The biggest question I have is that was there actually anything really good done with S3TC worth futzing around with the savage 4 card for?

if you have other retro PCs to cover other bases, no problems, but if this is going to be your only retro PC, I'd probably steer you towards a geforce 2/geforce 4 mx card, along with the voodoo 1 and m3d cards to cover other bases.

I'd expect the possibility of more problems with the S3 card on a VIA chipset vs Nvidia or ATI cards, but that said, I've never really had any problems worth discussing with VIA AGP, as long as I install the correct drivers. I also am pretty sure the S3 Opengl drivers are pretty crap.

canthearu wrote:

The biggest question I have is that was there actually anything really good done with S3TC worth futzing around with the savage 4 card for?

Yes, Unreal with high-res textures for example.

hehe the Matrox m3d is a nice fit for older Thinkpads with PCI inside their Dockingstation 😁

You have to choose between S3TC (Savage only) and S3D (ViRGE only). There's no mix between them. Rest of your cards looks like 1st gen, so i would go into ViRGE/GX or GX2 (or DX from diamond) for S3D games. You won't be able use higher resolution than 640x480, like with rest cards (voodoo limited to 640x480, matrox too due lower performance).

Savage give you S3TC, 800x600 resolution, in older titles maybe 1024x768 and OpenGL support. But OpenGL can be replaced by minigl drivers for voodoo 1 and im not sure about performance of underclocked Savage 4 with 8MB sold as cheap card for desktop use. Keep in mind, that savage 4 can also overheats, have stability issues in some games (mostly quake engine based) when using agp texturing and many games needs to be tweaked with s3tweak to run without freezing. So its not worth of troubles using it at 3D card....If you need 3D card from S3, go for faster Savage 2000 (still bugged drivers) combined with Voodoo 2 / SLI for glide compactibility.

I think you'll need to be downclocking that CPU to avoid Voodoo Graphics speed sensitivity issues. The V2 would be free of that problem, but they require quite a bit more tuning for many games.

derSammler wrote:

canthearu wrote:

The biggest question I have is that was there actually anything really good done with S3TC worth futzing around with the savage 4 card for?

Yes, Unreal with high-res textures for example.

Yes, that is the exact reason I'd like to try it. Not only the unreal, also some other games with S3TC texture patches like HL. But as it widely known, the S3TC supported games are quite limited, and the performance of Savage 4 8MB version is quite poor. So im still thinking of it... 🤣

vlask wrote:

You have to choose between S3TC (Savage only) and S3D (ViRGE only). There's no mix between them. Rest of your cards looks like 1st gen, so i would go into ViRGE/GX or GX2 (or DX from diamond) for S3D games. You won't be able use higher resolution than 640x480, like with rest cards (voodoo limited to 640x480, matrox too due lower performance).

Savage give you S3TC, 800x600 resolution, in older titles maybe 1024x768 and OpenGL support. But OpenGL can be replaced by minigl drivers for voodoo 1 and im not sure about performance of underclocked Savage 4 with 8MB sold as cheap card for desktop use. Keep in mind, that savage 4 can also overheats, have stability issues in some games (mostly quake engine based) when using agp texturing and many games needs to be tweaked with s3tweak to run without freezing. So its not worth of troubles using it at 3D card....If you need 3D card from S3, go for faster Savage 2000 (still bugged drivers) combined with Voodoo 2 / SLI for glide compactibility.

So many helpful ideas, thanks buddy.

I know that Virge chip might be the better partner for the 1st-gen 3D add-in cards generally. But I got another MMX 133 retro rig with integrated 2MB Virge onboard, I think that is enough for the normal 486/pentium level retro dos games or even S3D games. So this rig is mainly aimed for those later 90s high performance demanding dos games and early win9x games with rare APIs support at its max 3D speed, with no CPU bottleneck hits and faster HDD transfer speed. Besides, the Virge's 2D speed is quite slow with poor color and resolution support in win9x. I wish to connect the primary graphic card to an LCD in 1280x960, which is perfectly suitable for upscaled 640x480/400 dos and windows games. And the image quality of Virge is quite unstable, something very depends on the Manufacturers. This is the main reason Im thinking of using a low specs Savage 4, fully DX 5.0 support, much faster 2D speed, much better color and high resolution support in win9x desktop, with still excellent dos games compatibility.

I may build up another rig with a 800Mhz ~ 1Ghz Pentium 3, a PCI voodoo3 3000 and an AGP Savage 2000 or Matrox G400 (G400 preferred since it got better image quality with decent OpenGL compatibility according to Phil's video reviews, btw Savage 2000 is very hard to be found in Japan...) for those DX5~6/voodoo2 era/early OpenGL games. IMHO, Voodoo 3 3000/3500 is a perfect replacement for Voodoo2 Sli, with stronger performance and much better image quality but only one interface slot occupied.

Another question: will a Pentium3 533/667 become the bottleneck for Savage 2000 or high specs Savage 4 (like 32MB version)? if not, I may find one for the rig.

firage wrote:

I think you'll need to be downclocking that CPU to avoid Voodoo Graphics speed sensitivity issues. The V2 would be free of that problem, but they require quite a bit more tuning for many games.

Yes, the CPU clock could be lower into 266/333Mhz when FSB set in 66Mhz, that is equal to MMX or PRO 233~350Mhz IMO, very decent for high performance demanding 3D dos games and early win9x speed sensitive games. Other dos games will be handled in another rig or DOSBOX.