Half-Saint wrote on 2022-04-05, 10:55:

I have this problem which I've been having with all of the Voodoo 3 cards that I came across so far and I find it very puzzling. […]
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I have this problem which I've been having with all of the Voodoo 3 cards that I came across so far and I find it very puzzling. Whenever I run 3D Mark it runs fine until it gets to the part where the dragon flies over the medieval town. That's when it freezes at some point.

The test bed is ASUS P5A-B and Windows 98SE. I haven't tried this on a different motherboard because I don't feel like setting up another AGP system but could it be the motherboard or is it a problem with 3D Mark itself?

Any ideas?

Cheers

Well, you're probably talking about 3DMark2001, then (no dragons in 3DMark 2000). 😀
Truthfully, 3DMark2001SE is way too new, too advanced (and too DirectX 8 😁 ) for Voodoo cards, so never bothered testing it with any of them (this benchmark is definitely GeForce 3+ territory).

If you really want to run 3DMark2001 on a Voodoo 3, I'd suggest testing newer third party drivers, maybe some of those will work better (the latest 3dfx reference drivers are too old).

No, I'm most definitely using 3D Mark 2000. First benchmark is a military helicopter (Apache?) and the second is the medieval town. I don't know where I got that dragon part from but I clearly remember it from the past. Weird...

Half-Saint wrote on 2022-04-05, 13:03:

No, I'm most definitely using 3D Mark 2000. First benchmark is a military helicopter (Apache?) and the second is the medieval town. I don't know where I got that dragon part from but I clearly remember it from the past. Weird...

Oh, OK! 😁
In that case, your build is probably not 100% stable. 3DMark2000 is a very good stress testing tool, and it will generally catch even the tiniest problems.
If you already tried a fresh Windows reinstall with just the bare minimum, then something else is probably going on. Are you overclocking the FSB / CPU?
Other things that might cause issues: dying capacitors, memory related problems.
Did you also try other video cards, does 3DMark2000 also show issues with them?

It passes fine on either my k6-3+ V3 2000 PCI rig, or my PIII/V3 3000AGP rig. I am using the stock 1.07.00 drivers for both.

Half-Saint wrote on 2022-04-05, 13:03:

No, I'm most definitely using 3D Mark 2000. First benchmark is a military helicopter (Apache?) and the second is the medieval town. I don't know where I got that dragon part from but I clearly remember it from the past. Weird...

The 3DMark2K medieval town has no dragon, it's just a fly-through. The dragon shows up for 3DMark2001.

As for the crashing, could be an an ill-matched driver/DirectX-combo if it always happens in the same exact spot. Stability issues tend to vary a little bit (the timing of the system crashes will differ more).

You can always increase your memory timings or drop the FSB to see if you are currently riding the line. Keep reducing the performance until you get a stable run (or figure out what the real culprit is).

FWIW, a Voodoo3 can handle 3DMark2001. It'll just skip nature and DOT3/EMBM/Pixel shader tests and default to 1024x768x16 (as 32bpp is the default). Third-party drivers shouldn't be neccessary (they can't do anything about the HAL core anyway).

Alright guys, thanks for the input. I'll try different drivers and maybe do a fresh install on a different motherboard.

Sorry for the necro but I'm having exactly the same problem... again.

So, today I successfully ran benchmarks on two Creative Voodoo Banshee 16MB PCI cards in 3DMark2000. I tried to benchmark a Voodoo3 3000 AGP and it froze during the medieval town scene as previously described. Now this is a completely different card. I added a large fan above the card and it was able to pass all the benchmarks fine in the end but there were some artifacts (vertical lines) in several demos.

I'm also unable to enable 3D acceleration in Grand Prix Legends for example or to run Ignition 3dfx.

Any ideas how to fix that?

EDIT: I'm currently testing a second Voodoo3 with added cooling. It froze in the middle of the medieval town despite cooling. I could see no artifacts in this one but the games won't run either.

Half-Saint wrote on 2023-05-10, 10:11:

Sorry for the necro but I'm having exactly the same problem... again. […]
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Sorry for the necro but I'm having exactly the same problem... again.

So, today I successfully ran benchmarks on two Creative Voodoo Banshee 16MB PCI cards in 3DMark2000. I tried to benchmark a Voodoo3 3000 AGP and it froze during the medieval town scene as previously described. Now this is a completely different card. I added a large fan above the card and it was able to pass all the benchmarks fine in the end but there were some artifacts (vertical lines) in several demos.

I'm also unable to enable 3D acceleration in Grand Prix Legends for example or to run Ignition 3dfx.

Any ideas how to fix that?

EDIT: I'm currently testing a second Voodoo3 with added cooling. It froze in the middle of the medieval town despite cooling. I could see no artifacts in this one but the games won't run either.

Sounds to me like we need to be able to determine if you have two damaged/broken Voodoo3's vs. if there is something wrong with your setup.
I would also just like to point out that it was "common knowledge" back when that boards with ALi chipsets were a little finicky to say the least. Just thought I'd throw that out there, since it could be an additional factor here.

If you had another system to test the Voodoo3's in with a different motherboard, that would help rule out the video cards themselves.

Are you still using the P5A-B board? I think that one has only AGP 1X support, which the Banshee actually is. But the V3 is AGP 2X and there might be a conflict.
I'd try the V3 cards in a faster Pentium 3 system. Also AmigaSport 3.0 seems to be one of the more stable drivers I've tested:

https://www.3dfxzone.it/dir/3dfx/voodoo3/drivers/windowsxp/

aaronkatrini wrote on 2023-05-11, 19:38:

Are you still using the P5A-B board? I think that one has only AGP 1X support, which the Banshee actually is. But the V3 is AGP 2X and there might be a conflict.
I'd try the V3 cards in a faster Pentium 3 system. Also AmigaSport 3.0 seems to be one of the more stable drivers I've tested:

https://www.3dfxzone.it/dir/3dfx/voodoo3/drivers/windowsxp/

Yes, still using the same board. Cards should be perfectly fine running in AGP 1x slots but it might be worth checking out. I've been considering building a socket 370 system for a while now. Might be a good excuse to start this project 😀

Since I have 3 x Asus P5A rev 1.04 boards, I can confirm that not only Voodoo 3 cards work with this platform (and almost any other SS7 platform, except for those with AGP power delivery problems), but they are 100% stable in every possible scenario. I can leave 3DMark2000 running for 24 hours in a loop on these systems (with either a Voodoo 3 or a GeForce card) and there won't be a single glitch (a bit of tuning is required to achieve 100% stability with GeForce cards, though).
You can see this extended benchmark session I did on one of the P5A boards, with a modded & overclocked K6-3+, and a Voodoo 3 3000 OC @ 3500 clocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFFNyexouGU
And the same platform with a GeForce 2 Ti @ Ultra clocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrV6vPGR3Yc

If you are experiencing instability, then something else is going on (memory incompatibility, capacitor problems, semi-faulty video card, some other specific peripherals/PCI cards that you might be using, etc).
Capacitor problems are unlikely, though. At least all of my boards came with Rubycon caps from the factory, which are still in excellent shape (but not sure if this was the norm for all P5A boards or not).