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?

What I can tell you is that 3DMark should work fine with Asus P5A and Voodoo 3 cards. I recently did a benchmark, actually, where I also tested 3DMark2000, you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFFNyexouGU

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.