Voodoo 3,4 or 5. Even D3D games were basically designed for 3dfx cards back then. D3D5 features like pallettized textures and table based fog were also influenced by 3dfx hardware.

Voodoo 1 and 2 are fine too but just slower and have limited-capacity split memory designs that hurt Unreal and Quake 2/3 for example. Banshee is sort of a Voodoo3 prototype.

That's funny, my father got me a voodoo 3 but ended up returning it... I wish he didn't now.

I used to play Unreal tournament on a voodoo 2 (I think SLI as well) didn't notice too bad a performance out of it despite the hardware design at the time. I'll look into finding a good voodoo 3 thanks.

Anyone have any experience (for better or for worse) with the i740 by any chance?

I have experience with the similar i751 and I thought its 16-bit banding was horrible, looking far worse than Voodoo. I wouldn't count on that for being a 3dfx substitute. Its control panel isn't even good - just seems to be redundant resolution setting menus.

If you want to experience "poor man's d3d unreal" as it were in 1998, i'd suggest a Riva128, Rage Pro Turbo, or a Matrox G200. Enjoy the stutter 😀

Wasn't thinking of using a i740 was just curious about actual accounts of it. DarkStar engine games like Starsiege and Tribes 1 (the only two to begin with) have OpenGL presets for the i740. I never actually had the chance to see how horrible those games looked under the i740 though.

That's just little presets to make buggy OpenGL ICDs less upset. Half-Life packs a few vendor-specific cfgs as well (including one for the unreleased PowerVR SG even)

There were alot of accelerators my father never bought, he stuck with the 3dfx series before switching to ATI... and man ATI was horrible.

I had a ATI Rage Pro (I think..) and just 20 minutes of gameplay in UT99 results in all the textures turning into a complete memory screw over mess... (had to type flush blind to fix it but only fixes it temporarily before it goes haywire again) don't know if it was the cards fault or faulty drivers but it was damn annoying...

I740 is fairly capable, kind of like G200. There are worse options for sure! But it's no best choice for anything. I made some videos of it on YouTube and you can find them with a Google search.

Unreal and UT99 are definitely the purview of Voodoo. The game engine is designed for Glide. It wasn't until fairly recently when some people wrote modern OpenGL and D3D9 renderers for the games that anything could keep up with Glide.

Rage Pro is only interesting for its ability to run some games that use a proprietary ATI API called 3DCIF.

What's the "CIF" stand for in that ATI API? (ATI API, hey that rhymes!)

Rage pro can run the ATI Mech2 I'm assuming? I still have horrible memories of that card ruining my UT99 experience compared with the voodoo 2 + STB Velocity combo. (having to flush so many times in one sitting.... man what the hell was wrong with my computer then?)

Regarding Hellbender: I tried that game on a Radeon 9000 mobile and can't remember any problems. I didn't play long, though.

Regarding i740: See Putas' website: http://www.vintage3d.org/i740.php
It's not bad, but less common than other accelerators, if you don't already have one it may be hard to find.

The usual recommendation on Vogons for old 3D games is usually either a 3Dfx card or a Geforce 2/3/4/FX since those chips also retain old features.

DracoNihil wrote:

What's the "CIF" stand for in that ATI API? (ATI API, hey that rhymes!)

ATI 3D 'C' InterFace 🤣

Hellbender has an awful HOM effect in D3D mode, leliei told me awhile back it was due to table fog not being supported anymore.

And now I feel stupid for asking that question Stiletto thanks, how witty of ATI back then...

Not supporting tabe fog breaks the visibility of a ton of games since it was relied on to clip.

Speaking from vast experience with Unreal and it's early D3d support, you'll find anything but Matrox G2/400's and Voodoo's to be very hit or miss on early versions. I remember the first D3d patch being for Matrox cards. BUT, if you step it up a few patch versions, the Riva TNT's were good all around with few graphical errors. Gamma correction seemed broke at one point, but that could have been early Detonator drivers too. I think for the best period correct D3d 5/6 era card which fits Unreal, you'll find the TNT's the most robust. I don't think later drivers affected D3d feature support on older TNT and early Geforce cards, so you should be safe with most any version.

Edit: Check the bottom of this page for super old patches -
http://oldunreal.com/officialpatches.html

Hmmm, I was a huge 3Dfx fan back in the day. I even owned a Quantum Obsidian back in the day, wish I still had it. Anyways I would (and did) grab this. http://www.ebay.com/itm/310320932421