VOGONS


Worst fastest early 3D cards

Topic actions

Reply 240 of 249, by 386SX

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

aT3D and Ultimate Race Pro with Direct3D almost all enabled beside gouraud shading that decrease a lot frames/s. Fraps doesn't work here but frame rate and graphic is ok, without big errors in rendering.

Attachments

Reply 241 of 249, by 386SX

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

aT3D and Resident Evil 2, few graphic errors in the background image similar to Final Fantasy 8 but with Rendition rendering path. At least compared to RE1 the in-game background can be seen.

Attachments

  • RE2_aT3D_2.jpg
    Filename
    RE2_aT3D_2.jpg
    File size
    111.63 KiB
    Views
    582 views
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception
  • RE2_aT3D_4.jpg
    Filename
    RE2_aT3D_4.jpg
    File size
    120.22 KiB
    Views
    582 views
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 243 of 249, by Takedasun

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie
386SX wrote on 2024-04-02, 09:38:

I searched all the versions I could find and there are few 04.3.203x ones which was a good start, I don't have links. It would be interesting to find archived official pages that should even have that .2039 that was not archived from the company webpage. The Voodoo Rush road seems the easy one to find more files to work with.

386SX wrote on 2024-04-18, 16:48:

Meanwhile I still wonder if someone might have some old hard to find Voodoo Rush/CD driver or Generic drivers CD collections where to find early drivers up to summer 1997.

Filename
Alliance_at3d_2039_VRush.zip
File size
388.45 KiB
Downloads
7 downloads
File license
Public domain
386SX wrote on 2024-04-14, 18:19:

... a bit newer driver.

Can you share this driver?

Reply 244 of 249, by 386SX

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t
Takedasun wrote on 2024-04-19, 00:57:
Alliance_at3d_2039_VRush.zip […]
Show full quote
386SX wrote on 2024-04-02, 09:38:

I searched all the versions I could find and there are few 04.3.203x ones which was a good start, I don't have links. It would be interesting to find archived official pages that should even have that .2039 that was not archived from the company webpage. The Voodoo Rush road seems the easy one to find more files to work with.

386SX wrote on 2024-04-18, 16:48:

Meanwhile I still wonder if someone might have some old hard to find Voodoo Rush/CD driver or Generic drivers CD collections where to find early drivers up to summer 1997.

Alliance_at3d_2039_VRush.zip

386SX wrote on 2024-04-14, 18:19:

... a bit newer driver.

Can you share this driver?

Thanks but the 2039 is already the version I've been using. Anyway it's the right period to look for with the very next versions would be interesting to find but the Voodoo Rush releases doesn't work so far, seems deeply customized imho. The best ones would be compiled / released from Alliance in those few months but seems lost.

Reply 245 of 249, by DEAT

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie
DEAT wrote on 2024-04-01, 23:42:
386SX wrote on 2024-03-31, 18:59:

Alliance at3D with an old uncommon driver

Do you have a link to this "uncommon" driver? Any version information?

JustJulião wrote on 2024-04-02, 17:44:

Can you post the driver? You'd just have to pack it in an archive if you don't have the links.

Putas wrote on 2024-04-14, 10:37:

now I want to give AT3D a second look. My focus on the latest drivers is sometimes a weakness.

Takedasun wrote on 2024-04-19, 00:57:

Can you share this driver?

386SX wrote on 2024-04-02, 09:38:

I don't have links.

I've decided to do some legwork on this seeing as 386SX continues to refuse to post links or even upload files for reasons completely unknown. So far, I've found the following drivers:

2031
2036
three variants of 2039
2043
2045
2052
2059
two variants of 2063
2071
2072
2073

The three files that are important are PROMDD32.DLL, PROMTN.DRV and PROMTN.VXD - the most critical being PROMDD32.DLL as that is what handles Direct3D support. The three variants of 2039, 2043, 2045 and the first variant of 2063 were found on Hercules driver CDs posted on archive.org, the rest were all found on DriverGuide. I've attached all except 2073, as that is missing PROMDD32.DLL since it's a Voodoo Rush driver and the PROMTN.DRV/VXD files will work on a standalone AT3D card.

Using my standalone AT3D card, I noticed that trying to use 2043, 2045, the third variant of 2039 and the second variant of 2063 drivers as-is will not display anything other than standard VGA, so I'm guessing they need a Voodoo Rush card (maybe specifically a Hercules Stingray 128/3D) but I wasn't particularly interested in pulling out my A-Trend Helios 3D to confirm that. 3dfx Archives - The Collection & Discussions Thread is lacking a mirror of A-Trend Helios 3D Driver CD, so I have no idea if that has another driver with the three important files. The second variant of 2063 and 2071 are missing the PROMDD32.DLL files, but they're included as part of experimenting with mixing different versions of PROMDD32.DLL with PROMTN.DRV/VXD.

As for PROMDD32.DLL itself, the second variant of the 2039 DLL appears to be the best one overall and I have extensively documented compatibility with almost 200 games with hardware acceleration support:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ppeiH … 7BolJrLYk4r9D8/

The biggest issue is that a good portion of games will crash the system in some way if the desktop resolution is not set to 640x480x16b, while a very small number of games will crash if the desktop resolution does not match the game resolution if >640x480 - I did my initial testing in 800x600x16b and once I clued in to what was going on, I deliberately kept testing and noting which games are sensitive to resolution changes with the drivers. There doesn't seem to be any difference in stability regardless of what PROMTN.DRV/VXD are used.

2043 and 2045 PROMDD32.DLL files are completely useless and quick testing shows that they will not run anything hardware accelerated, not even Forsaken which does have the ability to run the hardware accelerated version on 2D-only cards, even if it does produce a rather amusing result where lightmaps and transparency are non-existent. The 2052 PROMDD32.DLL seems as useless as the 2072 DLL. The 2031 PROMDD32.DLL does function, and while it is notably more broken in rendering than either of the two different 2039 PROMDD32.DLL files it still does a better job than >2052.

Curiously, I've also noticed that there is a difference in performance with Incoming with changing the PROMTN.DRV/VXD but there's various implications - 2052 has the fastest performance, but there's minor blit corruptions with icons on the desktop. >2059 is slightly behind in performance and has desktop corruption issues on Pentium III CPUs, but has no issues whatsoever with a VIA C3. 2039 is the slowest, but works perfectly. I've included my own modded drivers (based off the 2072 package) that mixes the later 2039 PROMDD32.DLL with the 2052 PROMTN.DRV/VXD, and another that mixes the later 2039 PROMDD32.DLL with the 2073 PROMTN.DRV/VXD. Otherwise, you can use the 2039a package for what appears to be the best official package.

Attachments

  • Filename
    Alliance_AT3D_2.zip
    File size
    4.16 MiB
    Downloads
    8 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception
  • Filename
    Alliance_AT3D_1.zip
    File size
    3.97 MiB
    Downloads
    9 downloads
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 246 of 249, by 386SX

User metadata
Rank l33t
Rank
l33t

As long as I am testing this video card without being sure of the logic of the results I didn't like to suggest half ideas, drivers or links and probably ending up in broken vga installations and errors. If I had some definitive idea of the "best" driver , mixing or how to mix it I would have already said that if there were more drivers to work with that I still hope to find. So far I am still using the same second 1997 2039 DLL with the 2036 DRV and VXD while most other mix gave me more problems. But I imagine some of the later 204x DRV/VXD/DLLs we can't find were probably still oriented to the aT3D basic 3D capabilities but the only/most OEM ones even sharing the same driver version were imho customized for their cards already in the AT25 territory. But the old DLL sizes was slowly getting larger and imho the Alliance compiled versions might have been still oriented to the single card too at least for a while. The 205x versions just like the 207x were probably not single-aT3D oriented anymore (while the 2031 still maybe was but lack some speed, features and fixes).

Reply 248 of 249, by justin1985

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

Has anyone ever compared the S3 Savage cards with the VIA integrated versions? Or the early VIA integrated Trident CyberBlade with the card version?

VIA integrated chipsets seem a confusing mess of which have which graphics cores. I've definitely got one in a DigiPOS system that gets reported as a Trident CyberBlade but has S3 logos all over the driver package! PLE133 ?

Do the VIA S3 ProSavage, Unichrome etc support the custom S3 versions of 90s games? Would they match the performance of the discrete versions?

Reply 249 of 249, by lti

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

I have one motherboard with a VIA KN133 chipset (S3 TwisterK, which is some kind of ProSavage variant). Its drivers don't support the Metal API, but they might support S3TC (I don't remember if I tried it). They won't perform as well as a discrete Savage card because they're sharing RAM with the CPU, and performance will depend on RAM speed.