havli wrote on 2023-05-17, 07:29:
With the same Q3 settings Velocity 100 at 800x600x16 will score around 60 fps and the image quality won't be much worse.
Uhm... but those really aren't quite the same settings, are they? 😀
Granted, I do understand your point. Even with its 16 bit color limitation, the Voodoo 3's image quality is very good in Quake 3, while the TNT2 does look worse in 16 bit color. However, this is not the case in other games - which is why it's not OK to just look at a few AAA titles, because the bigger picture is more nuanced than that.
havli wrote on 2023-05-17, 07:29:
I am not sure about other games but NFS3 will run in D3D mode perfectly fine on V3, no need for patches and Unreal too.
True, just tried it now. With a fresh NFS3 installation, the Voodoo 3 does work fine if choosing Direct3D, but fails if forcing Glide.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the Velocity is/was a bad card, I'm just saying that the TNT2 M64 wasn't a bad card either and there's a reason why it was so popular back then, just like there's a reason why nVIDIA is the company we know today (love it or hate it).
Minutemanqvs wrote on 2023-05-17, 08:02:
This is all so true, looking at reviews and video nowadays 60 fps seems to be the minimum expected in every game. At the time 20-25 was ok and I have the exact same experience as you, we were looking at quality and higher resolutions before pure performance. That's what made me move from a Voodoo 3 to a Radeon quite quickly...
Indeed! Truthfully, even today I find that anything above 40 FPS is acceptable for me, as long as the frametime consistency is good (which can usually be achieved by locking the FPS just below the GPU's or CPU's capability, depending on the bottleneck). Having said that, I just did an upgrade recently, so most games are running at 100 - 200 FPS 😅, which means that I will probably not do another upgrade for at least 5 years.
1 x PLCC-68 / 2 x PGA132 / 5 x Skt 3 / 9 x Skt 7 / 12 x SS7 / 1 x Skt 8 / 14 x Slot 1 / 5 x Slot A
5 x Skt 370 / 8 x Skt A / 2 x Skt 478 / 2 x Skt 754 / 3 x Skt 939 / 7 x LGA775 / 1 x LGA1155
Current PC: Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Backup PC: Core i7 7700k