Driver from CD sounds bad. Swipe everything with Driver Cleaner Pro and take the newest drivers from falconfly. (V1.07.00)

Name the games.
To test glide - use SDK.

ok here's what:
1) downlaoded the drivers suggested by d1stortion
2)downlaoded the sdk app test by gamecollector
3)installed drivers,they seems to work ok
4)tried the tests..glide2x works ok,glide3x crash with an unhandled error5)tried descent 3 ,recognize 3dfx and works,SLOOOOWWWWW (even at lowest details settings)but does work..
5)tried heavy gear 2 and croc 2,none of them can recognize anything pbeyond direct3d hal..and indeed they plays like molasses on screen..

the cherry on top?every time i play a non 3dfx game like the ones above,all the 3dfx panels,resolution and setting(both from display properties and the taskbar)DISAPPEAR from the pc,and i have to restart the pc to get them again

also,don't know if its related or not:many dos games states that there's no proper vga installed and that i should try an univbe emulator(death rally stated that).if run in pure DOS,works perfectly

Heavy Gear 2 and Croc 2 aren't supporting glide at all.
See this list.

You're going to need more RAM if you want Descent 3 to run smoothly and Heavy Gear 2 needs at least 64MB. How fast is your PII CPU? Anyway, i think you should definitely install more RAM 😉.

If they are really running like molasses it doesn't have to do anything with the CPU or RAM. A PII with 32 MB is somewhat passable. They probably just run like crap because Direct3D sucked back in the day. The problem with Death Rally is normal, I have that too.

Did you wipe the old drivers with Driver Cleaner Pro like I said? And try some other games. Half-Life (no Glide either though, I don't get why it's in Gamecollector's list... it has 3dfx MiniGL only) should run great on your system, UT still somewhat decent. Get the demos for those games if you don't have them and see how they run.

d1stortion wrote:

If they are really running like molasses it doesn't have to do anything with the CPU or RAM. A PII with 32 MB is somewhat passable. They probably just run like crap because Direct3D sucked back in the day. The problem with Death Rally is normal, I have that too.

Did you wipe the old drivers with Driver Cleaner Pro like I said? And try some other games. Half-Life (no Glide either though, I don't get why it's in Gamecollector's list... it has 3dfx MiniGL only) should run great on your system, UT still somewhat decent. Get the demos for those games if you don't have them and see how they run.

32MB RAM is the minimum for Descent 3 and Croc 2... It won't be pretty running these games on the minimum specs (HDD thrashing comes to mind). I'm surprised Heavy II Gear works at all with it needing 64MB RAM and the OP only has 32MB!

When I hear 3dfx and bad Direct3D performance I can relate to that, because I once tried the G-Police demo on a PIII 900 with 512 MB. It was an unplayable mess at 640x480, the framerate was jerky and totally erratic.

thanks for the tips guys...the strange thing is that heavy gear 2 ran pretty well on windows me, as well as HEDZ which indeed supports Glide(and now runs very slow).i wonder why these differences in speed..and to think that i re-installed w98 instead of ME because of the dos support...

update:a friend of mine found some old RAM boards,but he can't remember how much ram are those..and i can't tell by just looking at them or the chips\rom on them.anyway i mounted them and windows now says that i have 126 mb ram(probably 130 total?)..i tried some games mentioned before..and lo and behold...same issues..

I don't recall having abnormally bad D3D performance with Voodoo3...

Try dat G-Police demo then.

I recall G-Police working smoothly on a Voodoo2 ages ago (on a Pentium cpu no less). Haven't tried on Voodoo3...

Tried it on V5 and it works fine there.

leileilol wrote:

I recall G-Police working smoothly on a Voodoo2 ages ago (on a Pentium cpu no less). Haven't tried on Voodoo3...

No performance issues with G-Police on a PS1... It just looks poo 🤣.

I think it holds its ground against the PC version, but I've never been a big fan of that game in the first place...

d1stortion wrote:

I think it holds its ground against the PC version, but I've never been a big fan of that game in the first place...

I actually enjoyed it on the PS1 😀, I've never played it on the PC, but i might give it a try soon. Surely it must look better than the PS1 version with it's wobbly polygon shifting and terrible draw distance 🤣 (still a decent game despite this though).

I liked Psygnosis a lot (RIP) and there are better games from them 😉 although I will admit that I was mainly concerned with shooting civilian cars in the sequel back in the day 🤣 so I can't fully comment on it...

By the way, HEDZ isn't supporting glide too. D3d game.

i decided to bite the bullet and do a clean windows me installation..i installed the drivers you guys linked above and it works perfectly..now i have decent speed in all 3dfx games.ist strange that only with ME i can achieve that.the main gripe with ME its the lack of dos mode.can i use a boot disk to boot it into dos?