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Voodoo 1 vs Voodoo 2 in a Pentium 200 (non mmx), worth it?

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First post, by RYZINN

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I currently have a Pentium 1 200mhz with a Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo 1 card installed. Everything works perfectly. That being said, a friend of mine recently gave me a Diamond Monster 2, 12mb voodoo 2 card and I'm tempted to give it a go but I'm not sure this P200 system is worth bothering with. The Voodoo 1 card took a bit of work to get to run properly, and from what I've seen I might see some improvement in overall visual quality with some glide games but the P200 is probably going to bottleneck the voodoo 2 card. Kinda sucks, was hoping maybe I could get Unreal to run a little better with it but the Pentium 200 will probably hold me back regardless of which card I slot in.

Do you guys think it's worth swapping the cards or should I just stick to the 4mb voodoo 1? Further, would I have to reinstall drivers specific for the voodoo 2 or would the general 3DFX drivers (specifically vg-w9x-3.00.01) work for the voodoo 2 card?

Last edited by RYZINN on 2021-02-11, 01:13. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 7, by Unknown_K

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I would think a P2/P3 would be better for a Voodoo 2. I run my SLI V2 on a P3-500 system. I also have a V1 on a Pentium (233 I believe) system.

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Reply 3 of 7, by chinny22

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Dos games, you're better off with the V1 with its better compatibility.

A V2 will be held back on the P200 but it does have a few advantages for windows gaming.
The extra memory will allow higher resolutions.
I know NFS4 needed at least a V2 if you wanted in car dashboard maybe other games like that.

If you only want to have the one PC setup then maybe it's worth it.
but yeh the P200 paired with the V1 and C500 paired with the V2 is a much better balance.

Last edited by Stiletto on 2021-02-11, 19:05. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 4 of 7, by Pierre32

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Not much to add, just supporting the general sentiment. I've got a P200 + Voodoo 1 machine (DOS only) and it is such a delightful, perfect system. I've got my eye on a Voodoo 2, but that would be going into a P3 system.

Reply 5 of 7, by mwdmeyer

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I've got a Voodoo 2 in my Pentium 200 MMX. I wouldn't downgrade to a Voodoo 1.

The voodoo 2 has more texture memory, can run at 800x600 and it offloads some graphics functions that the voodoo 1 doesn't.

Yes a faster CPU would be better but you should notice an improvement by upgrading.

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Reply 6 of 7, by vetz

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Few benefits with that CPU. Some games will be able to run in 800x600 and you will get slightly more FPS in others (if it's noticable is a different case).

One thing that hasnt been mentioned is that the VGA output quality is generally a bit better on Voodoo2 compared to Voodoo1.

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Reply 7 of 7, by frudi

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If you only have a single system or have additional Voodoo 2 cards to spare, and you aren't primarily interested in running DOS glide games, then by all means, use the Voodoo 2 in your P200 system. It will be bottlenecked by the CPU, but it will still perform better than a Voodoo 1.

But since it sounds like you only have a single Voodoo 2 to use, I would put it into a more powerful system, something like a Deschutes P2 or Katmai P3 would be the perfect fit for it. Unreal is not going to run well on a P200 even with a Voodoo 2, neither will many other Windows 3D games from that time period.

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