Concupiscence wrote:

I believe the Virge was built directly on the Trio32/Trio64's 2D core, and that the later, nominally 3D-capable Trios were all just rebadged Virges.

O wait a minute, you're right!
I'd kinda completely forgotten about the Trio3D 😊 .
It seems to indeed be a rebadged Virge. Maybe they just cut out the Virge name because it was known as a 3d decelerator? And having it called a Trio wouldn't get in the way of their Savage line?

I never had much interest in the Trio3D's, mainly because the ones I've found were all AGP 2x and, thus, one of THE crappiest AGP cards ever produced and on top of that, won't even work in AGP 8x boards if you ever needed an ultra low powerconsumption graphics card for use in a server or something.

swaaye wrote:

Well clearly that junk pile needs to be filled out with a VX so get to it. 😈

Haha! I think I'll spend my money and energy on something I consider to be more worth it 🤣 😜
But whenever I see a Virge (especially one with more then 2MB of memory) I'll usually bring it anyway as Virges are awesome testing cards 😁

Virge could probably be called Trio64V+ Super 3D Non-Accelerating Edition.

swaaye wrote:

Virge could probably be called Trio64V+ Super 3D Non-Accelerating Edition.

I reckon S3 would've simply called them Trio64+...but that name was already taken so they had to think of a new one! 😜

But lets all be greatful those Trio/Virge cards are all over the place, run stable (knocks on wood) and are very compatible with what we do 😉

Edit:
Btw, what would be the slowest AGP 4x/8x card ever made?
One potential use could be for filling up the AGP slot in a system intended for server-like tasks so you'd have an extra PCI slot for other things.

The slowest (and thus coolest) AGP 4x card I know of would be the TNT2-M64 Vanta. I've got a couple of the AGP ones (one is actually in my Super 7 rig, providing 2D as it's a Voodoo2 rig) and the Vanta ones, coming with 16MB memory, don't even have a heatsink 😀

Edit2:
Some interesting info on wiki about the Rage family:
Rage XL was a low-cost RAGE Pro-based solution. As a low-power solution with capable 2D-acceleration, the chip was used on many low-end graphics cards. It was also seen on Intel motherboards, as recently as 2004, and was still used in 2006 for server motherboards. The Rage XL has been succeeded by the ATI ES1000 for server use [2].
The chip was basically a die-shrunk Rage Pro, optimized to be very inexpensive for solutions where only basic graphics output was necessary.

If the Rage XL is a die shrunk ATI Rage Pro, it probably has very low power consumption (provided the clock wasn't considerably raised of course). Only thing is, is the Rage XL a true AGP 4x card? Or is it one of those AGP 2x cards with the AGP 4x AGP connector?

How about a Trident Blade XP? Yuck. There are also cards like the XGI Volari, SiS 315, and S3 Chrome that perform somewhat ok but probably have terrible buggy drivers overall.

Yeah the Rage XL was just more Rage Pro but shrunk to become ultra cheap. Server boards need some basic video capabilities and that's where it was used.

Ah, Trident Blade 3D. Fancy name and it's drivers were as ugly to install as it's performance turned out to be. Granted I was using a PCI 8MB version (heh, just trying to help the poor Blade 3D out over here! 😜 ;D). I never encountered an AGP version, so can't tell if it's AGP 2x or AGP 4x.
What I like about the Vanta's is that apart from it's low-end-ness, it's quite compatible 😀
I don't know for sure about the Rage XL, but it's drivers weren't terribly great in those days so the Vanta might've been the better choice here.

Didn't even know about the SiS 315 🤣, I do know about Volari and Chrome. I think I own neither of them though but their SiS6236 thingy was pretty much aweful.

Now that you mention die shrinks, I think the Matrox G200 also had a die shrink. Iirc it was the graphics cards without heatsink that had the shrunken die.

Not Blade 3D, but Blade XP. A rare POS that's definitely 4x.

The shrunken Matrox G200 is the OEM-only G250.

swaaye wrote:

Not Blade 3D, but Blade XP. A rare POS that's definitely 4x.

Lol, never knew there were 2 of em 😜
I suppose the Blade XP is the newer one?

Tetrium wrote:

Edit2: Some interesting info on wiki about the Rage family: Rage XL was a low-cost RAGE Pro-based solution. As a low-power solut […]
Show full quote

Edit2:
Some interesting info on wiki about the Rage family:
Rage XL was a low-cost RAGE Pro-based solution. As a low-power solution with capable 2D-acceleration, the chip was used on many low-end graphics cards. It was also seen on Intel motherboards, as recently as 2004, and was still used in 2006 for server motherboards. The Rage XL has been succeeded by the ATI ES1000 for server use [2].
The chip was basically a die-shrunk Rage Pro, optimized to be very inexpensive for solutions where only basic graphics output was necessary.

If the Rage XL is a die shrunk ATI Rage Pro, it probably has very low power consumption (provided the clock wasn't considerably raised of course). Only thing is, is the Rage XL a true AGP 4x card? Or is it one of those AGP 2x cards with the AGP 4x AGP connector?

Rage XL is AGP2x/PCI card with AGP2x connector. If you want AGP4x connector card with only AGP2x mode then look for ATI Rage LT PRO AGP.
Real AGP4x cards from ATI are Rage 128 Pro (later Ultra) and ofc radeons.

Tetrium wrote:

Didn't even know about the SiS 315 🤣, I do know about Volari and Chrome. I think I own neither of them though but their SiS6236 thingy was pretty much aweful.

SiS 315 = perhaps the first consumer-level non-NVIDIA/ATI chip to have on-chip hardware T&L, although an inferior implementation (unlike the Savage 2000 though, this one wasn't completely broken)

AA on it is nice, but its method of bilinear approximation drastically reduces visual quality. Nonetheless it proved to be a worthy alternative to the GeForce2 MX 200. Later on, SiS integrated it in their P4 chipsets, though the integrated version lacks hardware T&L. No support for anisotropic filtering though, unlike the GeForce.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/sis315.html

Tetrium wrote:

swaaye wrote:

Not Blade 3D, but Blade XP. A rare POS that's definitely 4x.

Lol, never knew there were 2 of em 😜
I suppose the Blade XP is the newer one?

There's also the Blade XP4, which was their "DX8-compliant" chip. But performance on that thing is also laughable. And even more so are the drivers.

Quick Q: Should I do a compact OA build with no sounds, just one level and two player models and a couple demo files (benchmarking/screenshot taking), just for this thread?
I want to see how bad opengl implementations screw up on obscure hardware. 😀 but SDL might fault it first.

Go for it, I don't see why not. 😀 This will weed out the superior hardware from the inferior (i.e. cheaper) ones. OpenGL ICD suddenly became very important once id threw that curveball with Q3A.

leileilol wrote:

Quick Q: Should I do a compact OA build with no sounds, just one level and two player models and a couple demo files (benchmarking/screenshot taking), just for this thread?
I want to see how bad opengl implementations screw up on obscure hardware. 😀 but SDL might fault it first.

Don't we already have Q3Test and Q3Demo1 for that purpose?

SiS 315 was working well. Only the 2xAA mode was blur filter, 4x was great multisample implementation. And the drivers were very compatible, they were just lacking good control panel. Just like all SIS graphics IIRC.
This is getting too modern for my taste, but did somebody actually got Trident XP4 card?

Putas wrote:

SiS 315 was working well. Only the 2xAA mode was blur filter, 4x was great multisample implementation. And the drivers were very compatible, they were just lacking good control panel. Just like all SIS graphics IIRC.
This is getting too modern for my taste, but did somebody actually got Trident XP4 card?

Too modern? 😕

I never heard of the Blade XP and even if I did, I forgotten about it when I read swaaye's post earlier 😜

It's kinda a shame though that most of the old 3D accelerators aren't proving themselves to be of much use these days. Seems the most liked ones (for PCI and beyond anyway) are the Voodoo's, Virge's/Trio's (though mostly for it's 2D 😁), GF2MX's and GF4/Radeon 9X00's.
SiS, Trident and Matrox aren't getting much love though. I used to think Matrox was quality, but it seems other people's experiences here say a different thing.
Rendition is interesting, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to have a nice niche it can fit into. It's no good for a 486 and too slow for anything faster then a Pentium 200 and in between them, we have plenty of other alternatives it seems.
S3 Savage...I don't know.

I know I loved my Radeon 9600's more then I love my GF7600GS's, even though the Radeon 9600's are of course slower, but relative to their age they've always performed great for me. The GF7600GS's were kinda a letdown, I expected more performance from them, and certainly less heat!!

Personally I was never really impressed with the TNT I had (was my very 1st graphics card, bought when it was brand new). I like the GF2MX's a lot more actually though some people here mention the TNT's, TNT2's and Riva's work good in DOS?
It's kinda a shame I don't have any PCI cersions of these cards, except for a couple TNT2 M64's

I would argue that the only really useful retro 3D card is Voodoo3-5 unless you are trying to play a game that requires a specific 3D card. Why? Because of Glide and because even the old D3D and OpenGL games targeted Voodoo cards for best compatibility.

Voodoo3-5's 2D is also almost as good as a S3 card for DOS compatibility and is also insanely fast. And its GUI acceleration is basically as fast as you can get. Banshee might be buggy though so steer clear of it IMO (I saw some palette corruption with StarCraft video).

Voodoo2 doesn't really have any advantages over V3-5. Voodoo1 is sometimes useful for really old DOS Glide games that don't recognize anything else.

Anything that uses DX7 or newer is best played on a modern card if it doesn't render incorrectly. Modern cards have the best texture filtering and antialiasing options.

.... but otherwise I just play around with old buggy worthless useless gimpy hardware because it's somewhat fascinating.

I think you should change the - to &. The Voodoo 4 sucked then and sucks now. It's equal in power to a Voodoo 3, if not a tid bit faster, and it also has FSAA, but only 2x and it also has the same compatibility problems as the Voodoo 5. The Voodoo 3 is a pretty nice card, however it's not an add-on card so you can't use it with another card and its compatibility with older Glide games is worse than the Voodoo 2. You could probably hook up a PCI Voodoo 3 with another AGP card (preferrably GeForce 2 or something), but I'm afraid of there being incompatibilities.
I also think the passthrough quality of the Voodoo 1/2 is good enough, but you can just hook the two cards (Voodoo and other card) to a monitor switch box and select which cards' signal you want to watch on your monitor, so no problem at all.

My Voodoo1 (Righteous 3D) definitely blurs the signal so I prefer to not use it unless it's for a specific game like Mechwarrior 2. I don't have a switch box. I just see little reason to use Voodoo1/2 unless I run into the rare game that won't work on a newer Voodoo but they are few. Heck I even got Carmageddon 1 running on Voodoo 3 and 5 (I think) and it was so wonderfully fast. That game runs awful on Voodoo1 and even Voodoo2 isn't fast enough to get solid 30 fps.

I'm really pumped about that DOSBOX Voodoo emulation and it hopefully ending all need for a Voodoo1 card.

I once had a setup with a GeForce FX AGP and Voodoo3 PCI in the same system. I just had to go into the BIOS and change the primary video card setting (AGP/PCI) and then Windows would run on one or the other on boot up. Worked fine.

batracio wrote:

Don't we already have Q3Test and Q3Demo1 for that purpose?

Q3Test/Q3Demo1 isn't that compact, has icky usage rights, and also lacks some features they cut out (detail textures and occlusion flares)

swaaye wrote:

My Voodoo1 (Righteous 3D) definitely blurs the signal so I prefer to not use it unless it's for a specific game like Mechwarrior 2. I don't have a switch box. I just see little reason to use Voodoo1/2 unless I run into the rare game that won't work on a newer Voodoo but they are few. Heck I even got Carmageddon 1 running on Voodoo 3 and 5 (I think) and it was so wonderfully fast. That game runs awful on Voodoo1 and even Voodoo2 isn't fast enough to get solid 30 fps.

I'm really pumped about that DOSBOX Voodoo emulation and it hopefully ending all need for a Voodoo1 card.

I once had a setup with a GeForce FX AGP and Voodoo3 PCI in the same system. I just had to go into the BIOS and change the primary video card setting (AGP/PCI) and then Windows would run on one or the other on boot up. Worked fine.

Carmageddon ran fine on a Voodoo 2, it was a bit slow at times on a Voodoo 1 at max details. Must have been unoptimised it doesn't make sense otherwise. But anyway, switch boxes are pretty cheap and I really think it does a great job at solving the problem. I might try to find a Voodoo 3 PCI to replace the two Voodoo 2 cards I've got, just for the heck of it 😁