Have you tried a different/better VGA cable between the Voodoo1 and your monitor?

Is it only at certain refresh rates and/or resolutions?

What specific games?

Thanks for these suggestions. I had already ruled out the VGA cable.

Refresh rates, games, drivers all have no bearing on the issue. This blurry picture quality happens no matter what the computer is doing. This makes me think it's an issue at the hardware/physical level, and there's a chance it's normal for this card, I'm just not sure. It's interesting that it looks so bad to me that it actually feels like a step down from the software renderer.

I managed to get some video of it:

Windows startup: https://youtu.be/jdVdbSrOKpI

Quake II: https://youtu.be/Nv2PwklkxjI

Windows startup: https://youtu.be/jdVdbSrOKpI

The Voodoo 1 is not doing anything when you're using Windows, so the problem is most likely your VGA monitor. Try a different one.

The diagonal dancing lines is interference. The Voodoo2 also does that. It's far more noticeable on LCDs.

The ingame blurriness in your Q2 video though (i.e. the 3-pixel purple streak off that edge) ? That's normal and by design. That is the screen filter and it is working properly to save your eyes from ICKY GRAINY DITHER PATTERNS. There's environment variables you can set to turn this off if you desired (SST_VIDEO_FILTER_THRESHOLD = 0x000000 off the top of my head, but probably wrong). The default gamma of 1.7 also heavily accentuates this filter, so turning that down to 1.0 should make the 3dfx appear like the other contemporary 3d video cards of the era.

Yeah there's not a lot of awareness about the filter. It's an important aspect of 3dfx that's gone ignored by wrappers, emulators, and retrospectives. I had to do my own clean room research to implement it for PCem's Voodoo Graphics / Voodoo2 emulation a couple of years ago. MAME doesn't have this yet, but should, and i've made an issue to raise awareness about the relevant register involved...

leileilol wrote:

The diagonal dancing lines is interference. The Voodoo2 also does that. It's far more noticeable on LCDs.

The ingame blurriness in your Q2 video though (i.e. the 3-pixel purple streak off that edge) ? That's normal and by design. That is the screen filter and it is working properly to save your eyes from ICKY GRAINY DITHER PATTERNS. There's environment variables you can set to turn this off if you desired (SST_VIDEO_FILTER_THRESHOLD = 0x000000 off the top of my head, but probably wrong). The default gamma of 1.7 also heavily accentuates this filter, so turning that down to 1.0 should make the 3dfx appear like the other contemporary 3d video cards of the era.

Yeah there's not a lot of awareness about the filter. It's an important aspect of 3dfx that's gone ignored by wrappers, emulators, and retrospectives. I had to do my own clean room research to implement it for PCem's Voodoo Graphics / Voodoo2 emulation a couple of years ago. MAME doesn't have this yet, but should, and i've made an issue to raise awareness about the relevant register involved...

Thanks a lot, this is all great info. I had a feeling it might be normal for these cards. I'll play around with the environment variables.

I've been testing some pretty demanding games for this system (the Voodoo is in a Pentium Pro 200 w/ 64mb EDO ram) such as Half-Life, Shogo, Unreal, and even Jedi Knight gives it a good workout. The one game I can still play online with *real* players is Quake II, as the http://tastyspleen.net DM server has people on it pretty much 24/7. It's cool to be able to hop in and play real DM with real players with a real framerate of... like 25. 🤣

I am currently using my P200MMX with V1.
I did not test HL1 but Unreal is quite OK in 512x384. I never thoght that it gets more than 10fps, but it's obviouslky relatively smooth.
Q2 seems to be too slow (stuttering) in my opinion.