VOGONS


First post, by Drake9800

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Hello everyone!
Reaching out in hopes of some Voodoo 2 insight.
Recently purchased 2x8mb Voodoo 2 cards (Diamond Monster 3d II, Creative CT6670) Paired with a Matrox Millenium 2 (8mb expanded).
Each card works independently and with latest Fast voodoo 2 drivers the display tab confirms SLI "detected" BUT...

the reported texture memory still shows 4mb, I assume 8mb total (4mb per card) is the norm?
gmLUEyk.jpg

3dMark99 gives a score of a whopping 900 in 800x600 and 899 in 1024x768...

I've tried several driver combos with no avail. Beginning to wonder if these two cards really are just incompatible?
There must be something I am missing?

Win 98se
Mitac PH5400V Mobo
128mb Ram
Pentium 200 mmx

Reply 1 of 3, by leileilol

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Yes.
A Voodoo2 8mb has 2mb of texture memory per TMU (x2). Another card through SLI won't up this texture memory because SLI is an alternating line technique and requires the same textures to be on both cards. For many early vertex-shaded games without lightmaps, this is still effectively 2mb.

Last edited by leileilol on 2020-05-22, 01:02. Edited 1 time in total.

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 2 of 3, by Garrett W

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It seems like every few months or so someone has the exact same question. I like to call it the "VOGONS Voodoo2 Memory Reporting Curse"! Your cards are fine. Each card has 8MB split into 4MB Framebuffer and 4MB Texture memory.
Haven't looked into how 3DMark99 performs on similar systems such as yours, but your scores betray a CPU bottleneck 😀. That PMMX 200 is not doing these cards any favors, even one of the Voodoo2s would be severely limited by this CPU.

Check some threads here or perhaps some scores on HWBot to see how 3DMark99 performs on similar CPUs. Also, your motherboard is apparently i430VX based, which means it can only cache up to 64MB RAM. Those extra 64MB are actually slowing your system down most likely, I'd recommend sticking with 64MB.

Reply 3 of 3, by Drake9800

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I really appreciate the replies, my apologies for being a complete dolt!
I am glad to learn that the cards are at least working/reporting as they should, in regards to the system specs I have other towers with more appropriate CPUs (P3 550, k6-2 333), I'll give them a try tonight!
Hopefully I can track down a better spec'd mobo for this particular case as I am quite fond of how ugly it is!
all else fails I'll fall back to playing Test Drive on my 5150.

Cheers!