole rig for that price /face palm.

I've got V1s, V2s, V3s, and V5s. I'm slowly coming to accept that 3dfx hardware is mostly unnecessary. Modern computers with nglide can run most things. Heck, even Mechwarrior II, EF2000, and Archimedean Dynasty can be made to run nowadays. As time goes on, there are fewer and fewer games that won't run. If you have an FX5900 Ultra in your Win9x box, glide wrappers will run games better than real 3dfx hardware most of the time. Even a GF4 usually does a better job.

I still like to have my V1 cards for Mechwarrior II, EF2000, and Archimedean Dynasty because it requires a pretty powerful machine to get them working otherwise. Aside from that, the reasons for me keeping the other cards are out of pure nostalgia. I would sell my V2s and V5s before I ever sold my V3s. IMO, the V3 is just the most compatible and all-around good card to have for a pre-2000 legacy machine. They just work.

If I knew how expensive V5 5500 cards were going to get, I would never have done a cooling mod to mine. Even though I've improved the cooling, the mod cannot be reversed since I used thermal epoxy. I'm sure this makes it far less valuable, even if it makes it more reliable.

KT7AGuy wrote:

I've got V1s, V2s, V3s, and V5s. I'm slowly coming to accept that 3dfx hardware is mostly unnecessary. Modern computers with nglide can run most things. Heck, even Mechwarrior II, EF2000, and Archimedean Dynasty can be made to run nowadays. As time goes on, there are fewer and fewer games that won't run. If you have an FX5900 Ultra in your Win9x box, glide wrappers will run games better than real 3dfx hardware most of the time. Even a GF4 usually does a better job.

I still like to have my V1 cards for Mechwarrior II, EF2000, and Archimedean Dynasty because it requires a pretty powerful machine to get them working otherwise. Aside from that, the reasons for me keeping the other cards are out of pure nostalgia. I would sell my V2s and V5s before I ever sold my V3s. IMO, the V3 is just the most compatible and all-around good card to have for a pre-2000 legacy machine. They just work.

If I knew how expensive V5 5500 cards were going to get, I would never have done a cooling mod to mine. Even though I've improved the cooling, the mod cannot be reversed since I used thermal epoxy. I'm sure this makes it far less valuable, even if it makes it more reliable.

The cooling mod was a good thing as your card will likely outlive the other remaining cards by a good margin, stock cooling is bad on these cards. I absolutely agree about nglide and glad that people have that option.

KT7AGuy wrote:

I've got V1s, V2s, V3s, and V5s. I'm slowly coming to accept that 3dfx hardware is mostly unnecessary. Modern computers with nglide can run most things. Heck, even Mechwarrior II, EF2000, and Archimedean Dynasty can be made to run nowadays. As time goes on, there are fewer and fewer games that won't run. If you have an FX5900 Ultra in your Win9x box, glide wrappers will run games better than real 3dfx hardware most of the time. Even a GF4 usually does a better job.

I still like to have my V1 cards for Mechwarrior II, EF2000, and Archimedean Dynasty because it requires a pretty powerful machine to get them working otherwise. Aside from that, the reasons for me keeping the other cards are out of pure nostalgia. I would sell my V2s and V5s before I ever sold my V3s. IMO, the V3 is just the most compatible and all-around good card to have for a pre-2000 legacy machine. They just work.

If I knew how expensive V5 5500 cards were going to get, I would never have done a cooling mod to mine. Even though I've improved the cooling, the mod cannot be reversed since I used thermal epoxy. I'm sure this makes it far less valuable, even if it makes it more reliable.

But what is the point of emulating glide on a retro system?
Then I could play the games immediately on my Windows 10 netbook without having to haul around a 2005 system with little to no compatibility benefits. I just emulate everything 🤣

Arctic wrote:

KT7AGuy wrote:

I've got V1s, V2s, V3s, and V5s. I'm slowly coming to accept that 3dfx hardware is mostly unnecessary. Modern computers with nglide can run most things. Heck, even Mechwarrior II, EF2000, and Archimedean Dynasty can be made to run nowadays. As time goes on, there are fewer and fewer games that won't run. If you have an FX5900 Ultra in your Win9x box, glide wrappers will run games better than real 3dfx hardware most of the time. Even a GF4 usually does a better job.

I still like to have my V1 cards for Mechwarrior II, EF2000, and Archimedean Dynasty because it requires a pretty powerful machine to get them working otherwise. Aside from that, the reasons for me keeping the other cards are out of pure nostalgia. I would sell my V2s and V5s before I ever sold my V3s. IMO, the V3 is just the most compatible and all-around good card to have for a pre-2000 legacy machine. They just work.

If I knew how expensive V5 5500 cards were going to get, I would never have done a cooling mod to mine. Even though I've improved the cooling, the mod cannot be reversed since I used thermal epoxy. I'm sure this makes it far less valuable, even if it makes it more reliable.

But what is the point of emulating glide on a retro system?
Then I could play the games immediately on my Windows 10 netbook without having to haul around a 2005 system with little to no compatibility benefits. I just emulate everything 🤣

We're all odd people 🤣, we do it however we want 😎

Arctic wrote:

But what is the point of emulating glide on a retro system?

A ~$20 GF4 Ti4600 with a glide wrapper will run games better than a real V5 that will cost over $100. Not everybody has tons of cash to blow on a legacy PC.

Even though V3 3000 cards are still pretty cheap at around $20, the GF4 Ti4600 will still run much faster. For 1ghz and below, I think a V3 is the best choice. For over 1ghz, a GF3, GF4, or FX is the best choice.

Arctic wrote:

Then I could play the games immediately on my Windows 10 netbook without having to haul around a 2005 system with little to no compatibility benefits. I just emulate everything 🤣

For some glide games, you're absolutely right. For others, you're absolutely wrong. There's no way you're going to run Mechwarrior II, EF2000, or Archimedean Dynasty with emulated hardware acceleration on a netbook's atom CPU.

KT7AGuy wrote:

A ~$20 GF4 Ti4600 with a glide wrapper will run games better than a real V5 that will cost over $100. Not everybody has tons of […]
Show full quote

Arctic wrote:

But what is the point of emulating glide on a retro system?

A ~$20 GF4 Ti4600 with a glide wrapper will run games better than a real V5 that will cost over $100. Not everybody has tons of cash to blow on a legacy PC.

Even though V3 3000 cards are still pretty cheap at around $20, the GF4 Ti4600 will still run much faster. For 1ghz and below, I think a V3 is the best choice. For over 1ghz, a GF3, GF4, or FX is the best choice.

Arctic wrote:

Then I could play the games immediately on my Windows 10 netbook without having to haul around a 2005 system with little to no compatibility benefits. I just emulate everything 🤣

For some glide games, you're absolutely right. For others, you're absolutely wrong. There's no way you're going to run Mechwarrior II, EF2000, or Archimedean Dynasty with emulated hardware acceleration on a netbook's atom CPU.

No, this is not true.
The Voodoo 5 has a special Full Scene Antialiasing, that was superior to all other cards until like 2008 or 2009.
No Geforce 4 or FX can beat it!

I know Netbooks could still not be powerful enough for glide-emulation. I just wanted to exaggerate 🤣
In a few years they might be, right?

Arctic wrote:

No, this is not true.
The Voodoo 5 has a special Full Scene Antialiasing, that was superior to all other cards until like 2008 or 2009.
No Geforce 4 or FX can beat it!

That's just a fancy way of saying the card did SuperSampling AA. You can do that with GF5 (and GF4 probably, have never tested). 😉
Granted, Voodoo 5 is nice for some other reasons as well, I've personally gotten about 6 or 7 Voodoo5 on my hands throughout the years. It was an endless cycle of spending money on it, getting disappointed with it, selling it to buy something else, buying it back sometime later etc... I've finally settled down on one of them and don't plan to sell it (finally 🤣 ).

Arctic wrote:

No, this is not true.
The Voodoo 5 has a special Full Scene Antialiasing, that was superior to all other cards until like 2008 or 2009.
No Geforce 4 or FX can beat it!

I dunno about it being superior until ~2008/2009, but I remember that it did FSAA better and before others. However, it still came at the cost of a pretty huge performance hit. Or, you used it in 640x480 to reduce the performance hit while still clearing up the jaggies. Because of that, I rarely used the FSAA on the V5. I would rather have the jaggies at a better FPS.

Comparing cost vs performance, I still can't rationalize a justification for buying a V5 rather than a V3. If I didn't already have mine, I wouldn't be buying one for today's prices. If it matters at all, I paid about $65 for my AGP version and about $75 for my PCI version. Even at those prices, it's still hard to justify purchasing one instead of a V3.

Arctic wrote:

I know Netbooks could still not be powerful enough for glide-emulation. I just wanted to exaggerate 🤣
In a few years they might be, right?

The netbook I owned in 2009 had an Atom N270 at 1.6ghz, hyperthreaded. It was comparable to a 1ghz P3 Coppermine. In another 8 years, we may indeed see some low-power netbooks that are capable of running the more demanding games. I certainly hope so. I really liked the portability and long battery life of my netbook, but it was just toooooooo ssssllllllooooowwwww.

KT7AGuy wrote:

Arctic wrote:

But what is the point of emulating glide on a retro system?

A ~$20 GF4 Ti4600 with a glide wrapper will run games better than a real V5 that will cost over $100. Not everybody has tons of cash to blow on a legacy PC.

Have you tried this?

I'm asking because I only tried nGlide on a Windows 98 machine with a very fast Athlon 64 and a GeForce FX 5800. It did perform beyond what a V5 can do, but I didn't try slower components.

I wonder what the overhead for the CPU and GPU is when running nGlide. It requires DX9, so I didn't even think about trying older cards 😀

Might be an interesting project...

I've tried it with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 AFAIR, performance was fine, the overhead is not too great. It certainly was faster than Voodoo5 though!

F2bnp wrote:

I've tried it with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 AFAIR, performance was fine, the overhead is not too great. It certainly was faster than Voodoo5 though!

Nice! What processor were you using?

Probably a Tualatin 1.4. Or maybe it was a Pentium 4 system? I honestly can't remember, so your best bet is to try it yourself or maybe get someone else's experience. I think I may have talked about it at some point, must have been back in 2010-2011 or so. I might look into my posts later on!

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I'm asking because I only tried nGlide on a Windows 98 machine with a very fast Athlon 64 and a GeForce FX 5800. It did perform beyond what a V5 can do, but I didn't try slower components.

I've been slowly assembling an old PC so a young relative of mine can play X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and Rogue Squadron with a real SideWinder 3D Pro. I'm also installing a nice large selection of other old pre-2000 games. It has a 1.8ghz P4 and 512mb rdram with a Ti4200-8X 128mb. This is the machine that is opening my eyes to the redundancy of real 3dfx hardware vs glide wrappers. I have Win98SE installed on it, so I have so far been avoiding nglide. I've been using both dgvoodoo and zeckensack's wrappers.

Simply put, this mediocre box smokes any real 3dfx hardware handily. However, and to be fair, I have not enabled any FSAA features on anything. I-War, Red Baron 3D, etc, all run much better than they ever would with a real V3 or V5.

Cool. I only tried nGlide, good to hear that other options work well. It's a great solution to have A3D sound as well as glide. Could be a good project to try out a few wrappers and work out the CPU and GPU requirements.

NGlide needs SM2.0 so all this GF4 haul is very strange.

Gamecollector wrote:

NGlide needs SM2.0 so all this GF4 haul is very strange.

That's odd. Perhaps I was using DgVoodoo then? Whatever, I don't want to spread FUD, someone else might as well try them both out and post their findings 😀.

Arctic wrote:

But what is the point of emulating glide on a retro system?

Isn't that the whole point of playing retro games through retro-emulation? 😜

Gamecollector wrote:

NGlide needs SM2.0 so all this GF4 haul is very strange.

I wasn't using nglide at all. I was using both dgvoodoo and zeckensack's wrappers. The PC runs Win98SE with a DX8 video card, so I figured nglide probably wouldn't work at all.

If I were doing this stuff on a modern PC, I would definitely be using nglide.

Well, I have tested glide games with Radeon 8500 SE + nGlide. Some games are ok, some aren't (chromakeying in Fighter Pilot as the example). Maybe later I will retest my test pack (322 games) with dx8.1 card and make a "dx8.1 compatible" list...