kjliew wrote on 2020-04-29, 11:14:

I would be glad to know the list of games that you think they work better on real hardware without insisting an absolute authenticity of rendering outputs as someone would proclaim, such as the filters and dithering effects of true 3Dfx hardware.

well for some of us authenticity does matter, that's why I'm still keeping Voodoo 3 card and my old machine, the photography of something from your cellphone is of by far better technical quality than a painting of a famous painter but there are reasons why it's worth $0 unlike the painting 😀

My question is any game going to look better on the voodoo 2 cards with glide than in DirectX or OpenGL with GeForce4 Ti 4600?

Yes and no. You can emulate Glide on a good level with GeForce 4 Ti card, with better color depth, resolution and other stuff like anti-aliasing, but texture filtering will be worse. Sometimes drastically worse.

You should also not forget dos glide games if you want to play those. Dos glide games are the main reason I installed voodoo 2 SLI in my P3 retro pc. (On the other hand just single voodoo 1 card would be enough for those)

My opinion: if you've got any PCI voodoo already: just put it in. It won't harm.

If you have to buy: think about it, are the current prices worth it? It's your call 😀

Open GLand direct 3D are handled by the Geforce better any way, so you just want glide support. I guess you could just try soft emulation first, and if it's not satisfying you could get a real voodoo instead.

I'd go for V1 or V2, because they can coexist in your computer without having to switch the cable. For dedicated V3 or banshee I'd set up another computer. That is, if you have the space for it.

Oetker wrote on 2020-04-29, 10:38:

Tomb Raider, however, really is best played on a Voodoo, I don't think it supports anything but software and Glide.

Is there really not a better way to play the original Tomb Raider at this point? I guess OpenLara isn't complete yet.

I remember back when everyone was mentioning EF2000 – something about how it was one of the few games that statically-linked the 3DFX libraries and absolutely required a Voodoo 1? But it seems to have finally been forgotten.

Tomb Raider can be played on a variety of 3D cards from that era, not just the Voodoo.

The frame rate is best on a 3DFX card, but in terms of visual presentation, other cards can also provide decent results.

The best way I've found to play the original Tomb Raider is with the OpenGL wrapper GLRage

https://github.com/ata4/glrage

This is for use on a modern-ish system however - Windows 7+, OpenGL 3.3, etc. The results are quite impressive though. Widescreen resolutions, increased draw distance, missing music from the PlayStation version, and other neat little additions. Digital Foundry did a video on it a while back.

As for Quake, Half life and Diablo 2 I think you'd be all set with Ti4600.

So

3dfx is not "closer to the metal by design, and thus better than OpenGL/D3D will ever be",

but

"first 3d acceleration API developed specifically for games
which could be implemented into late '90s hardware
and this hardware wouldn't then cost thousands of dollars (like fully-OpenGL-compatible accelerators of late '90s)
but then things changed (and now full (as "close-to-metal" as 3dfx) OpenGL/D3D-compliant hardware is cheap)
but because it's the only API supported by some old games -- and only in these games it makes sense to use it (if you can't (or don't want to) use wrapper for whatever reason)"

?

That depends. DOS Glide is closer to metal. All while Glide API for OS like Win9x just use less code compared to what OpenGL or Direct3D could achieve, due to being tailored for specific 3D accelerators.

My favorite method of playing Tomb Raider is the Anniversary remake. Also, if you have Unreal patched to 1.26, the D3D renderer is as good as Glide, no point running it on 3dfx cards.

Dosbox ECE has Glide emulation for the old DOS Glide games.

pixel_workbench wrote on 2020-11-07, 15:14:

My favorite method of playing Tomb Raider is the Anniversary remake.

The gameplay and level design in Anniversary is very different though.

It's a fine game on its own, but I wouldn't consider it a proper replacement for the original.

My major gripe with anniversary edition would be checkpoint system which automatically refills your health after death, which makes medpacks redundant.