VOGONS


First post, by Justin1091

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Hi,

I'm playing baldurs gate 2 multiplayer and since it's an OpenGL game and I use a Voodoo5 I'm wondering about all the different OpenGL drivers available for this card.

Can anyone tell me a bit about these drivers? What are the pros and cons? I think some of then convert the OpenGL calls of the game to Glide?

The 3dfx MiniGL was actually released for Quake 2 because their (3dfx's) ICD driver was not so good right? I use the latest Voodoo5 driver in Windows 98 so perhaps the default OpenGL driver is better than the MiniGL?

What about other games? What do you guys use? I tried Wicked3D for baldurs gate with a Voodoo3 and it was a lot faster, but it did crash once and the UI flickers a little.

Thanks!

Reply 1 of 3, by leileilol

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MiniGL - developed for the original Voodoo cards to get GLQuake working - and only GLQuake and its derivatives (Half-Life, Hexen II, Quake2). When MiniGL was written (Jan 1997ish), OpenGL ICDs on consumer 3d hardware was not yet a thing.
ICD - What your official drivers ship with. Baldur's Gate 2 is tested against this driver (though it doesn't totally guarantee OpenGL stability for any hardware anyway)
Wicked3D - A Metabyte-developed driver intended for performance reasons, built for the Voodoo2 first and then the Voodoo3.
MesaFX - Brian Paul's Mesa3D library compiled for the 3dfx backend only. This generally supports the most extensions possible (to the point to fake Doom3 to "work" on V2 etc)

The ICD and MesaFX are the only real choices for the Voodoo5 here.

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Reply 2 of 3, by Fusion

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I believe the best OpenGL driver to use is the one from the most recent official 3dfx release build. I tried MesaFX, I didn't see any noticable difference in performance or quality. I'll admit I only tried Quake 3 and I think my Voodoo3 is bottlenecked by CPU (P3 800) anyways.

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Reply 3 of 3, by Justin1091

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Many thanks guys, that clarifies it!

I found out that opengl32.dll in C:\Windows\System is the 'standard OpenGL driver' reported by the game. 3dfxogl.dll is the '3dfx installed OpenGL' driver.
I might try MesaFX sometime, but I read somewhere it only works with beta (3rd party) glide3x.dll files.

@Fusion I had about the same framerate in Max Payne 1 with my Voodoo3 and Voodoo5 in my PIII 800 system, so your P3 800 bottlenecking it is probably correct. Note that this won't be the cause in every game! I'm not 100% sure but I think I had the same 3DMark99 score with both cards in that system.