You should delete the opengl32.dll in the Quake folder as that is a MiniGL intended for the first generation Voodoo card back when Voodoo didn't have their own full ICD yet. Doing this should allow GLQuake to fallback to the system ICD which should also be accelerated by Voodoo5.

Yes, the Voodoo4/5 power is, well, bad. Almost anyone was disappointed by this "performance"...

About GLQuake - the default minigl version is 1.0 (or 1.1). This version is very old so - of course there can be incompatibilities with Voodoo3/4/5. Try the last version (1.49) or just delete opengl32.dll in the Quake directory (to use the system OGL ICD).

About glide wrappers - yes, almost all games are working faster with current PC + nGlide. Even with FSAA. There are still games with a severe slowdown in nGlide (like King's Quest: Mask of Eternity).

Thanks for the help!

I tried both deleting AND using the 1.49 OpenGL32.dll. I can get into the game and play at the default resolution, but when I go to the video options it says I have use the command line!? So I went to the properties of the GLQuake.exe and added this "-width 1024 -height 768 -bpp 16"
I've tried several different resolutions and color combinations, and nothing seems to work. It will throw the error again, or if I use the 1.49 opengl32 it will just go to a black screen, then the desktop. Is there any way to change the res?
Also, there isn't any music. I'm guessing that's not normal? I found another thread about missing music for Quake. *sigh* I figured if I built an old win98se machine, these problems would be easier to deal with.

Ok, found a newer version of the GLQuake here.
http://www.falconfly.de/patches-quake.htm

I didn't realize my version was so out of date, this should fix it I hope.

EDIT: I'm worried now, the GLQuake 1.13 at that site is unofficial and adds more graphic capability. I don't want the game to change AT ALL, no added graphics or anything. I'm going to search around and see if .98 is legitimate.

IT WORKS!! I used the .98 GLQuake and now I can at least set the resolution to 1024x768xbpp24. It claims I cannot doing anything larger with 24bpp, I must use 16. So I tried higher resolutions at 16 and the game had some crazy lines and what not. It seems anything over 1024 x 768 is not going to work out.
Quake fans, would you prefer 24bpp with 1024 x768, or a higher resolution with 16bpp?

I hate to say this, but the voodoo 5 5500 is one disappointment after another. I'm honestly wondering what the point of 4XFSAA is, maybe someone can explain it 🤣.
Because Quake gets laggy when I set it to 4Xfsaa, and 1024 x 768. That's just pathetic, I mean common, wtf that game is soooo old. At this point I really wondering as a 3Dfx hobbyist, is the Voodoo 5 5500 worth my time? I could run the game at the exact same settings with my Voodoo 2 SLI setup, it's almost like there would be no difference. I guess other than the 24bpp. But yeah, I have had very little success using 4Xfsaa. It makes me wonder, would buying Quake 1 on Steam and using my modern card be better? Probably....But the 3Dfx hobbyist in me won't give up on this card yet. Maybe the LOD Bias will make it stand out on these old titles?

PS EDIT: I shouldn't be so negative about the Vooodoo 5, at the very least I can run smoothly with LOD Bias -1.0 AND 2Xfsaa! With that combo it looks amazing and would certainly be better than the Voodoo 2 SLI setup.
Update: Looks like 2Xfsaa won't cut it either, there's slight lag when picking up items, enough that it bothers me so I turned it off and it's smooth as butter.
Voodoo's FSAA has been a major disappointment. I think the only title it's not laggy is Carmaggedon 2 so far.

Regarding performance of the Voodoo5 5500: A single VSA-100 is in theory roughly as fast as a Voodoo3 3000 (it might be faster because of more RAM) so a Voodoo5 5500 is two times as fast, or roughly two times as fast as Voodoo2 SLI. I think FSAA reduces this performance so with 4xFSAA it is about as fast as a single Voodoo2. Sufficient for 640x480, but not for 1024x768. That's where it's most usefull, for games that won't do more than 640x480.
I don't get why you insist on running GLQuake on the card? The game uses OpenGL, not Glide, it should be possible to use modern cards to run it. The only issue I know of is that newer drivers have so many OpenGL extensions that a buffer will run over and the game will crash, but I think there is a workaround in most drivers. Compatibility for older games is much better in OpenGL than in Direct3D.
Regarding command line: That's correct, software Quake I allows you to change the resolution in-game, Quake II allows this in all modes, the original GLQuake only takes this as a parameter.
Don't worry about more colors than 24bpp, although other cards may give you 32bpp there is no visible difference, only 24bpp are used for the display.

VSA-100 is a bit faster in theory because of the dual pipeline design (as opposed to one pipeline with dual TMUs on Voodoo3).

@OP: I think you may have mistaken a 2000 card for a 2014 one...

@d1stortion: You are right about the pipelines, didn't have that in mind. I suppose the effect depends on the game/application, if dual texturing is used exclusively than it doesn't make a difference.
I suppose the amount of RAM is more important (32MB instead of 16MB), especially for higher resolutions, texture swapping is not that fast on Voodoos. (Of course this shouldn't matter for GLQuake which works fine with 2MB of texture memory.)
Here are some comparisons. (Article in German, but you won't need to understand the whole text.)

And yes, just because the 5500 was the fastest card 3dfx made (except the 6000 prototypes) you have to keep in mind it is not *that* fast, a Geforce 1 DDR should be faster even without taking T&L into account.

Well, the differences don't quite stop here. VSA-100 has an 8-bit stencil buffer for shadow calculations, although I'm not sure how much that was used in actual games. The chip also supports S3TC and does it better than Geforce. I don't remember all the details, but there was some controversy about color banding with the compressed textures in Quake3 on Geforce256, and Voodoo5 didn't have that issue.

d1stortion wrote:

VSA-100 has an 8-bit stencil buffer for shadow calculations, although I'm not sure how much that was used in actual games.

There are no glide games with Voodoo4/5 specific features.
There are several tech demos. And you can force 2x(4x) FSAA with Voodoo5. That is all.
P.S. Maybe the glide GPU plugin for ePSXe (Lewpy's) is using VSA-specific features...

Not Glide, I was thinking more in lines of OpenGL. TNT2 has the same stencil buffer. I know that stencil shadows were used prominently in Doom3, but that is a tad later...

See here for more info if interested.

I've been playing around with the Amigamerlin driver properties, trying to squeeze as much performance out of it as I can.
For a moment there I thought I had playable NFS4:HS @ 1024 x 768, with 2xFSAA and LOD -2. It was smooth on most of the levels, depending on the situation. But it wasn't perfect so I had to turn off FSAA again. I was SO CLOSE, that game looks soooo sweet with those settings. Also I have read about other drivers increasing performance, I'll have to try some others. I've tried the 3Dfx latest reference drivers, and I think they overall perform the worst and have less important settings than Amigamerlin.

I managed to get Quake running playable at 1024 x 768 x 24 bpp, with 2XFSAA and LOD -2. Using an old version of Fraps 1.9D, I was able to measure frame rates. With those settings it usually doesn't dip below 35FPS and averages higher than that. The game looks stunning.
Fraps doesn't work with NFS4:HS for some reason, I've tried a number of things to fix but it's the only game that it doesn't work for. So I can't give a proper judgement of the FPS rate, overall that game is the heaviest on the Voodoo 5 and tends to bog it down at higher resolutions etc. I'm overall disappointed with the performance on that game with the Voodoo 5, it should be able to take more. But these games look awesome and it's been a fun hobby project.

Anybody familiar with "Hidden surface removal" and FSAA? Apparently it doesn't work well and can cause visual artifacts, I had no issues with it. And it was the only way I could get NFS4:HS to run somewhat acceptably with FSAA on. I felt like I was so close!! I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with these settings, because maybe there is a winning combo that will enable me to enjoy FSAA properly. Triple buffering almost doubled my frames on GLQuake. Sadly at this point, maybe running NFS4:HS in DirectX with a higher resolution, colors, and AA would look better than its native Glide counterpart.

OMG I did it!! I think I finally figured it out!
I have NFS4:HS running smooth @ 1024 x 768 in Glide mode, with 4XFSAA on a Voodoo 5 5500. This card is a sleeper that I think needs the right attention to unlock its true power. There's a ton of settings to tweak in the Amigamerlin driver, and if done correctly can really unleash the power. I'm going to continue to experiment with the settings and other drivers. I've reviewed the various technical documents for the 3rd party drivers, and Raziel64s Evolution drivers look promising. Once I find a winning combination I'll start a new thread detailing what I've done and my experience with the card. Wow this is exciting, I knew if I didn't give up on my beloved Voodoo 5 something would work out *cackles madly*.

I have this vintage machine setup on a 42" LED TV, with a Logitech gamepad. The game looks SO NICE! 4XFSAA FTW.

Are you runnning the nfs hs expansion pack ?

Yes I am Davros.
I played quite a bit without it though, using just the Vanilla game and patch 4.50. I haven't noticed a huge performance difference between the two, they pretty much both have the same response to the various settings. If I'm not mistaken the expansion pack has better textures and what not. To clarify, I'm using the unofficial expansion pack, I guess it's a mod. V4.0_1.74

Update on Voodoo 5 performance. 4XFSAA works great, except levels with excessive weather or night time. So for an overall smooth experience, 2XFSAA will have to work. I'm still happy I was able to get FSAA to perform correctly by tweaking the various settings. At this point I'm researching EVERY setting available and testing the various setups to find the best performance. Once that is complete I'll likely publish documentation of my experience for other people to replicate.

NOTE: I'm on longer using the P3 450Mhz machine for this, so the increased clock speed could be helping.
NEW RIG.
850mhz AMD Athlon Slot A
Voodoo 5 5500
Etc etc, other specs pretty much the same as before.

Cypher402 wrote:

NOTE: I'm on longer using the P3 450Mhz machine for this, so the increased clock speed could be helping. NEW RIG. 850mhz AMD At […]
Show full quote

NOTE: I'm on longer using the P3 450Mhz machine for this, so the increased clock speed could be helping.
NEW RIG.
850mhz AMD Athlon Slot A
Voodoo 5 5500
Etc etc, other specs pretty much the same as before.

😲 Voodoo 5500 on a P3 450 😲 and your wondering why its not performing ? Pretty sure you need a 1GHZ cpu to get the most out of your Card but the Athlon should be good enough.