386SX wrote on 2024-03-22, 22:15:

I think I'm going to buy another expensive one identical... don't know why.. it has something special itself.. :D […]
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BitWrangler wrote on 2024-03-22, 22:11:

We've found it, the Richard Hammond of 3D, starts off fast but crashes spectacularly. 🤣

Spoiler

(Top Gear / Grand Tour joke for those who are lost ) https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Hamm … d%27s_Accidents

I think I'm going to buy another expensive one identical... don't know why.. it has something special itself.. 😁

It seems like it's actually trying to run games and quite fast and it's incredible some complex games even start. But I want to think it "only" needed a big amount of drivers work to be useful, would be nice to ask some old Alliance developers what was wrong with it along where later generation chip ended up even in prototypes.
I was also wondering about the Bus Master option and other mainboard related compatibilities; could it be that we are testing these cards on the wrong chipsets and something might get better?

(anyway.. just bought a Trident 3Dìmage9750 4MB four modules SGRAMs meanwhile.. 😁)

That Trident card might actually be pretty decent

ODwilly wrote on 2024-03-23, 00:26:

That Trident card might actually be pretty decent

Yes reading the great vintage3d reviews and YouTube videos I was really expecting worse results. Trident deserve indeed respect to have actually tried in that difficult time.

Today I will post some more results with the aT3D, maybe even trying an older Socket7 chipset to see differences. I tried the Final Fantasy 8 demo and while broken graphic as usual it also seems like having some speed to render while as been said broken graphic I'd imagine meaning faster rendering anyway. Ah in the feature check list it even support the 8-bit texture rare one. Thief2 impressively seems like starting the rendering but immediately break anything. Thief1 seems more problematic. ZBuffer option doesn't change much.

Was the aT3D chip running on the Voodoo Rush versions like the Innovision actually running at 72Mhz reading online this info? That heatsink would make sense.

I've built an older config with a PCI only Socket7, 82437VX chipset, K6-3 bios patch, the K6-3 400 and the Alliance aT3D card to see if something change. The monitor vga noise (darker waves during mouse movements or hard disk load) is still there. Final Reality scores decreased up to 0.9 overall score of course and no visible changes obviously. Maybe I could even try some ALi chipset to test again if something change or not. Using now fresh Windows 98 first edition instead of ME with the P-III before. Same ESS ISA audio card, same USB 1.1 PCI card too. 2x32 PC66 DIMM memories. 3DMark99 MAX get a 589 3DMarks score (5189 CPU 3DMarks) and with the usual "accuracy" in rendering .

I have a Voodoo Rush with the AT25 chip and it is one of the many reasons why I don't like anything about 3DFX, I don't understand how they could release something so poorly designed.
The issue of the default frequency of the AT25 in the Rush left me stunned, having to modify the registry to lower the frequency because the chip does not support it is unusual, and even more so at a time when the internet was not as accessible as it is now. The 3DFX part of the Rush is a little slower than a Voodoo 1, as I understand it because everything has to go through the AT25.
By the way, I used it for a while until it started showing artifacts on the screen and it was no use lowering the frequency, then the 3DFX part also failed.

Hoping wrote on 2024-03-23, 15:32:

I have a Voodoo Rush with the AT25 chip and it is one of the many reasons why I don't like anything about 3DFX, I don't understand how they could release something so poorly designed.
The issue of the default frequency of the AT25 in the Rush left me stunned, having to modify the registry to lower the frequency because the chip does not support it is unusual, and even more so at a time when the internet was not as accessible as it is now. The 3DFX part of the Rush is a little slower than a Voodoo 1, as I understand it because everything has to go through the AT25.
By the way, I used it for a while until it started showing artifacts on the screen and it was no use lowering the frequency, then the 3DFX part also failed.

I suppose one of the "many" great 3dfx ideas to imagine such card in collaboration with a ready to use mostly 2D platform. I didn't remember it ended up that bad, never had the Voodoo Rush card while always thought interesting to test.

Meanwhile, the old Socket 7 platform ended up even less stable with the aT3D compared to the i440 previously tested. I've built an ALi config with the Pentium MMX 233 to test the card again.
EDIT: Final Reality seems just as bad but in the first spaceship test with different modes you can even see the 3D spaceship while other times I could not. I don't think it may have much to do with the ALi chipset but while broken as usual, it seems trying a bit more. 3DMark99 score 449 3DMarks and 1489 CPU Marks.

386SX wrote on 2024-03-23, 16:36:

I suppose one of the "many" great 3dfx ideas to imagine such card in collaboration with a ready to use mostly 2D platform. I didn't remember it ended up that bad, never had the Voodoo Rush card while always thought interesting to test.

Meanwhile, the old Socket 7 platform ended up even less stable with the aT3D compared to the i440 previously tested. I've built an ALi config with the Pentium MMX 233 to test the card again.

The AT3D may be much worse than many others, poor video signal quality and 3D capabilities even worse than the Mystique, and certainly also worse than the S3 and the ATI Rage, the first Rage cards were slow, but they had all the features available for DirectX5, if I'm not mistaken, and they also had good video signal quality.
Both the Mystique and the first Rage were released before the AT3D.

Hoping wrote on 2024-03-23, 16:58:

386SX wrote on 2024-03-23, 16:36:

I suppose one of the "many" great 3dfx ideas to imagine such card in collaboration with a ready to use mostly 2D platform. I didn't remember it ended up that bad, never had the Voodoo Rush card while always thought interesting to test.

Meanwhile, the old Socket 7 platform ended up even less stable with the aT3D compared to the i440 previously tested. I've built an ALi config with the Pentium MMX 233 to test the card again.

The AT3D may be much worse than many others, poor video signal quality and 3D capabilities even worse than the Mystique, and certainly also worse than the S3 and the ATI Rage, the first Rage cards were slow, but they had all the features available for DirectX5, if I'm not mistaken, and they also had good video signal quality.
Both the Mystique and the first Rage were released before the AT3D.

Of course, it would be interesting to ask someone that was in those projects, if these limitations were at the hardware level or cause bad drivers as usual for those times even the Rage/Rage II serie until much later and maybe with some help from the much faster CPUs that came later. About 2D quality it's not actually the worst and has a nice tool to increase contrast and brightness to get similar to other better cards; I've seen different Virge/DX on cheap PCBs having worse vga quality probably depending on those many manufacturer making cheaper designs or using lower quality components compared to better ones like the Diamond. Something I notice is that the card may suffer from bad shielding from the eletric noise coming from the hard disk for example. In this build it seems less visible but still there.

386SX wrote on 2024-03-17, 06:35:

Then again installed the Rage Pro Turbo AGP and always impressed that ran so well even in Quake2 and partially even Quake3. Ok that I am testing these with a 500Mhz P-III to push these to their speed limits but still surprise me every times. It's almost "too good" for the level of cards I am looking for.

ATi Mach64 third generation or Rage3 cards are good and cheap early PCI and AGP cards, 8MB and AGP ones are fastest, they also have good prices, almost all support 3dcif/opengl/directd3d api, only rage xl pci is missing working driver for 3dcif part at the moment.

Rage XL AGP 8MB+AMD K6-2+ 500Mhz 3DMark1999 800x600x16 = 1421 points, Quake 2 timedemo 1 gets over 40fps with tweaks @ 640x480x16, great underrated ATi cards from march 1997. You can get more fps out with atidbg.ini tweaks, try it with your Quake games.

create C:\Windows\atidbg.ini and copy these settings inside (works best from OpenGL 1084 up to 1107) .

[OPENGL]
EnableMTSGI=0
EnableMTARB=0
[Kelvin]
Bilinear=0
[Performance]
SkipFlipWaitIdle=1

marxveix wrote on 2024-03-23, 17:52:

ATi Mach64 third generation or Rage3 cards are good and cheap early PCI and AGP cards, 8MB and AGP ones are fastest, they also h […]
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386SX wrote on 2024-03-17, 06:35:

Then again installed the Rage Pro Turbo AGP and always impressed that ran so well even in Quake2 and partially even Quake3. Ok that I am testing these with a 500Mhz P-III to push these to their speed limits but still surprise me every times. It's almost "too good" for the level of cards I am looking for.

ATi Mach64 third generation or Rage3 cards are good and cheap early PCI and AGP cards, 8MB and AGP ones are fastest, they also have good prices, almost all support 3dcif/opengl/directd3d api, only rage xl pci is missing working driver for 3dcif part at the moment.

Rage XL AGP 8MB+AMD K6-2+ 500Mhz 3DMark1999 800x600x16 = 1421 points, Quake 2 timedemo 1 gets over 40fps with tweaks @ 640x480x16, great underrated ATi cards from march 1997. You can get more fps out with atidbg.ini tweaks, try it with your Quake games.

create C:\Windows\atidbg.ini and copy these settings inside (works best from OpenGL 1084 up to 1107) .

[OPENGL]
EnableMTSGI=0
EnableMTARB=0
[Kelvin]
Bilinear=0
[Performance]
SkipFlipWaitIdle=1

Thanks, I'm going to try as soon as I'll buy the XL card I don't have right now.

Thief Gold game usually crash and almost impossible to play even with the visible geometry only; without ZBuffer and lowering resolution to the desktop one it get a bit better and "stable" always without textures beside some few objects having them. But of course just as broken as the other Quake based game like Half Life that seems more stable at least but the rendering point of view will become crazy near the walls with geometry behind. The bad texture filtering would really be the last of the problems here. Too bad I can't set lower resolution for Direct3D games like 400x300 that maybe could have helped a bit the 3D workload.

For the 2D GUI as I was saying instead seems a time correct good video chip. Even in-game videos are ok, it doesn't seem to have any MPEG2 specific accelerations of course. it's not the worst 2D card for sure we've seen in those times for resolution at 1024x768 at least. I suppose that explain why even good brands like Diamond used the AT25. Are their drivers better for 2D or having some more work into it?

Alliance aT3D and Half Life 1 intro (Direct3D 640x480)

Alliance aT3D and Half Life 1 (Direct3D 640x480)

Alliance aT3D and 3DMark99 (Direct3D 640x480)

Interesting 3Dmark99 and Half Life are like the most stable and "accurated" games I'm trying. If most games looked like 3DMark99 I might have even bought this card back in our times thinking it should have been ok. The other games I'm trying are way more broken in rendering.

Alliance aT3D and 3Dmark99 (Direct3D 640x480)

Alliance aT3D and 3DMark99 "texture filtering" (Direct3D 640x480)

Looking at the aT3D driver package compared to some time correct alternatives, I wonder if there was at least some space for improvements. Rage II engines got a much better while probably (thanks to the later CPUs like as been said) driver upgrade for much higher driver size. Who knows where the aT3D could have ended with such level of support. 😀

(meanwhile I'm going to buy also a SiS6326 H0 revision, let's see if the Diamond or maybe some even later revisions..)

Alliance aT3D and 3DMark99 (Direct3D 640x480)

Alliance aT3D and Thief Gold (in game rendering is much worse than static images, very difficult to even move around)