VOGONS


90’s graphics cards

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First post, by Xray1281

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Hello everyone, I am building a old 90’s gaming pc using only parts from the 90’s. I have a kind of odd question. My computer will be using windows 98 second edition. Would it be possible use both the voodoo 3500 and the tnt2 pro in the same computer they both have different benefits but I’d like to use them both. I’d like to get the best 16bit and 24 big graphics possible for the time. Also is there a motherboard from that time that could handle this? I’m new to building PCs and any advice for this situation would be appreciated! 😀

Reply 1 of 7, by BinaryDemon

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From what I understand Win98 can’t support two different GPU simultaneously. Best case scenario, you will be disabling one in Device Manager and rebooting to switch active GPUs. I can imagine headaches with driver issues and the bios needing to a identifying primary GPU (are both cards PCI?).

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Reply 2 of 7, by Xray1281

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The voodoo 3500 is AGP2x and the TNT2 is PCI

Reply 3 of 7, by Justin1091

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I think you'll be fine, just get a monitor (crt!) with 2 inputs and switch to whatever card you want to use. Most games allow you to select the card you want to use. So you'd use one card to boot your pc into Windows, that one is 'primary' in your BIOS and you select the other one whenever you want in your games. Then use your monitor to switch to the other card when your game starts. I think it works the same as having a Voodoo2 setup but without the pass through cable.

Reply 4 of 7, by clueless1

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I'm not sure the TNT2 PCI will be a noticeable upgrade to what the V3 3500 could do in the same game, even in 16 million colors. For simplicity I'd just use the V3. Unless you had a couple of V2's that you could run in SLI, that might make more sense.

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Reply 5 of 7, by SPBHM

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Justin1091 wrote:

I think you'll be fine, just get a monitor (crt!) with 2 inputs and switch to whatever card you want to use. Most games allow you to select the card you want to use. So you'd use one card to boot your pc into Windows, that one is 'primary' in your BIOS and you select the other one whenever you want in your games. Then use your monitor to switch to the other card when your game starts. I think it works the same as having a Voodoo2 setup but without the pass through cable.

I think "most games" is a little optimistic, even with a Voodoo 2 + another 3d accelerator I had some trouble with that and had to try some 3rd party software,

glide and 32bits can be achieved with a voodoo 4 4500 or 5500.

Reply 6 of 7, by misterjones

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BinaryDemon wrote:

From what I understand Win98 can’t support two different GPU simultaneously. Best case scenario, you will be disabling one in Device Manager and rebooting to switch active GPUs. I can imagine headaches with driver issues and the bios needing to a identifying primary GPU (are both cards PCI?).

Win98SE does support two video cards, however there's a fairly small list of cards/chipsets it supports as a secondary card AND 3D is not available on the second card (if the chipset supports 3D). I used this type of setup for a while with a TNT2 for my primary card and a 4MB Virge card for the secondary. Neither card the op has is supported as a secondary display card.

Reply 7 of 7, by chinny22

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Got a similar setup.
Ti4600 AGP
Voodoo 3 2000 PCI.

I do have the occasional game that did require disabling a card but for the most part

AGP is the primary card so will play D3d games by default.
Glide games obviously only work on the Voodoo
Games that support both will let you specify which card/3D acceleration method you want to use.

Both are connected to separate screens so Win9x even allows you to extend the desktop.

I'll agree though that the TNT2 probably isn't that much of advantage over the voodoo, the TNT2 while supporting 24bit graphics isn't powerful enough to run games at decent resolutions.