I think that's kind of to be expected. V3-V5 should be unbeatable for the time period that you're focusing on (1995-1999) — those are golden years of Glide, after all. But if you want to go past that (say, 2000-2003) — that's where Voodoo lost its ground. You can see games gradually dropping Glide support and as a result GF2 or GF3 would be a better card for games that came in those years.

If you don't ever play above 1024x768 nor games released after late 1999-early 2000 then there's little need to change that 3000 of yours. 😀

Really, it was just when Quake 3 Arena was released that games started benefiting from the Geforce. 512x512 textures, 32bpp, trilinear filtering, higher polygon counts.. the advantages were starting to become more noticeable by that point. Before that though, I say 85% of developers worked with 3dfx's feature set as the target hardware for their games, and it clearly shows when you want to play a game like Unreal(without UTGLR) and the Voodoo3 surpasses all of its competitors, both IQ and performance wise.

subhuman@xgtx wrote:

If you don't ever play above 1024x768 nor games released after late 1999-early 2000 then there's little need to change that 3000 of yours. 😀

Really, it was just when Quake 3 Arena was released that games started benefiting from the Geforce. 512x512 textures, 32bpp, trilinear filtering, higher polygon counts.. the advantages were starting to become more noticeable by that point. Before that though, I say 85% of developers worked with 3dfx's feature set as the target hardware for their games, and it clearly shows when you want to play a game like Unreal(without UTGLR) and the Voodoo3 surpasses all of its competitors, both IQ and performance wise.

Yes, and that is part of the issue. I was hoping to target 1998-2000 with this system, but the problem is a card that will perform good at demanding 2000 games (NOLF, Thief II, Deus Ex, etc.) kind of bring a Voodoo 3 to its knees, but anything that handles them well (aside from a Voodoo 5 I suppose) fails at accelerating many games from 1998-99.

I guess 2000 is a different beast altogether and most games of that year are better run on Tualatin and onwards with DX7+ hardware. I wwas hoping 98-2000 could have been considered a single era, but alas, not really.

appiah4 wrote:

subhuman@xgtx wrote:

If you don't ever play above 1024x768 nor games released after late 1999-early 2000 then there's little need to change that 3000 of yours. 😀

Really, it was just when Quake 3 Arena was released that games started benefiting from the Geforce. 512x512 textures, 32bpp, trilinear filtering, higher polygon counts.. the advantages were starting to become more noticeable by that point. Before that though, I say 85% of developers worked with 3dfx's feature set as the target hardware for their games, and it clearly shows when you want to play a game like Unreal(without UTGLR) and the Voodoo3 surpasses all of its competitors, both IQ and performance wise.

Yes, and that is part of the issue. I was hoping to target 1998-2000 with this system, but the problem is a card that will perform good at demanding 2000 games (NOLF, Thief II, Deus Ex, etc.) kind of bring a Voodoo 3 to its knees, but anything that handles them well (aside from a Voodoo 5 I suppose) fails at accelerating many games from 1998-99.

I guess 2000 is a different beast altogether and most games of that year are better run on Tualatin and onwards with DX7+ hardware. I wwas hoping 98-2000 could have been considered a single era, but alas, not really.

Maybe you could save up some money and give Voodoo3 PCi - Voodoo2 SLI a chance? (plus a cheap VGA Splitter if you want to avoid passthrough degradation or plugging-unplugging)

If you decide to go either way you won't really need a secondary system to do what you could already achieve do with your current setup 😉

The geforces suck for compatibility. I prefer the matrox g400 over the voodoo 3. About the same speed, give or take, but better quality.

The problem is we were used to lower performance back then too. There is no perfect solution. With old hardware you have to be happy with compromise.

I like using Zeckensack's Glide emulator on 9x in some cases. Best to use with at least GeForce FX for shader features needed with Glide emulation. I have a Voodoo5 but actually prefer this in most cases because the Voodoo5 5500 isn't really fast enough for 1600x1200 in some Glide games.

I preferred my GF2GTS over the Voodoo3 in the day, as I wanted to play newer games at the time, and drop that 16-bit color limitation along with it and have FSAA 😐 and as an artist this was very important

There's alot of work arounds.

Glide emulation is one I'm trying out now as i can use a hdmi kvm with my quadro fx 3000 and get higher resolutions and performance than 3dfx cards.

I was using a ti4600 agp and a voodoo 3 2000 pci before and that was fine. Just use bios to select what card you want to use.

You could also use a voodoo 3-5 agp and somthing like a fx 5500 pci or so.

I think the only Glide wrapping I ever had to do was for Outlaws using XGL200. This was before the D3D driver was released for it

This is one of my favorite perks of having a decent collection that if something isn't suited or I decide to use a different flavor I can, I am always collecting cards especially when the interest is low and prices are very low.

Another thing I really need to point out; after reverting to the Voodoo 3 I can tell you that 3dfx's 2D quality was lightyears ahead of nVidia - you really need to experience the two back to back to appreciate the difference.

The signal quality varies among NV cards. Some are terrible, some are as good as can be. If I remember right, with GF4 they finally tried to address this problem among their board manufacturers.

3dfx and ATI had tighter control over it the entire time. Except Voodoo Rush. And ATI had some interference issues with at least 9700 (scrolling lines in image).

swaaye wrote:

The signal quality varies among NV cards. Some are terrible, some are as good as can be.

Definitely. The Canopus Spectra series of TNT/Geforce cards with the interchangeable daughterboards have a fantastic video output which is worth seeing for yourself

I tried to write a shader about that once.

A texture shader to provide the strange 16x16 dither pattern would be the appropriate Geforce-icing before this vga post 😜