First post, by Rhuwyn
Ran across a Voodoo 4 thats been modded. They replaced the VSA100 chip with the latest revision and bumped the RAM up to 64MB of ram. But they want a lot of money for it. Anyone think it might be worth it?
Ran across a Voodoo 4 thats been modded. They replaced the VSA100 chip with the latest revision and bumped the RAM up to 64MB of ram. But they want a lot of money for it. Anyone think it might be worth it?
How much?
150 USD
I think you'd need some very special reasons to be paying a Voodoo5's price for that.
Yeah it's just so unuseal you rarely see Voodoo4s and I have heard about the possible mods for them but never seen any actually available for sale. Basically this Voodoo4 technically has more useable memory then a Voodoo5 right? Because a Voodoo5 has 64Mb of RAM but since it's SLI you are splitting that between both chips 32MB per VSA100 chip on the board right? Where this particular Voodoo4 has 64MB for a single chip so on games that don't need the horsepower of two chips it should be able to do higher resolutions right?
This one is different, whoever is buying this isn't paying for a bone stock card but someones hard work and whoever did the mods did pretty good. At least this isn't a $90 generic voodoo 2 that any idiot can find for $15-30 from a different seller.
On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.
Yeah, I'm sure there's more texture memory, but the chips aren't that high power.
I've found my V4 to be rather disappointing and i doubt twice the memory would fix that.
You get spotty compatibility with older games meant for v2/v3 and it's not that fast in newer ones.
I found some benchmarks on the web:
Voodoo 4 AGP 64 Mb AGP4x :
No FSAA : 1576 3D marks
2x FSAA : 803 3D marks
Voodoo 4 AGP 32 Mb AGP 4x :
No FSAA : 1471 3D marks
2x FSAA : 661 3D marks
For me personally, it's worth having the extra 32MB for a 20% performance gain in FSAA.
And we are not talking just about the memory upgrade.
If the RAM is 5ns or lower, I think you could easily run it with 200/200!
A Voodoo5 will trounce it at $150. It's not a bad mod, but the purpose has to be pretty specific.
64MB is pretty much useless for voodoo4. For most games performance increase is exactly zero. And if you can find a game where 64MB brings more fps, it will be unplayable anyway. With 5ns (or less) SDRAM, you probably can run it @ 200/200 MHz... which is 20% increase from default and once again useless for actual gaming (either the game is running fast enough as it is, or it is unplayable and +20% won't help).
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Thanks for the input all. I passed on it. Still woud have been nice to have such a unique piece of hardware, but it just wasn't worth it at that price I decided.
here is obvious difference in perfomance and image quality between 32 and 64 mb
32: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5PpbAYUBwg
64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC5NJssGhF4
look at the sky flickering in 32mb card test
I had an opportunity to buy one of these on ebay a few years ago and passed it up. I think it sold for about $100. Maybe less?
It's more of a novelty but I wouldn't mind owning one simply to support higher native resolutions. As rare as they are, $150 would really be a collector's bid, as it's not realistically valued as such when compared to Voodoo 5 offerings.
Meanwhile on german ebay (finished auctions) http://i.imgur.com/BukEjhX.png
Almost makes this look like a bargain 😵
Sounds like a cool novelty to have at any rate, just not very useful.
Yea, I don't know why Voodoo 4 cards as so expensive. I would like to own one just to have a VSA-100 to dink around on with old Glide APIs but not to actually game on.
they are more rare then Voodoo5s basically at the time why by a Voodoo4 when you can do a Voodoo5 for not really that much more. Ultimately, value is all supply and demand. The more people that are willing to pay and the fewer there are the higher the price goes.
I feel like the price is to high for a voodoo 4, but I can understand based on rarity and the work for the mod
I have a v4 4500 PCI and I have mixed feelings towards it, maybe it would be a lot better if it was AGP or with PCI 66, but from my experience the card is to slow with anti aliasing, and slow for a card from 2000, still it's kind of a voodoo 3 3000 with 32bit support and more memory, its kind of nice for some glide games and kind of cool to be the last "GPU" 3dfx released (but a v5500 would also achieve that and be more useful since it's a good bit faster), but if you are going to run OGL and D3D games I think it's kind of a waste unfortunately, and even for glide, a lot of games require some tweaking to actually work with it, since those games tend to be older.... also I get the feeling that if you need more than 32MB the card is probably to slow for what you are trying to do?
and something that bothers me, I don't have a great experience with DOS games and this card unfortunately, it have some artifacts in some games, as far as I know the vooodo 3 didn't have these problems,
wrote:and something that bothers me, I don't have a great experience with DOS games and this card unfortunately, it have some artifacts in some games, as far as I know the vooodo 3 didn't have these problems,
What games are problematic?
3dfx had bugs in its VESA implementation for sure, and people have made tools to solve most of those. This page here is pretty neat, and compatibility doesn't look too bad: http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/
wrote:wrote:and something that bothers me, I don't have a great experience with DOS games and this card unfortunately, it have some artifacts in some games, as far as I know the vooodo 3 didn't have these problems,
What games are problematic?
3dfx had bugs in its VESA implementation for sure, and people have made tools to solve most of those. This page here is pretty neat, and compatibility doesn't look too bad: http://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/
a little late response but, it seems like 320x200 is the most problematic
I get some horizontal lines here and there, in some games is even a little hard to detect, but to list a few
quake on 320x200 has the problem (not very obvious), but 320x240 and higher doesn't have the problem;
Dark Forces also have the problem, Destruction Derby had the problem on the menu, but I didn't notice during gameplay.
Zsnes have the problem at 320x240 "modex" and 256x256 (I think) "modeq" on the menu (didn't notice during the emulated games), but not at the vesa2 and vs1.2 modes (at any res)
one thing is that using fastvid makes the problem a lot more obvious on all cases, but, it still only happen on the conditions mentioned, and also it made the problem appear on Doom (which I didn't notice without fastvid), but still not the most obvious case...
I've tested a few other games where the problem never happens, but I can't remember all of them, but I think I could mention GP2 (but thats SVGA), perhaps lost vikings, stunts...
this is all with a 440bx board, so I'm not sure there is something to do with the combination, but the problems didn't happen with other cards I tested, and this Voodoo seems to be working well other than that...