coppercitymt wrote:This dude is driving me nuts 😉. He wants both glide and D3D, with no AGP slot I don't know I can pull that off! And want's it perord correct
Hmm, so he went from wanting to use a P4 to wanting something period-accurate? (circa 1999/2000, I assume)
You could probably make do with a single video card for D3D, Glide, and OpenGL with one of the later 3DFX cards. A voodoo 5 would tend to be a bit pricy (and you're on a budget), but a Voodoo 4 might be a good compromise. A voodoo 4 might end up being beyond your planned budget too, though.
Voodoo 3 would be a bottleneck for that CPU in most cases (unless you dropped the detail/resolution fairly low), and you also won't have 32-bit color support. OTOH, a Voodoo 3 3000 should still be pretty decent for most things in the era you're talking about. (and the 16-bit color quality is good enough that you don't miss that much for 32-bit) I think D3D and OpenGL support is relatively good for the Voodoo 3 too, at least through DirectX 6.x (which will cover the vast majority of games in question).
Anything requiring DirectX 7 or higher will almost certainly work on a modern system anyway.
If you want to go multi-card and don't want to deal with a VGA switchbox (or manually plugging the cable in), a Voodoo 2 set-up would probably be more convenient alongside a good D3D/OpenGL capable PCI card. But, unless you can manage to get dual voodoo 2s on the cheap (and the added card), that's probably going to get pricey too.
If you have any reasonably fast PCI video cards on-hand already, it might just make sense to start with that and let him get a feel for things before moving on. If you don't have anything on-hand, then a voodoo 3 would probably be the best starting point if you can get one cheaply. It's certainly period-accurate and fast enough to at least run games from ~1999/2000 reasonably well (it is a 1999 vintage card, after all). DOS compatibility is also pretty good on the voodoo 3, in case your friend ever decides to take interest in that. (even if he's mainly into 3D stuff, there's quite a few late DOS games that might be of interest)
Short of the voodoo 3 (or better in some respects) PCI Rage 128 Pro, TNT, or Matrox G400 would be decent choices if you can find them cheaply. All 3 were relatively common in PCI iirc, though still mostly made in AGP.
If you can't find any of those for less than the Geforce2MX PCI, then just go with that and deal with glide later. (or use a wrapper, but the GF2MX might be too slow for that to work well)