1) Voodoo2 disables dithering for 1024x768. There's never dac filtering for this mode either (especially with SLI as that should disable it altogether). The same applies to single V2s running a z-less 1024x768 allowed by certain games.

2) Yep, scanline artifacts are a given wiht how SLI works. This is normal.

Voodoo3 doesn't have either of these issues at 1024x768 and higher 😉

Oh... well then.

I don't suppose there's a way to at least cheat the colours back to looking ok, is there?

I heard FastVoodoo drivers support anti-aliasing. If I have to stay with 800x600 maybe I could just enable this to improve visual quality a bit. How do you enable AA? I didn't see it in the control panel.

the scanline effect should be less noticeable on a CRT. vsync should get rid of it completely, at the cost of some extra input lag.

I don't remember any color issues when using V2 SLI at 1024x768. Could it be perhaps related to "SSTV2_VIDEO_24BPP" settings? It works when running 800x600 or less, however not at 1024x768, not without some glitches at least. Some info can be found here https://translate.google.cz/translate?sl=cs&t … f%3D4%26t%3D535

As far as anti-aliasing is concerned, I don't think it ever worked on V2.... except Quantum 3D Mercury, but this is not the case here. 😈

"24BPP" is a filter toggle as far as I can tell.

The only antialiasing you generally ever see is the edge AA on the 3dfx splash logo.

leileilol wrote:

"24BPP" is a filter toggle as far as I can tell.

The only antialiasing you generally ever see is the edge AA on the 3dfx splash logo.

We had the explanation in this thread:

(dither) 3dfx Voodoo image quality
(24bpp) Re: 3dfx Voodoo image quality

Also check my VGA grab images in first post for comparison (I repaired the links, nothing was lost).

elianda wrote:

We had the explanation in this thread: […]
Show full quote

leileilol wrote:

"24BPP" is a filter toggle as far as I can tell.

The only antialiasing you generally ever see is the edge AA on the 3dfx splash logo.

We had the explanation in this thread:

(dither) 3dfx Voodoo image quality
(24bpp) Re: 3dfx Voodoo image quality

Also check my VGA grab images in first post for comparison (I repaired the links, nothing was lost).

Thanks for the links. Actually the pictures in that thread are helpful because my UT menu screen looks WAY worse than that. I mean the colour banding is very bad compared to that.

That's gamma correction bug. Try to set all three gamma sliders to 1.0 intead of default 1.3. This should help.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

That's gamma correction bug. Try to set all three gamma sliders to 1.0 intead of default 1.3. This should help.

Unfortunately, that didn't change anything except reducing brightness as expected.

The fact that it looks just fine in 800 makes me think that this is just some environment variable getting flipped off at 1024. I just can't figure out why it would happen to me but not everybody else. I'm using FastVoodoo 4.6 with mismatched V2 cards.

Can I get the same effect that 800x600 has by changing one of the environmental variables in the registry?

Is it SSTV2_VIDEO_FILTER_DISABLE that needs to be set to 0 or is a different one toggled in 1024 mode?

leileilol wrote:

1) Voodoo2 disables dithering for 1024x768. There's never dac filtering for this mode either (especially with SLI as that should disable it altogether). The same applies to single V2s running a z-less 1024x768 allowed by certain games.

...and yet I fixed the problem by my last post 🤣.

Setting SSTV2_VIDEO_FILTER_DISABLE to 0 was what did it. 1024 must have been toggling it on so by turning it off all the colour banding goes away and it looks good again. I also tried AA, which didn't hurt anything and 24BPP caused artifacts as warned above.

To make these changes you have to go into the windows registry under local machine > Software > 3dfx interactive > Glide and add the above environment variable. Since the variable won't exist at that point, it means the card can change the setting itself, which it seems inclined to do when you go from 800 to 1024. Adding this variable prevents that by permanently disabling it.

The question is why did they disable it?

swaaye wrote:

The question is why did they disable it?

Good question. Because based on the other screenshots I see around the net, other users don't have this problem so at least with the drivers they're using, it probably isn't disabled. FastVoodoo does do some unique things though, in order to get mismatched cards to work. Maybe it was a compatibility thing.

In 3dfx's Glide sources, the filtering is forced off in SLI due to timing issues in between the two cards. I'm guessing FastVoodoo overrides their sanity checks in the name of "Fast", which wouldn't surprise me at all...

I wonder if there could be visible weirdness in the dithering with SLI then.

You mean as each card for itself renders 1024x384 the dithering is applied on each card on the 1024x384 image before it is interleaved?
or
If VSync is off then it filters between two sub images that are not from the same frame?

elianda wrote:

You mean as each card for itself renders 1024x384 the dithering is applied on each card on the 1024x384 image before it is interleaved?
or
If VSync is off then it filters between two sub images that are not from the same frame?

Both of those 😀

I think that having no dithering at all would still be the least desirable though.

leileilol wrote:

In 3dfx's Glide sources, the filtering is forced off in SLI due to timing issues in between the two cards. I'm guessing FastVoodoo overrides their sanity checks in the name of "Fast", which wouldn't surprise me at all...

But the filtering "was" off and I enabled it. It's the screenshots I've seen of other peoples' normal SLI setups where the graphics quality was actually good, suggesting they had something enabled that I did not. Do you instead mean that FastVoodoo gets their speed from NOT filtering 1024, whereas normal drivers do, because that would better explain why FastVoodoo is fast and looks like crap and why it looked better after I re-enabled filtering.