Use the latest drivers instead of the Monster3D ones and see what happens then.

Also, try benchmarking a specific game at 800x600 and then try the same thing with SLI disabled and see if there's a difference. Quake 2 or Quake 3 will do nicely.

Ok so I will update to the latest reference drivers on falconfly tonight and see if that does anything. If not do i need to remove the 2nd card or is there a way to disable SLI without getting into the case?

Im assuming the 2nd test is to see if I have a dead card or not?

Thanks!

There is a switch in the drivers I believe, unless I'm mistaking it for Voodoo 5. You could always remove the card (or at least the ribbon cable) just to be sure no shenanigans are going on behind your back. 🤣

There's indeed a "Disable Scanline Interleave" checkbox in the V2 pane;'s advanced dialog.

So I tried those things. Still doesnt work. A couple questions Im having trouble finding the answers to on the net...

Do you need 2 x 12 MB cards to do 1024 x 768?

Do the cards have to be the same exact revision?

Thanks everyone.

What do you mean it doesn't work? Did you try the SLI thing and if so what was the result? You need to figure out whether or not SLI is actually working, that should be your first priority.

To answer your questions:

a) No, 8MB will do 1024x768 as well.
b) No. I've been SLIing my MaxiGamer3D II and Orchid Righteous II for almost 10 years with little issues. I just have to use the appropriate driver.

F2bnp wrote:

To answer your questions:
b) No. I've been SLIing my MaxiGamer3D II and Orchid Righteous II for almost 10 years with little issues. I just have to use the appropriate driver.

Just to be clear, the appropriate driver is NOT the reference drivers.
For mismatched cards you need an unofficial driver like the fastvoodoo

edit: just realised you said same revision not same card.
Reference drivers should work fine with different revisions but you may still have more luck with the unofficial driver

You can do mix and match even without FastVoodoo, there are other alternatives. This is besides the point however, I was merely stating that I have different cards just to push the point that different revisions of the same card should not really matter. The Monster3D was probably the most popular one of the Voodoo and Voodoo2 cards, this seems like a different issue altogether.

Hopefully, it's just Windows 98SE messing you up with the drivers and not a faulty card. Another thing that sprang to mind, which drivers are you using for that Live! 5.1 ? Do you know if they are VxD or WDM drivers?

So I did a fresh install of Win98SE, all I installed was the LAN driver, the primary display adapter (SIS 630), my sblive! drivers (Im sorry im at work and I dont know if they are VXD or WDM but I will confirm) and the FastVoodoo 4.6 drivers.

Curious enough when I did system info on settings it showed SLI detected but my total texture memory was only 4 MB (frame buffer was 4 MB as well)...which was wrong...so I reseated everything twice, no change. I went ahead and tried unreal and at all resolutions it was fine except 1024x768. It loads 1 frame and instantly locks up on the unreal flyby when the game is first started. Other games will seize up with crazy colors all over the screen and some wont even show a picture when loading at that resolution and just play the game music.

All that being said, I then switched to the latest ref drivers for win9x (3.02 I believe) and restarted and checked system info again SLI is detected BUT this time it shows 8 MB of frame buffer and 8 MB of texture memory. I believe this is correct. So I tried unreal again, same problem.

I thought I read somewhere where the FSB being too fast might screw up voodoo 2 sli. So I tried this...I lowered my clocks to 66/66...so my 1000EB down-clocked to 500 mhz and my FSB down-clocked to 66 mhz. Lo and behold different results. Unreal flyby actually plays for a bit sometimes, one time it kept the first frame on the screen sort of translucent while it flyby'd in the background at the right resolution.

So then I got another idea, I have another machine I've been working on a win95/DOS machine (ostensibly DOS really). So I pulled the cards out of my 1ghz machine and put them in this much slower machine running a Pentium 1 w/ MMX at 233mhz, 128 mb of PC100 SDRAM, VIRGE DX, Sound blaster 16

Loaded the 3.02 win 9x driver on windows 95 and installed unreal on the machine. Checked system info and got it to SLI detected 8mb/8mb. Started up unreal flyby and it ran fine on all resolutions except when I switch to 1024x768 it locks up.

THE SAME THING!

So maybe one of my cards has a bad memory module or something...is there a way to test these cards to make sure all the components are working?

Thanks again all.

I don't know what to tell you, I'm thinking your best bet is to test each card individually at 800x600 with something like 3DMark 2000 that will push them to the max. That way you'll see whether or not one of the two cards is having issues.

Dude, don't go by what "memory" the tab is reporting. Voodoo2s in SLI draw the EXACT SAME IMAGE on both cards, just using alternating scan-lines on the screen. So while you may "technically" have 8MB of framebuffer total between two cards, you effectively only have 4MB framebuffer for the image the two cards are drawing. If you have an "8MB Voodoo2" card, the tab could be telling you have 8MB of texture memory, but you really don't. Both cards have to have the exact same textures loaded into both memory banks, giving you only 4MB of texture memory effectively. If you have 12MB Voodoo2 cards, then you'd have 8MB of texture memory effectively. I'd rather the tab tell me my effective memory (the FastVoodoo drivers do this) than to give you a false impression when you're trying to match up system requirements for a game.

I tried playing Return to Castle Wolfenstein on my Voodoo2 SLI setup (12MB cards) and it ran, but only really at 640x480. Trying to change just about any video setting caused the game to lock up and refuse to start again until I deleted the configuration file (setting the game to defaults). It was a guy here on Vogons that helped me switch over to my RIVA TNT2 32MB card. Now I can play at 1024x768, but the framerate is around 14-25 FPS. Enough to play, but it's a bit choppy on outdoor scenes. Processor is a 600MHz Pentium 3.

Voodoo2s in SLI draw the EXACT SAME IMAGE on both cards

They don't.

In the internal memory, yes. They do. Both cards are rendering the exact same frame. They have the exact same textures for each surface, the same triangles, everything. The difference is that each card is only drawing alternating lines on the screen. This allows the two cards operating together to generate a higher-resolution screen at 1024x768. This means each card only has to ACTUALLY draw 384 lines OF THE IMAGE.

FFXIhealer wrote:

In the internal memory, yes. They do. Both cards are rendering the exact same frame. They have the exact same textures for each surface, the same triangles, everything. The difference is that each card is only drawing alternating lines on the screen. This allows the two cards operating together to generate a higher-resolution screen at 1024x768. This means each card only has to ACTUALLY draw 384 lines OF THE IMAGE.

Technically they are rendering the same FRAME but they are rendering alternating lines so they are not rendering the same IMAGE.

Voodoo 2 use afr. They both have the same data in their vram. But etch card renders one line of pixels after another. Etch card only rendereds half the screen/image. Not the hole image.

appiah4 wrote:

FFXIhealer wrote:

In the internal memory, yes. They do. Both cards are rendering the exact same frame. They have the exact same textures for each surface, the same triangles, everything. The difference is that each card is only drawing alternating lines on the screen. This allows the two cards operating together to generate a higher-resolution screen at 1024x768. This means each card only has to ACTUALLY draw 384 lines OF THE IMAGE.

Technically they are rendering the same FRAME but they are rendering alternating lines so they are not rendering the same IMAGE.

They ARE rendering the same image. They're just not drawing the same pixels.

FFXIhealer wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

FFXIhealer wrote:

In the internal memory, yes. They do. Both cards are rendering the exact same frame. They have the exact same textures for each surface, the same triangles, everything. The difference is that each card is only drawing alternating lines on the screen. This allows the two cards operating together to generate a higher-resolution screen at 1024x768. This means each card only has to ACTUALLY draw 384 lines OF THE IMAGE.

Technically they are rendering the same FRAME but they are rendering alternating lines so they are not rendering the same IMAGE.

They ARE rendering the same image. They're just not drawing the same pixels.

If they are not drawing the same pixels they can not twehnically be rendering the same picture. They are drawing the same frame but different pictures there is a distinction.

Dude, you need a dictionary. It's RENDERING THE IMAGE. IN MEMORY. The exact same triangles, the exact same textures, the exact same image.

Are you TRYING to troll here?

FFXIhealer wrote:

Dude, you need a dictionary. It's RENDERING THE IMAGE. IN MEMORY. The exact same triangles, the exact same textures, the exact same image.

Are you TRYING to troll here?

Calm down cowboy. If you can't be civil, I would suggest that you do not carry arguments. The cards in SLI mode render the same frame but do NOT render the full frames, they render seperate halves of the same frame so technically they are rendering DIFFERENT images. These two different images when combined create the full frame.