Only for a Windows 2000 beta driver.

leileilol wrote on 2022-05-11, 16:26:

Only for a Windows 2000 beta driver.

Thanks, I think I found it.

https://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1459

I think there are linux drivers to accomplish this too.

That's pretty cool, makes my eyes hurt just thinking about it though.

Widely adopted move to 3d hardware accelerated compositing window managers that happened in the past 15 years or so theoretically made all voodoo cards capable of displaying ordinary desktop.
Windows "Desktop Window Manager" draws desktop as a Direct3D surface since Vista, various Linux (Xgl, AIGLX and then mainstream Xorg)implementations use OpenGL
Are there any madmen who would like to update/make drivers for voodoo to accomplish this? Windows is out of the question because of hardware (in)capabilities, but linux opengl accelerated desktop could be doable.

EDIT:
Actually I am late to the party. There is xf86-video-voodoo driver which seems to be doing just that and also there used to be sstfb frame buffer module.
EDIT2:
And also xf86-video-glide:

This driver is mainly for Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 boards, later boards from 3Dfx have 2D built-in and you should preferably use a driver separate for those boards or the fbdev driver.
This driver is a bit special because Voodoo 1 and 2 boards are very much NOT made for running 2D graphics. Therefore, this driver uses no hardware acceleration (since there is no acceleration for 2D, only 3D). Instead it is implemented with the help of a "shadow" framebuffer that resides entirely in RAM. Selected portions of this shadow framebuffer are then copied out to the Voodoo board at the right time. Because of this, the speed of the driver is very dependent on the CPU. But since the CPU is nowadays actually rather fast at moving data, we get very good speed anyway, especially since the whole shadow framebuffer is in cached RAM.

That Linux driver for early 3Dfx cards is impractical, it will be slower on period correct computers due to relying much on the CPU. Even if 3D acceleration was possible on these early Voodoo cards, one has to contend being stuck at 16bpp and texture size being limited up to 256x256 without resorting to hacks.

Not to mention the lack of full NPOT texture support with most pre DX10-class hardware which only was hardware accelerated without mipmapping in OpenGL (if ARB_texture_non_power_of_two extension is available) or Direct3D (partial NPOT).

leileilol wrote on 2022-05-11, 16:26:

Only for a Windows 2000 beta driver.

No, not only this driver.
Google for "LegendgrafiX VooDooMage 2".
This is a Hungarian driver for XP that allows DirectX, Glide and OpenGL for Voodoo 2, and also supports exdended desktop.