Not between PCI slots. First slot will always take priority. Realistically, you only need Banshee for Glide and maybe some really old D3D games. Both do not require it to be a primary device in such setup, so only second/third input on your monitor or switch would be useful.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-03-25, 19:12:

Not between PCI slots. First slot will always take priority. Realistically, you only need Banshee for Glide and maybe some really old D3D games. Both do not require it to be a primary device in such setup, so only second/third input on your monitor or switch would be useful.

Thanks, so if I put GeForce 5500 in the first slot as the lead card for early D3D games and Banshee in the second and run, for example, Quake 2, select 3DFX Glide in options, will it switch to 3DFX video card? And of course, I have VGA switch, which I use to switch between Banshee and a new PCI-E video card GeForce 9600 GT for Windows XP. And what about the DOS Glide games? Will they find the video card in the second slot? Now my DOS Glide games are works great and I would like to use Banshee for DOS Glide games.

For Glide, running games on Banshee won't be any different than on Voodoo 1 or Voodoo 2, just with lesser DOS compatibility. Old Direct3D games usually have device selector.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-03-25, 19:12:

Not between PCI slots. First slot will always take priority.

Well, that's a choice of the BIOS. The BIOS enables the first VGA-compatible card it finds and ignores all other VGA-compatible cards, so they stay in the disabled state. Technically, it is perferctly possible to disable the graphics card initialized by the BIOS, replace the ROM image in shadow RAM, enable the other PCI graphics card and go on with that card. Practically, this is going to fail if something already took pointers into the old BIOS that is going to disappear, it will be troublesome if EMM386 already mapped UMB/EMS at C800:0000, and the new graphics BIOS is more complicated than the old one, but it's definitely not impossible to create a BANSHEE.SYS that can be loaded with ?DEVICE=BANSHEE.SYS from the first line in config.sys to switch over from the Geforce to the Banshee (or the other way around). That driver would be chipset specific, though, as rewriting the shadow RAM is a chipset-specific operation.

I alreday did operations like that when I played around with overly new PCI graphics cards in 486 boards.

Adding a PCI graphics card selection functionality to the BIOS would also be technically possible, but as this is a completely new feature, patching it on a binary level into a BIOS that is already fully assembled is going to be quite a hassle.

Didn't some bios have the option to select the pci scan order from first to last or last to first ?
At least I remember seeing such an option on a board or two.

edit: not to be confused with the primary display adapter AGP/PCI selection.

This is close to one of my GF4 + Voodoo 3 setup, main difference is my primary card is AGP but the fundamentals should be the same.
Set the Geforce as the primary and by default games will output to this device.
Any game that calls the glide API will be forced to use the Banchee and will output to this without any intervention needed.

Of course exceptions always exist, in my case Powerslide in glide mode. For this game I disable the GF4 in device manager and reboot.