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Voodoo 3000 questions. . .

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First post, by Griff3125

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I'll keep it short.

I've got a P3 1ghz with 2 Diamond Voodoo 2's, 8MBs, in SLI. There's a 5200FX in the agp slot, all on Win98SE.

Everything's working great, I know the 5200 is often berated, but it seems stable for what I'm driving, mainly dos and win games of that era.

The Mechwarrior series is pretty much my go to, along with Wing Commander Prophecy, Unreal, the standard fare.

I have a Voodoo 3 3000 that's been in the closet for ages, I think I was dissuaded from using this because of incompatibilities with the Mechwarrior games,
to my understanding it's not VESA compliant and requires a 3rd party driver to reboot and work with Mechwarrior 2(?).

I know the difference between a 3000 and a voodoo 2 sli is not a major leap, although I wonder if in my case, with 8mb boards, if it would be?
And would it be silly to replace the 5200fx with the 3000?
I do hear that the image quality on the V3 is much nicer in glide.

How does Mechwarrior 2+ run with the 3000?

Thanks for any insight on the above!

Cheers.

Reply 1 of 2, by swaaye

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Voodoo3 is definitely VESA compliant but maybe it has some quirks with MechWarrior 2. Try it out. There may be VESA fix TSRs for DOS that remedy problems. You could run MechWarrior 2 for Win95 instead too.

On the 3D front, it uses a unified memory arrangement that is much more flexible than Voodoo2 and as such has more texture and frame buffer storage. Voodoo2 tends to stutter with games of 1998 and later, especially the 8MB card with only 2MB effective texture storage. That's like a 4MB Voodoo1. Voodoo3 will stutter less, run higher resolutions, will be faster than Voodoo2 SLI and doesn't have the visual issues of SLI nor the VGA passthrough degradation.

The FX 5200 is not a bad choice for old games. In fact it has great compatibility overall if you run old drivers like 45.23. It also works well with Glide wrappers like zeckensack's. You just don't want to get into DirectX 9 stuff with it.

Reply 2 of 2, by Griff3125

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Thanks for the above info, I bit the bullet and threw it in.
It was very finicky with the original bios, but the updated bios seemed to kick it in shape.
Wow, I was not expecting any big improvements over the 8mb voodoo 2 sli setup, but I was wrong.
Everything feels buttery smooth, and no issues with Mechwarrior 2.
Much appreciated!

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