swaaye wrote:

.... but otherwise I just play around with old buggy worthless useless gimpy hardware because it's somewhat fascinating.

Same here 🤣 😜
I build 2 systems basically because I wanted to play through the Unreal campaign twice, once at normal on one computer and once on hard on another computer with different soundcard.
Is it normal for someone to build 2 computers from scratch just so he can go play a game he paid 1 lousy € for in a second hand shop?
I guess for a member here on Vogons...it is! 😁

F2bnp wrote:

I think you should change the - to &. The Voodoo 4 sucked then and sucks now. It's equal in power to a Voodoo 3, if not a tid bit faster, and it also has FSAA, but only 2x and it also has the same compatibility problems as the Voodoo 5. The Voodoo 3 is a pretty nice card, however it's not an add-on card so you can't use it with another card and its compatibility with older Glide games is worse than the Voodoo 2. You could probably hook up a PCI Voodoo 3 with another AGP card (preferrably GeForce 2 or something), but I'm afraid of there being incompatibilities.
I also think the passthrough quality of the Voodoo 1/2 is good enough, but you can just hook the two cards (Voodoo and other card) to a monitor switch box and select which cards' signal you want to watch on your monitor, so no problem at all.

Well, if the Voodoo4 is slightly faster then a Voodoo3, then the Voodoo4 would definitely be my preferred choice of the 2!
If those V4's weren't so expensive, I'd go get a couple more of them within a heartbeat! 😉

swaaye wrote:

Voodoo2 doesn't really have any advantages over V3-5. Voodoo1 is sometimes useful for really old DOS Glide games that don't recognize anything else.

Voodoo2 is an add-on card, and that's its main advantage. You can have whatever primary card you prefer, and then add a Voodoo2 as secondary. Why is this better than having a standard, more powerful PCI card (Voodoo3/4/5)? Because Voodoo 1 & 2 never will hang the whole system when a game freezes. Now we can build a retro PC just for a game or two, this advantage may sound irrelevant, but those constant lockups and reboots were a pain in the ass back when everything you had was a single machine running an unstable Windows 9x.

Another thumbs up for Voodoo 1 & 2 is their ability to bypass the OpenGL limitation of not being able to use hardware acceleration on secondary devices. This issue won't affect add-on cards with a standalone OpenGL driver (on the negative side, they won't run Direct3D apps under Win2K and higher, but that's another story). And don't forget that Voodoo 1 & 2 don't require any IRQ, I/O address or bus mastering, just a single memory range. They are the best upgrade for a system with scarce resources, a PCI slot with a shared IRQ, or with no bus mastering at all.

F2bnp wrote:

The Voodoo 4 sucked then and sucks now. It's equal in power to a Voodoo 3, if not a tid bit faster, and it also has FSAA, but only 2x and it also has the same compatibility problems as the Voodoo 5.

Voodoo 4 is MUCH BETTER than Voodoo 3. Actually it is what Voodoo 3 should have been, and never was: a Direct3D 6 compliant device with support for 32-bit rendering, textures larger than 256x256, texture compression, (sort of) programmable multitexturing, and so on. And it does not suffer the worst compatibility problem that Voodoo 3 & 5 have: it's an AGP 4x card, and therefore will work on any AGP slot ever made. Of course, PCI cards are preferable over AGP cards most of the times.

I have Voodoo3 and Voodoo2 cards, but I almost always only use my Voodoo2s, cause they look so damn 1337 when SLI'ed.

We have to add a new Voodoo to our comparisons: http://www.geforce.com/ 😀

I wonder if that might be what they're talking about....

Pure bliss there.

I particularly like how the 7.5GB RAM is actually in practice going to work like 32MB. 🤣 🤣

swaaye wrote:

Pure bliss there.

I particularly like how the 7.5GB RAM is actually in practice going to work like 32MB. 🤣 🤣

That's awesome. Can't wait. Does it support Quad-SLI?

*looks at calendar*

batracio wrote:

Voodoo2 is an add-on card, and that's its main advantage. You can have whatever primary card you prefer, and then add a Voodoo2 as secondary. Why is this better than having a standard, more powerful PCI card (Voodoo3/4/5)? Because Voodoo 1 & 2 never will hang the whole system when a game freezes. Now we can build a retro PC just for a game or two, this advantage may sound irrelevant, but those constant lockups and reboots were a pain in the ass back when everything you had was a single machine running an unstable Windows 9x.

Another thumbs up for Voodoo 1 & 2 is their ability to bypass the OpenGL limitation of not being able to use hardware acceleration on secondary devices. This issue won't affect add-on cards with a standalone OpenGL driver (on the negative side, they won't run Direct3D apps under Win2K and higher, but that's another story). And don't forget that Voodoo 1 & 2 don't require any IRQ, I/O address or bus mastering, just a single memory range. They are the best upgrade for a system with scarce resources, a PCI slot with a shared IRQ, or with no bus mastering at all.

Good one! You put it really well 😉
Extra stability for 9x 😀

I'm not really convinced of that claim. you can definitely still lock up your system with a secondary 3D card. and once 9x has had an app go haywire you will probably need to reboot anyway.

Yeah you're right on that. But having a secondary card is a benefit. I wish Nvidia had released a driver for their cards to use Glide...
Wasn't there a rumour once that with the then new GeForce 3 there would be glide support?

There were rumors of GF3 having Glide support, yes. I'm not sure what the deal was with that.

There actually was a Glide wrapper included with the Creative 3D Blaster TNT2. They called it "unified".
http://guru3d.com/CLGlide/index.htm

F2bnp wrote:

Yeah you're right on that. But having a secondary card is a benefit. I wish Nvidia had released a driver for their cards to use Glide...
Wasn't there a rumour once that with the then new GeForce 3 there would be glide support?

If my memory is not failing on me, i believe Creative did something like that in their driver set. It was more of an emulator, but still you were buying a Nvidia card that supported Glide... How odd is that? 😖

swaaye wrote:

There were rumors of GF3 having Glide support, yes. I'm not sure what the deal was with that.

There actually was a Glide wrapper included with the Creative 3D Blaster TNT2. They called it "unified".
http://guru3d.com/CLGlide/index.htm

I take it only works with Creative's cards though, correct? Oh well, I kept hearing it wasn't that great anyway.

Yeah a wrapper now I remember. It would have been really cool if nvidia added support for glide in their cards!

IIRC I could get my Voodoo2 to work in a 486 board, but my Voodoo3 works on none of them.
Kind of a waste but at least it would work should you have a board with a bad PCI implementation.

I'm debating on dropping my G200+Voodoo2 setup for a single Voodoo3 setup.
Mostly because I cannot get a proper passthrough cable or switch box short or cheap enough to be worth while.

It's a shame really, I like having a Voodoo2 but what's the point if you can't use it?

Well the Voodoo 3 is certainly better than the G200, save for the image quality perhaps. It has better DOS support though, matrox has a few problems with some games.
I think the problem is that many people like me want a fast primary graphics card and the Voodoo 2 for Glide and early D3D Games. That means using CPUs at 1GHz and higher and such, however in your case the Voodoo 3 is sweet, especially if you have something like a Pentium 3 500 to feed it 😁

TheLazy1 wrote:

Mostly because I cannot get a proper passthrough cable or switch box short or cheap enough to be worth while.

Can't you just use a monitor cable with the correct thingies on both ends? Perhaps it's longer, but since it's a cable mess behind there anyway...

I'd rather reduce the amount of mess, especially since most cables are at least 6 feet long.
Now I'm wondering if you could read the Voodoo2's framebuffer and display it on a separate window.

TheLazy1 wrote:

Now I'm wondering if you could read the Voodoo2's framebuffer and display it on a separate window.

Yes, there even were Voodoo(2?) cards which did away with the analog pass-through and copied the framebuffer over the PCI bus.