stef80 wrote on 2023-08-31, 07:00:
V3 - good availability and relatively "normal" prices
V4- poor availability, which reflects prices
V5 - good availability and high prices
Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2023-08-31, 07:13:
Depends on which games you're targeting and at what resolution. For DOS Glide games and some early Win9x ones, the original Voodoo 1 is the best choice, but that card doesn't work correctly on systems faster than ~400 MHz. Alternatively, a Voodoo 2 with some tweaks applied should be able to play most of these early Glide titles. You can find more info about the compatibility in this thread: Voodoo 2 DOS Glide compatibility matrix
If you only care about Win9x games, go for a Voodoo 3. There are some early Glide games which may not work (e.g. Pandemonium and Mortal Kombat 4) but generally, it's pretty smooth sailing. With this card, you can target resolutions up to 1024x768 and get fairly good performance. Image quality is also improved over the Voodoo 1&2 due to the lack of a pass through cable and better filtering.
If you want higher resolutions and Full Scene Anti Aliasing, then a Voodoo 5 can be useful, but the prices of those things are absolutely insane. These cards can also render in 32-bit color depth, but I'm not sure if that's applicable to Glide games or just Direct3D. Someone who actually has one of those should be able to tell you more. I don't really see a use case for a Voodoo 4, since its performance is relatively close to the higher tier Voodoo 3 models. You can find more info about the various Voodoo cards on the Vogons Wiki.
Thanks for your replies guys.
@Joseph _Joeseph Joestar It is mainly about games from late 98 to 2001/2002.
For 96,97 and early 98 I have my asus p2b slot 1 pentium 2 system.
I have already though that this question is not easy to answer.
The V5 sure has some advantages but the pricing is really insane and it is a good question to ask if the advantages are worth the premium price or not.
My prefered resolutions to play are "only" 800x600 or 1024x764. I think most retro games look the best in that resolution.
Some higher resolutions might be nice but then the interface of same games looks just strange.
It makes sense that the Voodoo 3 would be the most reasonable choice.
For the coolness factor alone a Voodoo 2 SLI system might be cool as well but it would be expensive matter.
The same can be said about the V1 but the athlon system would be too fast for that card anyway.
A V1 might be suitable for my asus p2b PII 400mhz system though.
I need to do some deeper research about the games I am into but with all things considered the answer for my question is rather clear. At least to me.
And the answer is V3.