Even a tnt2 would be overkill (but still nice). The tnt2 ultra was back in de 90's reviewed on a p3-500 or so and is as fast as a voodoo3.

The voodoo1 will scale as far as a p2-400 or so but i think that's the perfect card for a 233mmx (i use that setup), voodoo2 will not be a lot faster on a p1 system and overkill.

I use a S3 Virge (for dos games) on my 233mmx/voodoo1 but a riva128/tnt1/tnt2/Matrox G200 would be fine choices as well.

Why would you have such an overkill combination like that? Might as well go further back than the GeForce/Radeon timeline and get a Matrox card for 2D and just use the Voodoo1 for 3D gaming. If you want to max out 95-98 games, you'd need a Pentium 3 and 256MB of RAM anyway. The P54 is holding you back there anyway. I wouldn't put a GeForce in there unless it was the cheaper option.

...Seriously....overkill.....

Between the choice of a V1 and a V2 i'd always go for the V2.

Why? Multitexturing helps. It doesn't matter if your CPU's a big bottleneck to it. It's an overall more efficient card than the V1 and has more matured drivers. It's even a better choice for a 486 class.

The screen filter's also relatively cleaner and doesn't drop purple lines everywhere. Instead it'll stretch a few pixels to 4 lines wide if you really notice them. Only the Voodoo2 seems to do this. Filter-wise, it's the odd duck of the whole Voodoo lineage

V2 SLI is overrated though. If 1024x768 glide is so important then just go get a V3.

Pentium MMX is slow, so expect it to hold you back quite a bit, however a Voodoo2 can be a lot faster than a Voodoo1 even on such a slow CPU.

This is because the Voodoo2 can do multitexturing, is clocked much higher than the V1, offers full triangle setup and more mature drivers as leilei suggested. A single Voodoo2 is more than enough however, I wouldn't pair it with a GeForce card for a few reasons:

a) You'll be using a VIA or ALi chipset most probably and both can be troublesome with AGP cards (not 3Dfx AGP cards however), so you might run into instability and other issues

b) Any GeForce card is total overkill for an MMX 233, like I said even a single Voodoo2 should max the CPU out, unless you want to run T&L enabled games such as MDK2 for the fun of it or maybe provide some Antialiasing.

c) If you use a 2D Matrox or S3 (or whatever else) card you'll be keeping it more period correct 😁

I know it’s overkill, but was just curious what f it would work. I have a PIII 1.4 Tualatin machine that i use for stuff this one wont run and then a faster machine for games after the PIII won’t run them. Just want to make the MMX machine the best I can, and since I have a bunch of cards I’m not using now or will be for a while, I figured I’d look into getting one into this build to take care of any non glide games from the era

Not so worried about period correct, just want to give the MMX the best experience I can

I have a Matrox AGP as well that I could pair with the Voodoo2 but I figured I’d see if I could bump it up some more for the heck of it. I could go Riva 128 / TNT / TNT2 as well

Thanks for the info on AGP. My board is an ASUS P5A with the ALI chipset, so perhaps the Matrox / Voodoo2 setup would work best

I find the big plus of my p1/v1 system the fact that every old 3dfx game just works out of the box thanks to the voodoo1. Voodoo2 needs more adjustments for these older games (settings, batchfiles or patches).

Otherwise i agree ofcourse and the voodoo2 is the better card in every way. But hey! the voodoo1 was here first and needs a nice system too. 🤣

I think the voodoo2 is better used in a fast k6 or p2/3 system. But yes, it will be a bit faster even on a p1 (or 486!).

blurry image, scanlines,little artifacts etc. etc. were just awesome voodoo1 features, Nvidia STILL doesn't have them!

F it, I guess I will pair the Voodoo2 with a Matrox AGP and go from there....I can see the rest would be pointless in the end,,,

leileilol wrote:

Between the choice of a V1 and a V2 i'd always go for the V2. […]
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Between the choice of a V1 and a V2 i'd always go for the V2.

Why? Multitexturing helps. It doesn't matter if your CPU's a big bottleneck to it. It's an overall more efficient card than the V1 and has more matured drivers. It's even a better choice for a 486 class.

The screen filter's also relatively cleaner and doesn't drop purple lines everywhere. Instead it'll stretch a few pixels to 4 lines wide if you really notice them. Only the Voodoo2 seems to do this. Filter-wise, it's the odd duck of the whole Voodoo lineage

V2 SLI is overrated though. If 1024x768 glide is so important then just go get a V3.

If your focus is on DOS, V1 gives you a bit more compatibility.

Watching thread with interest 😀

We are currently going through a similar conundrum

Seriously, use a Voodoo 1. Not only would that be more correct time-wise, you would also not waste a Voodoo 2. Yes, the Voodoo 2 may have better image quality, but then, why not also use a faster CPU to get more frames per second? Oh, and more RAM for newer games, and what not. That makes no sense. Just stay in the correct timeline, because only then games of that era will work best.

Also consider that you may build a faster system in the future which can fully utilize a Voodoo 2. And then you notice that you put it into your Pentium 1 where it just twiddle its thumbs...

And if you absolutely must use one of the listed Geforce cards, take the 256. Then you have at least a system with two milestone 3d cards in it (Voodoo1 and GF256). Something like a S3 Trio64 would be a better match, of course.

I have a Voodoo 5500 paired with my MMX 😵 . If the goal is to use the best possible compoent for the games you are intending to play then period correct is irrelevant. The best componnet could also be older then the main system, I have a 1988 sound card in the same setup. Instinctively you think that mixing components from differents eras would give you nothing but trouble but if you select the components carefully you can endup with something far superior than would normally be available.

derSammler wrote:

Seriously, use a Voodoo 1. Not only would that be more correct time-wise, you would also not waste a Voodoo 2. Yes, the Voodoo 2 may have better image quality, but then, why not also use a faster CPU to get more frames per second? Oh, and more RAM for newer games, and what not. That makes no sense. Just stay in the correct timeline, because only then games of that era will work best.

Also consider that you may build a faster system in the future which can fully utilize a Voodoo 2. And then you notice that you put it into your Pentium 1 where it just twiddle its thumbs...

And if you absolutely must use one of the listed Geforce cards, take the 256. Then you have at least a system with two milestone 3d cards in it (Voodoo1 and GF256). Something like a S3 Trio64 would be a better match, of course.

After looking things over and reading all this, I am gonna start with the Voodoo1 and GF 256, see how things go and make changes from there.....will let everyone know how it turns out..

This may sound odd but if I were you I would use a Matrox G450 PCI or AGP depending on motherboard for the simple fact that it has much superior 2D AND DVI compared to all your options. It will also be as fast as a GF2 Ultra with your CPU in 3D. I use the Mystique 220 in my build for similar reasons and I would upgrade to the G450 right away if picking contemporary hardware wasnt a concern to me.

lvader wrote:

If the goal is to use the best possible compoent for the games you are intending to play then period correct is irrelevant.

The best components are those that work well with each other without causing any bottlenecks. Also, for games of that era, say NFS2SE and POD, do you really think your Voodoo 5500 is the best component? Games were optimized for the hardware that existed back then.

Wonder what your definition of "best possible component" is in the first place, as the Voodoo 5500 is probably the worst example, being desperately out-dated on release already. I can't think of any system in which a Voodoo 5500 would be the "best possible component". But I digress. The options to choose from were clearly stated.

it clearly depends on the games bias, my pentium MMX targets games mostly between 92 and 96, althoght it will play games prior or after that quite well. It provides a high level of DOS compatibility, very high quality video (Both through VGA and DVI). The fact that it was dated at the time of release is irrelevant, it does things that virtually no other card can do.

Potential bottlenecks are also irrelevant if the game runs perfectly at the correct speeds. When I run with caches disabled there is a clear memory bottleneck but that enables my PC to run older games in an optimum way.

I felt like doing some necroposting just to share a though that usually is not really that present in the retro PC community.

Pentium MMX release date = End of 1996 start of 1997
Voodoo 2 release date = Beginning of 1998

I was there and i had a PC with MMX and voodoo 2 in it, it was as period correct as it gets, hermeneutically speaking people at the time didn't reason like today, if they bought a PC with a CPU from 97 they would enhance part of it with a GPU that came out a year later and developers definitely had that in mind, you just need to check a patch changelog for a game or a driver update.

Just putting this out there because most of the times "period correct" seems to mean more "maxed performance"

while that's a fair notion, recommending against putting the v2 in a pentium system isn't just some modern meme, reviewers at the time usually quite strongly pointed out that it really takes a pentium ii to benefit from the voodoo2. just from a quick search: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/voodoo2- … -3dfx,60-2.html

Testing shows that it takes at least a Pentium II 266 to see a significant impact of the Voodoo2 performance in game benchmarks and this only in case of high resolutions. At 640x480 most games won't let the Voodoo2 show it's full performance even in a Pentium II 300 system, which means that most likely even the upcoming Pentium II 400 will maybe only just deliver enough CPU power to max out the Voodoo2 . The K6 3D is the only Socket 7 candidate that could take the Voodoo2 closer to its limits, no currently available Socket 7 CPU is able to supply enough CPU power to really use the vast 3D force of the Voodoo2 .

and yeah, there are some games like forsaken (also mentioned in that article) that will run well on pentium mmx, and stuff like turok2 that has a console lineage, but most of the big 3d games from 1998 definitely need a pentium ii for decent performance, and for 1999 titles even the older pentium iis were getting quite slow. i can't quite follow the remark about developers taking the pentium MMX into account, because IMO in 1998-2000 there were a ton of misleading pentium mmx and even vanilla pentium minimum requirements on game boxes that really ought to have stated pentium ii instead. quake3, UT, homm3, diablo2 come to mind, with my favorite being half-life in software rendering on a p133.

auron wrote on 2022-12-29, 03:48:

while that's a fair notion, recommending against putting the v2 in a pentium system isn't just some modern meme, reviewers at the time usually quite strongly pointed out that it really takes a pentium ii to benefit from the voodoo2. just from a quick search: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/voodoo2- … -3dfx,60-2.html

Testing shows that it takes at least a Pentium II 266 to see a significant impact of the Voodoo2 performance in game benchmarks and this only in case of high resolutions. At 640x480 most games won't let the Voodoo2 show it's full performance even in a Pentium II 300 system, which means that most likely even the upcoming Pentium II 400 will maybe only just deliver enough CPU power to max out the Voodoo2 . The K6 3D is the only Socket 7 candidate that could take the Voodoo2 closer to its limits, no currently available Socket 7 CPU is able to supply enough CPU power to really use the vast 3D force of the Voodoo2 .

and yeah, there are some games like forsaken (also mentioned in that article) that will run well on pentium mmx, and stuff like turok2 that has a console lineage, but most of the big 3d games from 1998 definitely need a pentium ii for decent performance, and for 1999 titles even the older pentium iis were getting quite slow. i can't quite follow the remark about developers taking the pentium MMX into account, because IMO in 1998-2000 there were a ton of misleading pentium mmx and even vanilla pentium minimum requirements on game boxes that really ought to have stated pentium ii instead. quake3, UT, homm3, diablo2 come to mind, with my favorite being half-life in software rendering on a p133.

I do happen to agree with iraito, not many people were able to run these games at the highest quality and/or resolution with acceptable performance (higher framerates didn't matter as long as the game was playable). Also, when that article from Tom's Hardware came out in 1998, Pentium II computers were really expensive and wasn't an affordable option for budget-minded consumers.

Many people in retro communities these days tend to only look at introduction dates for each hardware with little regard on how actually the things were back then.

remember that prices on this stuff were falling rapidly at the time. the pii 333 had already been out for two months when that article came out, and the 100 mhz FSB models were literally around the corner, so i'm quite certain that pii 233/266 based machines were firmly pushing into the mainstream by then, with pentium mmx relegated to the low end, and shortly completely replaced by the celeron (outside of CPUs sold as upgrade processors for existing socket 7 users). from my testing, a pii 233 running the 3dfx minigl renderer of half-life performs acceptably enough to play through the game, while it's just unplayable on pentium mmx (unless you enjoy single-digit FPS at times...).

the price argument isn't very convincing to me given that the voodoo2 cards weren't that cheap themselves at launch, let alone the hyped SLI, so these reviews were essentially just saying to go with a voodoo1 and not waste your money if you didn't plan to upgrade to a better CPU any time soon. not to mention any console from that time would give a much better experience than watching some of these newer titles crawl on an outdated PC.