VOGONS


Rendition Verite Thread

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Reply 40 of 652, by swaaye

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keropi wrote:

vHexen II looks very nice....
this thread is VERY interesting, thanks for all contributing to it!

Tis fun. I have to find another game with a screenshot function.....

Reply 41 of 652, by swaaye

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retro games 100 wrote:

Wow, Grand Prix Legends looks even nicer! 😁

Yup it is perty! It's also a quality simulation.

One quirk to it though is some z sorting problems with scenery and stuff. Sometimes things will be visible when they should be hidden. You can see this in some of the screenshots. They probably skipped z-buffering. This isn't uncommon for '90s 3D games. V1000 in particular takes a big hit from z-buffering.

Reply 42 of 652, by swaaye

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I just remembered that I wanted to mention how incredibly ugly GLQuake is on Voodoo1. Oh my. Compared to any other card I've seen, Voodoo gives you the most amazingly washed out muddy image.

I'd forgotten about this aspect of the Voodoo until running my Righteous 3D alongside the Verite cards yesterday. I know there are some ways to tweak the output, but wow by default it is ugly ugly. No need to mess with the Verite card settings.

Reply 43 of 652, by bushwack

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swaaye wrote:

I just remembered that I wanted to mention how incredibly ugly GLQuake is on Voodoo1. Oh my. Compared to any other card I've seen, Voodoo gives you the most amazingly washed out muddy image.

I'd forgotten about this aspect of the Voodoo until running my Righteous 3D alongside the Verite cards yesterday. I know there are some ways to tweak the output, but wow by default it is ugly ugly. No need to mess with the Verite card settings.

Yeah the Verite does have the better image quality over the Voodoo, but I dont think it's all that much. I'd rather play with the Voodoo for the better framerate. By the time the nVidia Riva came in, it was all the rage to cut down the image quality of the Voodoo. Till the V2 came out of course.

Swaaye are you running a CRT or LCD with these cards?

Reply 44 of 652, by swaaye

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19" CRT

I started my 3D card trek out with the Voodoo1 back in 1997. Image quality wasn't much of a concern initially because anything was better than my previous 5x86 sys. But I started to get curious about it because the Voodoo was definitely very blurry and washed out. I tweaked the gamma levels and tried out some of the other options.

At first with that sys, I had a Matrox Mystique 220 alongside the Voodoo1. Believe it or not but sometimes I preferred to run the pixely Mystique 3D accel instead! I remember playing Jedi Knight with the Mystique. Cripsy pixelation and stipple transparency, or extreme blur? That is the question. 😀

Then in 1998, I bought a $50 Diamond Stealth II S220 (first Verite exposure) and briefly played with it. Several months later I got a Matrox G200 (it came out shortly before TNT). The Voodoo quickly fell by the wayside because I really liked what I saw visually with those cards. I never got a Voodoo2. I went to TNT eventually, then to G400.

In retrospect I think the best card of 1999 and 2000 was the Voodoo3. The others had their issues and lacked Glide which really was a huge disadvantage at the time. Voodoo3 got the wrong rep courtesy of the moron review sites and their obsession with 3DMark and 32-bit color that was too slow anyway. And I think G400 was way overrated for games. WAY too many issues that I had first hand experience with.

Reply 45 of 652, by bushwack

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swaaye wrote:

19" CRT

I started my 3D card trek out with the Voodoo1 back in 1997.

What no Virge? The Virge was fun yet disappointing at the same time. Descent II with the Virge patch was sooo pretty, yet sooo slow. 😒 My next card was the Techworks Ultimate 3D that featured the Cirrus Logic Laguna3D chip that was a complete failure. Creative also had a card based on the same Cirrus chip called the Graphics Blaster 3D, not to be confused with the Graphics Blaster 3D that ran off the VLB bus and used Permedia's Glint chip. After the Techworks card I bought a Voodoo 1 and almost got motion sickness the first time I played Descent 2. It was a awesome.

I ran a V2100 along with my Voodoo sometime in between 97-98 and preferred the v2100 for some games. I remember playing Whiplash on the Verite over the Voodoo. Then I upgraded to a Voodoo2 and the other cards were kicked to the curb, Well I used the Verite for 2D anyway.

Reply 46 of 652, by bushwack

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swaaye wrote:

In retrospect I think the best card of 1999 and 2000 was the Voodoo3. The others had their issues and lacked Glide which really was a huge disadvantage at the time. Voodoo3 got the wrong rep courtesy of the moron review sites and their obsession with 3DMark and 32-bit color that was too slow anyway. And I think G400 was way overrated for games. WAY too many issues that I had first hand experience with.

+1
I think the Voodoo 3 is the best card for 1999 for sure. Playing Unreal with it was amazing. You could run any game with it, plus Glide games. 32bit color was overrated and slower.

I had a Radeon VIVO in 2000, I was disappointed with it some what, mainly for the fact the drivers sucked and many games had graphic glitches. Couldn't tell much about 32bit gaming, maybe cause games were still written in 16bit I dunno. Plus I paid $280 i think for it, and it really wasn't that much faster then the Voodoo3, but it did 32bit color WOOOooooh. Playing Black and White with it was cool though. I wondered how the game performed with a Voodoo3.

Reply 47 of 652, by swaaye

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bushwack wrote:

What no Virge? The Virge was fun yet disappointing at the same time. Descent II with the Virge patch was sooo pretty, yet sooo slow. 😒

Actually, I originally bought a STB Nitro 3D (Virge GX) for my big upgrade in 97 to a Pentium II. But it would lock up almost immediately doing just 2D in Windows. After searching online I discovered that there was some problem between my Supermicro mobo and ViRGE that caused freezes.

So I returned that card and went with the Matrox Mystique 220 and it worked fine. I was kinda bummed about not being able to play around with the Virge. So I finally got a Nitro 3D again, sometime last year.

bushwack wrote:

My next card was the Techworks Ultimate 3D that featured the Cirrus Logic Laguna3D chip that was a complete failure. Creative also had a card based on the same Cirrus chip called the Graphics Blaster 3D

I have that Creative Graphics Blaster 3D in the drawer here! I was always curious about that card too. Read about it back in the day but I've heard that it's super terrible so I haven't gotten around to trying it out.

I am a real addict when it comes to 3D cards. From the first VLB 3D Blaster. So over the years I've tried to pick up everything that I always wanted to try.

Reply 48 of 652, by retro games 100

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Will a STB Nitro 3D (Virge GX) be the best option for those special "Virge powered" games like Descent 2, Terminal Velocity and a bunch of others. I tried a Diamond Stealth 2000 3D Pro card with Descent 2, and the Virge chip was not detected. I'm sure the non-Pro card would work OK. I guess I'm looking for a "325" based card or 100% compatible. Thanks.

Reply 49 of 652, by swaaye

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No the GX is also not detected sometimes (maybe always with S3D stuff). Very unfortunate cuz the DX/GX are quite a bit faster than the original. The VX is the slowest for 3D, btw.

Reply 51 of 652, by swaaye

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I picked up a Diamond Stealth 3D 3000 (Virge VX) years ago. It had a video memory expansion board installed even. And then I tried it and it was super blurry at any sort of high res!! So much for it being a high-end 2D card. 😀

Reply 52 of 652, by keropi

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Virge VX is actually slower than DX part, there is a thread here that I have tested both cards (a Diamond 3d 2000pro) and a 8MB VX card (diamond too IIRC) ... Malik pointed that speed difference and I have benched both:

PCPBENCH stealth3000/8MB (NOLFB) -> 30.4 fps
PCPBENCH stealth2000pro/4MB (NOLFB) -> 37.5 fps
PCPBENCH stealth2000pro/4MB (LFB) -> 55.3 fps

ps. the 2000pro is a very nice card, I had one with my p200mmx machine, one game to try with Virge chip is CROC: Legend of the Gobbos 😀 ... and my copy of descent2 worked fine with my 2000pro, I remember because I was playing that 😅

Reply 59 of 652, by keropi

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😀 I got mine from eBay for ~7$ complete, looks like it had little use too!
Never actually tried the mpeg module though

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