Supports vsa-based cards, no v3, for win98.
Extract, read readme.txt - Extra notes, run setup.exe.
Version 1.1
- Fixed occasional lock-up on game start
- Added back sse2 texture downloads, that were removed from v1.0
- Fixed eventual crash from switching between windowed and fullscreen in glide
- Alt-tab wont crash openGl games anymore
Supports vsa-based cards, no v3, for win98.
Extract, read readme.txt - Extra notes, run setup.exe.
Version 1.1
- Fixed occasional lock-up on game start
- Added back sse2 texture downloads, that were removed from v1.0
- Fixed eventual crash from switching between windowed and fullscreen in glide
- Alt-tab wont crash openGl games anymore
Alpha blending! I always forget whats the "best" setting between sharper and smoother. In all cases, filtering quality was set to High, glide api for the game.
As far as I read online High filtering quality and Sharper alpha blending enables the 3dfx ""22bit"" post process filter(looking at the images would have to disagree). 32bit will ofc always look beter, also drop fps from 80 to 50.
Pictures a bit too small on the forum too see much of a difference, besides the amazing 16bit green-ing. You can open the file link, and then you are able to zoom.
Sharper will show those
Zoomed
16bit Sharper
16bit Smoother
32bit
Looking at it, Smoother (I guess it dithers the colors?) looks like the better option between the two. If theres fps to spare then 32bit.
After some more playing with it, I will stick with sharper. Smoother, while nice for some fx, does make the image a bit murky.
Dolencwrote on 2022-07-07, 14:36:Alpha blending! I always forget whats the "best" setting between sharper and smoother. In all cases, filtering quality was set t […] Show full quote
Alpha blending! I always forget whats the "best" setting between sharper and smoother. In all cases, filtering quality was set to High, glide api for the game.
As far as I read online High filtering quality and Sharper alpha blending enables the 3dfx ""22bit"" post process filter(looking at the images would have to disagree). 32bit will ofc always look beter, also drop fps from 80 to 50.
Pictures a bit too small on the forum too see much of a difference, besides the amazing 16bit green-ing. You can open the file link, and then you are able to zoom.
Sharper will show those
Zoomed
16bit Sharper
16bit Smoother
32bit
Looking at it, Smoother (I guess it dithers the colors?) looks like the better option between the two. If theres fps to spare then 32bit.
After some more playing with it, I will stick with sharper. Smoother, while nice for some fx, does make the image a bit murky.
The problem is, screenshots can't capture that 3dfx "22bit" post process filter, because it is done AFTER the framebuffer. There was quite a fuss about it back in the day.
3dfx added screen capture(hwcAAScreenShot) that combines all 4 buffers, to the driver, so you get outputed what you see on screen. This is how it was captured. Some loss is because I converted it from tga to png, but to show the difference between the two, its enough.
3dfx added screen capture(hwcAAScreenShot) that combines all 4 buffers, to the driver, so you get outputed what you see on screen. This is how it was captured. Some loss is because I converted it from tga to png, but to show the difference between the two, its enough.
But AA is not needed for the color upsampling, so this method is not generally applicable. Without the ability to read the dac output the only option is to record the display output.
Looked at the method that does this, doesnt say anything about dithering/undithering, but it does combine buffers and corrects gamma from values in dac.
Dont know what exacly the filter on dacs side does, sure someone can add some more info.
But I dont see much difference on screen or those screenshots. I do have a capture card, but it impacts the image quality.
Looked at the method that does this, doesnt say anything about dithering/undithering, but it does combine buffers and corrects gamma from values in dac.
Dont know what exacly the filter on dacs side does, sure someone can add some more info.
But I dont see much difference on screen or those screenshots. I do have a capture card, but it impacts the image quality.
Hi Dolenco,
Thanks for all the hard work and testing. I use a V5 5500 PCI on WinXP and use AmigaMerlin R11 drivers (Because of the better DX8 D3D Driver) - BUT I swap/change the Glide2x/3x/OGL files. For 'old' original games which existed when the card existed, I prefer KoolSmokys 3dfx & ICD ( https://www.3dfxzone.it/koolsmoky/glide.html ) They have bug fixes and allow S3TC. For 'newer' games, I can use either MESA or the SAGE OGL drivers, depending on game (Sage: https://www.3dfxzone.it/news/reader.php?objid=2354 ) By doing this I can 'fine-tune' my experience.
From your screenshots I prefer 'smooth' 16bit, why? I know, confusing right? Well, 'back in the day' I always loved my 3dfx in 16bit colour mode because all effects like smoke-trails were nicely smoothed and transparent, when I 'upgraded' to a TNT2 later I was massively dissapointed by it's horrible grainy 16bit colour, I missed that '3dfx filter'. By using the 'smooth' 16bit blending this is the look that I always loved, so even though I can run 32bit colour, I think - why? Then it just looks like any normal Nvidia card, boring... The lovely 16bit smooth dither gives my games that beautiful 3dfx 'look' while also being faster than 32bit. This is my own personal reasoning 😀
I see you also struggled with SFFT drivers, I too also have never been able to use SFFT. Always too buggy, barely usable. BUT apparently they have much more updated D3D?? So I wonder, is it possible to create an 'ultimate' driver bundle? Use AmigaMerlin R11 as the base - Then use the latest SFFT D3D part (AmigaMerlin R11 uses an OLDER SFFT D3D driver, not 3dfx's original) Then incorporate with KoolSmoky's Glide & OGL = ULTIMATE driver 😉 I know how to mix/match Glide/OGL but with D3D I have no idea.
Yes I did add that sentence at the end, sharper alphablending is the way to go. The card really has nice image quality, up to a point. For q3 and beyond, you can get better with 32bit and aa and af with other cards, but for 16bit titles, it just renders such a nice picture. Its really a joy to play those older games on it.
Ive been playing some some Quake1 (and all its milion expansions) and on my win10 machine, I preffer the nonfiltered look. But on v5 even filtered looks, well great, sharpnes is right, contrast is right, colors are really nice(all shades of brown!).
You can mixmatch basicly everything in the drivers, there is some crosstalk between parts of the driver, but generaly most things go. If you want to try sfft-s core, you can replace 3dfxvs.dll and 3dfxvsm.sys from his package. It does have the most advanced/correct d3d implementation. That one game(drakan) I tested didnt work right, but I use XP mostly for newer d3d games and so far everything I tried it chugs allong great.
The driver I added (3dfx wide driver, for win9x), uses Koolsmokys glide3 as base, with some improvements from the sourceforge glide project ported, glide2->glide3 wrapper (fixes some stuff this way), Mesafx6.2 for openGl with some additional settings. If you used mesaFx before, you probably noticed its a bit slow for some games, well its not, it just defaults to 32bit, so override is added. Theres a topic for it on 3dfxzone and on side 2, at the bottom instructions what do do for XP, if you wanna give it a try.
I tried sage, when I was looking for an icd, but the first game (q2) I tried, already had problems. There is an updated version on github, that you can build yourself, but at that point I kinda wanted to go the mesa way.
I will get to XP eventually, but since all the testing takes so long, and if something is actually broken then to fix it... not really on the menu right now. Wanna do newer mesa first.
But if I wanted to mix the ultimate driver!!!!!!, I would probably use sfft1.9 as base and mix in wide driver glide23/opengl+reg 😜
(I swear my plan was to make a very short post, but... might as well add a picture!)
I tried sage, when I was looking for an icd, but the first game (q2) I tried, already had problems. There is an updated version on github, that you can build yourself, but at that point I kinda wanted to go the mesa way.
Yes sage I think is very interesting in how I think it emulates up to OpenGL 1.5 which allows more modern games to work. But like you say it is a bit buggy since it was a very young project and hasn't had any development since the beginning. By the way - I experience some very strange results with Mesa under XP. On some games my sound will become staggered/crackled/distorted using Mesa, not sure why! I also seem to have issues with 32bit colour and certain combinations of Glide/OGL ICDs, where the sound becomes crackled/distorted as mentioned. I think this only happens in XP, not sure. My sound card and graphics card are running on their own seperate IRQs so I'm certain it's something strange going on (sound card is an X-FI) I wonder if you ever experienced such strangeness, but you're mainly testing on win98. I'll look forward to when you do more work on XP.
So to update my D3D I simply just 'drag and drop' 3dfxvs.dll and 3dfxvsm.sys to system32, same way that I change my Glide files etc? OK that is great, I'll have fun experimenting with this 😀
The most difficult part is matching the Glide files with OGL ICDs. Different versions of Glide will affect the ICDs behaviour. Like Sage for instance, I think it runs best on the latest Glide source but not the official 3dfx versions. When testing an OGL ICD, I usually try three or four different Glide combinations before deciding whether the ICD is good or not for a certain game.
I had this crackling once, but then never happened again, in q2 engine game. Changed sound from high to low and back to high and went away.
For drivers I test mostly in XP, cus I have everything setup there and its easy just to pump new versions out and copy them. Only for "release" then I go win98 and make sure that works. Different version of glide, some fix some xp stuff and break win9x, some work better in 9x but then dont have some of the fixes for xp, its fairly a mess and its hard to say, this one is the best! (cus it depends)
For d3d I usualy just replace the files in the driver package and reinstall again. For glide/opengl I just copy paste. Try just copy paste and write back if it works 😜
Card got some faster 5ns memory(not that it gives anything) and then it got stuck in a limbo for a while.... Where it still is ...
It works fine with atx power supplies but locks up in sli on game open with sfx psus, tried 4 different kind. There isnt really people out there with rev320 chips, using sfx psus, on agp1.5, that we can exchange experiences. And its been on plenty of different atx psus, where it works just flawless. Card has been traveling (way)more than me.. Limbo!
Additional heat output is manageable but noticale(200mhz@3v), power delivery section also heats up more. And I do play all my old games on the system, dont want it to die prematurely.
So while I had my shitty soldering "corrected", additional switch was added. It now toggles between default 2.8v and 3.0v to the core.
These copper coolers still around on the aliexpress. Real recently like today too, I was looking through goodies including copper stuff, heatsinks and thick plates, aluminum 15mm thick and 10mm for 100x100mm copper for my LED lamp project. For homebuilt projects with basic parts, basic parts is useful.
Evilbay can keep their outrageous shipping cost. It is madly too high. But there are some uses with ebay sometimes. More and more sellers no longer do combined shipping discount on multiple items, which is the biggest impact.
So Ive been playing System shock 2, which is a d3d title... And had some unpleasant screen tearing. D3d titles seem to defaut to 75hz refresh rate, whats set in the registry. I know this for a while, just now was the time to get to it and change it.
I looked if theres a registry value that affects this (yes yes V.control Ill get to that) and ofc there is.
So I added it to 3dfx tools with a registry addition.
It changes this setting, that I guess d3d part of the driver reads.
If refresh doesnt go as high in display settings for the adapter it will pick the closest one.
Didnt do extensive testing and I only tried with Widescreen driver, but here works fine, as expected!!!
(I also remember seeing the setting in some other driver and it didnt do shit, I guess it did in d3d)
Now an even better way is using V.Control. Custom refresh will write directly to hardware part of the driver and will override win98 settings, and all api-s. I also use it, if I want to go above what win98 allows. Or for opengl.
But I also always forget to load V.control... so having it set in 3dfxtools works for me.
