VOGONS


Rendition Verite Thread

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Reply 180 of 652, by Pippy P. Poopypants

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Made a quick compatibility list of games I've tested on the Stealth II S220 (V2100), similar to what leilei did with her PCx2 stuff.

http://sites.google.com/site/martinsguistuff/ … ation-resources

Will keep updating it once I test more games. So far as you can see anything OpenGL (not Quake/Quake II-related) is more than likely to be a crapshoot. 😀

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Reply 181 of 652, by Tetrium

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I think I asked it before somewhere, but what could be considered the most balanced CPU to match with a Rendition 2100 PCI?
I'd imagine it would be a Pentium MMX 233 or so?

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Reply 182 of 652, by swaaye

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That or maybe a low end P II. They are similar to a Voodoo1 in the best case games. Most 1998 and newer games have problems with Verite so you can't really get CPU limited with those processors.

Reply 183 of 652, by Pippy P. Poopypants

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Personally the absolute max. that I would go with is a PII 350. Anything beyond and the card is just gonna get saturated. The unreleased Hercules Thriller Conspiracy was supposedly designed to help P1 owners achieve near-PII gaming performance, so yeah I guess these weren't really designed to go far.

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Reply 184 of 652, by swaaye

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Thriller Conspiracy was a bad idea because only OpenGL games would have supported its transform chip. Direct3D didn't have any support for external transform hardware until v7, AFAIK, whereas Quake-based games inherently support it.

V2200 got buried by Voodoo2 quickly anyway, in both performance and compatibility. For that matter, a Voodoo1 is a better choice in almost every game. Verite chips are most interesting with Speedy3D and RRedline games but there aren't that many of them.

Reply 188 of 652, by SquallStrife

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swaaye wrote:

Thriller Conspiracy was a bad idea because only OpenGL games would have supported its transform chip. Direct3D didn't have any support for external transform hardware until v7, AFAIK, whereas Quake-based games inherently support it.

V2200 got buried by Voodoo2 quickly anyway, in both performance and compatibility. For that matter, a Voodoo1 is a better choice in almost every game. Verite chips are most interesting with Speedy3D and RRedline games but there aren't that many of them.

That's why I went with a V2200 8MB + Voodoo 6MB in my dual-MMX box. 😀

I saw in the first post that you were trying to get your hands on the 8MB variant of V2200, are there any benchies or whatever I could run for you?

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Reply 189 of 652, by swaaye

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I think the advantages to 8MB would be 1) maybe smoother play from less texture memory swapping in some later games 2) higher resolutions. I'm not sure the latter is useful considering the performance level and the former probably won't show up on benchmarks other than a simple large texture test. 😉

I still need to get myself on 8MB card. Considering how rare Verite cards are, I guess they didn't exactly sell well. Aside from the all too common Stealth II, anyway.

Reply 191 of 652, by keropi

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meh the more I read this thread the more I want a rendition just to see those few native games... 🤣

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Reply 192 of 652, by idspispopd

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This seems to be an appropriate place to dump some Rendition literature (see attachments).

v2200spec.pdf is very interesting and could answer some questions about the performance of V1000 and V2x00, even if you don't want to program the chips yourself. (The spec is for the V2200, but in several places the differences between V1000 and V2200 are highlighted. It seems that V2200 is running in V1000 compatibility mode until the driver switches to native mode.)

APIManual-VLibHostsideGraphics.pdf is what it says on the front page - an excerpted draft, quite incomplete. Maybe this is interesting for somebody.

(I will put this files on the Vintage Driver Library if I can get an account.)

Attachments

  • Filename
    v2200spec.pdf
    File size
    3.76 MiB
    Downloads
    239 downloads
    File comment
    V2200 TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS (including RISC PROGRAMMING)
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception
  • Filename
    APIManual-VLibHostsideGraphics.pdf
    File size
    268.33 KiB
    Downloads
    301 downloads
    File comment
    The Vérité™ VLib API (Excerpted Draft) Version 0.6
    A Guide to Vérité™ Graphics Rendering
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

Reply 193 of 652, by swaaye

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I'd say somebody should emulate it, but I can only think of a handful of games that would benefit from that. 😀 It's fascinating to read about the architecture though.

Reply 194 of 652, by idspispopd

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Tetrium wrote:

I think I asked it before somewhere, but what could be considered the most balanced CPU to match with a Rendition 2100 PCI?
I'd imagine it would be a Pentium MMX 233 or so?

According to http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3d-accele … step,51-23.html it depends, but a Pentium MMX 233 should be quite balanced:

3dbency8.jpg

(Benchmarks run at 640x480, GLQuake is Bigass1, Quake is timedemo demo1.)
Remember that this is an overclocked V2200. If you are talking about a V2100 at the standard clock of 40 MHz then your Pentium would be overkill.

Reply 195 of 652, by swaaye

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Well a P233MMX is ok but I can think of a couple of situations where you would want more speed than that. Grand Prix Legends, for example, is a game with RRedline support but it needs ~PIII to run really well (probably because of simulation and AI).

But when you consider the bulk of games that a V2200 will correctly run, a P233MMX is fine. It's really a D3D 5 / Quake 1 level card.

Reply 196 of 652, by idspispopd

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swaaye wrote:

I think the advantages to 8MB would be 1) maybe smoother play from less texture memory swapping in some later games 2) higher resolutions. I'm not sure the latter is useful considering the performance level and the former probably won't show up on benchmarks other than a simple large texture test. 😉

Regarding 2): Agreed.
Regarding 1): Depends on what you consider to be later games. Quake II with high quality setting is enough to see a noticeable difference with Voodoo2 with 2 MB vs 4 MB of texture memory, see http://www.fortunecity.com/millennium/celeste … 07/timedemo.htm. But V2200 might be to slow for these setting to be useful anyway.
IMO the biggest advantage to 8 MB is that you are able to switch on triple buffering. 3 screen buffers of 640*480 at 16bpp + one z-buffer at 16bpp is 2,457,600 bytes leaving 1,736,704 for textures, microcode and everything else (whatever that else might be) with a 4MB card. Depending on the game you could use more. But you seem to be aware of this early in this thread:

swaaye wrote:

According to the 1998 Gold MiniGL readme, triple buffering is enabled by default. This should negate issues with vsync and framerates. However, triple buffering may be a problem with 4MB cards because an extra screen buffer consumes more video RAM. I have no idea if their older OpenGL drivers have triple buffering support or whether it's on by default if so. This will definitely affect benchmark results because double buffering w/ vsync will lock the framerate near fractions of the refresh rate.

And of course 8MB should make it easier to run 24-bit color. Although I don't remember how big the performance hit was - that would probably be to slow to be usable.

swaaye wrote:

I still need to get myself on 8MB card. Considering how rare Verite cards are, I guess they didn't exactly sell well. Aside from the all too common Stealth II, anyway.

I should still have my old card (QDI Legend V2200 8MB AGP) in the basement, if I could only find it (and the time to do something with it...)

Last edited by idspispopd on 2012-02-18, 07:09. Edited 1 time in total.