No matter how much I evangelize the importance of emulating the characteristic filter, it's a very missing part of the Voodoo experience not found in any modern Glide wrapper still, so there's still *some* merit of owning a card...and know that a Voodoo2's 4x1 differs from Graphics and Banshee/V3/V4/V5' s 4x1.

It’s not worth the EBay cost.
Search somewhere else at less synthetic price

mothergoose729 wrote on 2020-09-10, 03:30:

On nglide can't you set an arbitrary resolution and it will sample it for you? You can try a multiple of your screen resolution.

not really, running nglide on a fx 5900 ultra under win98 so the performance available isnt unlimited, and using a 21" CRT at 1600x1200 at 100hz too, and tbh it's the anisotropic filtering that I want more so than the antialiasing, since unfiltered textures look so ugly

p.s. luckily I got a hold of voodoo2 SLI and voodoo3 3500 for not too expensive, so I now just need a voodoo1, voodoo4 and voodoo5 to complete the set, but particularly the v4 and v5 are nightmare to find for reasonable price

matze79 wrote on 2020-09-10, 06:03:

It’s not worth the EBay cost.
Search somewhere else at less synthetic price

sounds like a sensible approach - but if they are selling on ebay then those sellers will also be searching in the places you might search in order to sell it on ebay

I find the prices for these cards strange, can the experience of using one really be that great?

I find Voodoo 2 ideal if you can only allow yourself a single retro-PC (space restrictions, for instance).
If that´s the case, and one wants to cover a relatively wide era of vintage PC gaming (let´s say 1993-2001/DOS-Win98), then picking a Pentium III based machine is quite a natural choice. The AGP slot would be destined for a GF2-GF4 class card (or Ati 8500) to deal with late DirectX/OpenGL Win98 titles. The voodoo 2, installed in an available PCI slot, would be best suited for covering the earlier years of Win9X Glide 3D games.

To the question, paying $200 for a Voodoo 2, is it worth it? There is no easy answer. A Voodoo3 is better and a bit less expensive (for now). You can get a GF2 GTS on eBay for around $30, outperforming both.

Some here have mentioned nGlide as an alternative, some spoke about nGlide not being accurate enough.
It´s a similar situation to what happens in the console collecting world; is it worth paying those current prices when you can emulate (RaspberryPi) or use flashcarts/ISO loading devices?
Yet again, some systems are not accurrately emulated yet (Atari Jaguar or Sega Saturn, to name a few) or are not easily moddable.

Besides...nostalgia. When it comes to "re-creating moments", It is not the same "feeling" owning the real, piece of history, hardware than alternatives. It is not the same thing holding a Voodoo 2 in your hands than a GF FX Series one (that yes, outperfomrs it and can emulate it through nGlide).

maybe for nostalgic reason its ok for you to pay 200$ for a V2 Card.
For me its not.
We played a lot with the V2, even RTCW and NOLF.
We could not effort a GeForce Card from your pocket money

It has it own Charm, if you like blurry 16bit Colors 😀
For know i prefer something with better Picture Quality.

I tried V2 SLI 1-2 Years ago again and was not satisfied by its Performance, neither by its Resolution.
If i would use a CRT it maybe ok, but i use TFT.
And a V2 on a TFT is ugly Solution as i can`t choose 1280x1024 Nativ Resolution.

So if you play Glide Games its ok, if you don`t know whats glide is you would not need one.

I still have a Gateway tower with a P3-500 in it and 2 Voodoo2 SLI cards that I used to play Diablo 2 on. Visuals were fine for me on a CRT at the time. I paid $300 for my original V2 when it was first released (hope I kept the box not sure) and got another one a few years later much cheaper (same brand) for SLI. I think I have an 8MB V2 on the shelf I got with a bunch of other cards for shipping years ago.

As far as it it worth it, depends on your financial situation and love for glide games. Worst case you buy a pair and if you get bored sell them off and you just lose shipping or break even. GLIDE wrappers have been around for ages but some people want the real thing so 3dfx cards are probably not going to go down in price until people my age start to die off.

Unknown_K wrote on 2020-09-10, 19:34:

I still have a Gateway tower with a P3-500 in it and 2 Voodoo2 SLI cards that I used to play Diablo 2 on. Visuals were fine for me on a CRT at the time. I paid $300 for my original V2 when it was first released (hope I kept the box not sure) and got another one a few years later much cheaper (same brand) for SLI. I think I have an 8MB V2 on the shelf I got with a bunch of other cards for shipping years ago.

As far as it it worth it, depends on your financial situation and love for glide games. Worst case you buy a pair and if you get bored sell them off and you just lose shipping or break even. GLIDE wrappers have been around for ages but some people want the real thing so 3dfx cards are probably not going to go down in price until people my age start to die off.

With Glide wrappers being so good, I am guessing we are unliklely to ever see an FPGA based Voodoo re-creation . No interest for die-hard collectors and no real use for regular folks . Or maybe I'm wrong .

darry wrote on 2020-09-10, 19:41:

Unknown_K wrote on 2020-09-10, 19:34:

I still have a Gateway tower with a P3-500 in it and 2 Voodoo2 SLI cards that I used to play Diablo 2 on. Visuals were fine for me on a CRT at the time. I paid $300 for my original V2 when it was first released (hope I kept the box not sure) and got another one a few years later much cheaper (same brand) for SLI. I think I have an 8MB V2 on the shelf I got with a bunch of other cards for shipping years ago.

As far as it it worth it, depends on your financial situation and love for glide games. Worst case you buy a pair and if you get bored sell them off and you just lose shipping or break even. GLIDE wrappers have been around for ages but some people want the real thing so 3dfx cards are probably not going to go down in price until people my age start to die off.

With Glide wrappers being so good, I am guessing we are unliklely to ever see an FPGA based Voodoo re-creation . No interest for die-hard collectors and no real use for regular folks . Or maybe I'm wrong .

Somebody will do it just to do it. There is no real reason to play games on real hardware when you can do emulation other then just to do it.

If I live long enough I suspect somebody will come out with a 3d printing device that can make ANY chip including the packaging to replace dead ones needed for special tasks and some hobbyist will get access to it.

I've had my V2's for about three years now, usually running in tandem with a GF2 ultra. Honestly more often than not I
would use the GF2. Having SLI vintage is cool though but really my eyes can't tell much difference but then again I'm
no graphics professional as some of you out there.

Food for thought: Instead of putting money towards a V5 , why not invest in an Geforce 3070 which supposedly
surpasses an 2080 Super yet costs give/take around 500 bucks? Honestly I'm gravitating towards the modern games
these days.

A Voodoo2 is worth it (or not worth it, POV-dependent) in the same way that a Gravis Ultrasound is.

It's a niche product and so are the reasons for wanting one. Still perfectly valid.

3dfx value is overblown because it's a cult. Same goes for GUS cards, but with even less reason to use for games.

Definitely not worth more than $50 (from a functional standpoint, if you simply want to play some good ol' games). However, they are now collector's items (and I can understand why), so prices have gone up A LOT in the past 7 years or so. My advice: if you have one or more Voodoo 2 cards, take good care of them and don't let them go 😀 Also, some basic electronics debugging and soldering skills won't hurt, because they tend to suffer from the sudden death syndrome - I had one die on me while being as safe as possible on a shelf, in a high quality antistatic bag (VRAM gone bad). Fortunately, I was able to fix it and has been working fine for the past year.

one of my voodoo3 2000 agp cards died just recently, out of nowhere, the retro PC was on in the other room and the win98 maze 3d screensaver had came up, and it had frozen with artefacts, after rebooting the PC, artefacts all over the screen... no idea what happened, I had a high rpm fan tied to it to keep it cool, guess thats not enough to make it last long

Value is determined by the individual, and by the open market. Nothing else matters.

Shreddoc wrote on 2020-09-14, 13:58:

Value is determined by the individual, and by the open market. Nothing else matters.

or to put it in more traditional terms: money talks bullshit walks

I see it like this: If the card seems like it's still in good shape and it's not priced higher than what it originally cost, it's still worth it.

it IS a prized posession for those who want it, it was limited then and even moreso now. most of us were just simply unlucky to be into this hobby 5-10 years ago as opposed to getting into now.

on top of these factors, the voodoo 2 has more things going for it than other cards - 1) the first (and only for 3dfx?) SLI option, a historical bit of hardware. 2) the fact that these PCI cards allow an AGP system to have more functionality than what it normally would.

anyone upset at the price is allowed to be upset, sure, but it doens't make a lick of difference. people WANT these cards. you WANT this card. therefore it is valuable. there is no necessity.

if there's not many around, naturally the price goes up. if they were useless then nobody would care. but they are very useful, moreso than most cards from the time.

old paintings are some of the most expensive things in the world. do you think collectors cry about the price? "why does someone try to sell this painting for a million dollars?? its so old!!" no, this is a factor in the collection side of things. the value. the age sometimes determines the value too.

If you're a fan of Voodoo then nothing else is better than the original cards.

I do not run Voodoos as I lack room for a proper PPro / V2 setup that would be my Quake multiplayer machine. Voodoo3(+fast cpu) is of course way better from a practical standpoint but the original V2s are deliciously pompous. Also the various vendor versions lend it a cool "collector's haven" aura.

I have a Voodoo2 but I don't see it as some hot must have card personally. When you main it in its heyday like I have, you'll soon be sick of its shortcomings a year later, getting all those texture cache snags a SLI won't ever compensate along with the poor image quality. It's not the godly woo-big-forsaken-numbers wow-run-doom3 card certain some give too much credit for later on. Certainly don't spend a fortune on one if you expect decent 3d, unless you really want the gamma'd up, blurry, sometimes stuttery authentic voodoo niche experience (maybe with UnrealEngine1 stuff it's "best" for), or to have some outrageous box in your house, reminiscing hard on the sega-like 3dfx aggressive marketing.

My point earlier about the merit is that current emulation and wrappers aren't quite up to preserving the V2's nooks and crannies due to either performance reasons, scope, or the direction of convenience/whoopydoo4k. (I want them to though. Give me dither subtracted, filtered up, mipmap dithered, gamma overflow bugged, slow 3d in software please)

I've paid around $30 total for my Voodoo 1 + 2. One a lucky recent score, and the other had for a long time when it cost nothing. So I will never need to spend the current open market price of $200.

But I probably would, if I didn't have cards already. Simply because trying out various PC hardware is a main hobby. Then I might pass it on if I didn't like it.

I will probably sell my Voodoo1, as it's hard to justify keeping for only 2 DOS Glide games I like. The Voodoo2 is a lot easier to justify.