The passthrough of the V2 made the 2D quality of the main graphics card redundant. Meaning everything that was not rendered on the V2 and only passed through looked not as good as it looked without the V2 (I did have one, so I'm not just repeating others words)
Don't know about the V3 but I was happy with my V5. But yes, a V5 PCI is hard to come by and I do remember that old games needed some tinkering to work on the V5 (and V3?).

I'd go for V5... it loves fast CPUs and the KT7A should take the AGP version as well.

Believe me the v5 does sound like the way to go. I mean.. as far as pass through on v2 goes i can deal with it in one way or another... so that and the issues of procurement aside..

Can anyone tell me if any of the games i listed work (or look) better in a v2 than in a v3/v5? If anyone knows where i can see screen shots of of v2 vs v5 /w AA?

The only modernish games that I would want to play are Civ4 and the Sims 2. And I know that with a decent proc and a raedeon 7000 they are defiantly playable. So if the v5 can out class that GPU I think it just might work.

Voodoo3 and 5 will just look better because of the removal of the pass-thru cable. They are obviously going to be faster too. Voodoo5 adds 32-bit color depth too. Its anti-aliasing is quite good, but it does drag down performance quite a bit. Go look up reviews of it. They will have screenshots.

A Voodoo5 will definitely give a Radeon 7000 a run for its money. And there are 3rd party drivers out there with DirectX8 support so it should work with stuff like Civ4 perhaps. No guarantees though. Voodoo5 is DirectX 6 technology.

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=923
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=1276

Drivers available at http://www.falconfly.de

V5 prices are just nuts! 🙁

Also, why no mention of 4? Did 3DFX just decide to skip 4 that day?

V5 prices are just nuts!

Huh? Just a quick glance at eBay shows me a couple of V5s that have not much of a price going for them... Well, at least not the AGP ones.

yeah the v5 agp prices are deff. reasonable. besides mike.. i have an idea of what you paid for that roland daughterboard i saw in another thread. that said.. even going with a PCI can't really front on that. 😜 the voodoo5 is like 2x v4 but one single card to go on.. wiki says they are still in the same family.. using the vsa-100 chip.

swaaye:... that was some good info. that review wasn't very nice to that card.. FPS wise that geforce 2 GTS kinda walked all over it. i guess my big benefit will be the FSAA in the older games.

so now what i have found is that v5 dosn't have any hardware t&l. This is a major problem for civ4.. the sims can compensate by having a faster processor (my board has support for up to 2600+ t-bred).

based on the review: the 3dfx drivers have a feature called "geometry assist" that uses the processor to sort it out. it was disabled because it was glitch in most games. I'm sure that is the case on the original drivers.

So i went to the website with the new drivers.. since it looks like the 3rd party stuff supports from directx 8 to some stuff in nine. I love the EA games website.. it says min video requirements for civ4 is directx 9c.. but in the recommended it says directx 8. sounds like its gonna be interesting. I think this is what i like most about building this rig.. there are so many different gotchas.. there is no perfect solution. Simply prioritize and then optimize.

Yeah 3dfx never got a card out with HW T&L. Geometry "assist" is just a software-based equivalent that may or may not work, as you read. I've never even messed with it. Games of those days didn't need it at all. I wouldn't be surprised if "geometry assist" was added solely to get a few extra points in 3Dmark.

GeForce 2 GTS was out of Voodoo5's league. If V5 had come out when it was supposed to, it would've been up against GeForce 256 and that is a much better match-up. Of course, today the performance differences between GF2 and V5 are rather academic, but V5 definitely has much better AA and it has Glide support. Both of those features and the fact that most GF256 and GF2 cards are blurry as hell, makes Voodoo5 not nearly as bad as the plain performance numbers may make it appear.

And, if you like games that use the original Unreal engine, Glide on Voodoo5 is vastly superior to D3D on any card from those days. It's more than just performance, too. Glide is what that engine was built around and you get the most bug-free output from it. Excepting the recent OpenGL renderer from Chris Donhal, however. 😀

yeah dood for sure i'm set on getting the v5. is it sad though if now i DO want to get the pci version? 🤣...cost wise i doubt i'm going to do that. prolly gonna have to settle for a fx5500 pci or some other raedon if i want hw t&l. one thing i did find interesting though.. was that the 3rd party drivers seemed to stop at dx8 on windows 9x. the dx9c stuff was 2k/xp only. maybe i need to look a little closer..

at any rate.. i'm going to try to land the agp version this weekend.. i'll give it shot and see where it goes from there.

That the card's driver are only DX8 compatible doesn't mean you can't install DX9, it only means that certain DX9c features may not be availlable. So you will probably be good to install the game and even play it in Win9x

Mike 01Hawk wrote:

V5 prices are just nuts! 🙁

Also, why no mention of 4? Did 3DFX just decide to skip 4 that day?

Um, there is Voodoo4 4500, which only has one VSA-100 chip. It's not worth it, though. It can only do 2x FSAA, and if you decide to not use AA, Voodoo3 is much better choice.

prophase_j wrote:

Can anyone tell me if any of the games i listed work (or look) better in a v2 than in a v3/v5? If anyone knows where i can see screen shots of of v2 vs v5 /w AA?

Be cautious; old GLide games may not work with Voodoo5. Archimedean Dynasty is an example --check Silent Loon's thread here.

akula65 wrote:

I can sympathize with your plight. I remember trying to get the 3dfx patch to work on a Pentium MMX 233 MHz processor with a Creative Labs Voodoo2 card years ago. I also tried to get it to work in a Pentium III 933 MHz system with a Voodoo5 card. Unfortunately, I didn't take any notes, so I can't remember exactly what I did. I do recall that I had zero success getting 3dfx support to work with the Voodoo5.

So what other things won't work on the v5.. other than that game. Personally i have never played it or heard about it until very recently.. but i did read about it. is it one of those v1 games? the kind that access the hardware directly? if it is just that one and a few other.. probably not going to be a big deal. If compatibility was the main concern.. i'd still be back on get v2 SLI.

As far as driver dx8/9 goes... i'm figuring those 3rd party driver do what the 3dfx one were up.. as far as using the processor it do things like pixel shader. So i figure in worst case i can dual boot.. i'll save the XP partition for the new games and everything else will be 98 and dos 6.22. I have also decided i'm going to put a pci u160 scsi card and a 10k rpm disk... since that is the largest bottleneck

prophase_j wrote:

So what other things won't work on the v5.. other than that game. Personally i have never played it or heard about it until very recently.. but i did read about it. is it one of those v1 games?

Yup. Many V1 games may not work on Voodoo5, or Voodoo3 for that matter. It seems Voodoo2 has better chance to run V1 games.

let's put it another way:

If you want 100% Glide compatibility in every way, you have to use a Voodoo1. A Voodoo2 may be able to be coerced into playing the older games too, but it's not a guaranteed thing.

Voodoo Banshee/3/4/5 have considerable advantages over Voodoo1/2/Rush. Unless you are sure you want to play those Glide games that probably won't work on on a Banshee/3/4/5, I wouldn't even consider a 1/2/Rush. Blurry and slow the 1/2/Rush are. Limited to low resolutions too. 1024x768 can only be done with SLI'ed Voodoo2 cards. V1 is 640x480, V2 is 800x600. There are some games that go a bit higher by forgoing a z-buffer, but performance becomes questionable anyway and you can't skip the z-buffer and not have rendering issues. Voodoo Banshee/3/4/5 can do any resolution.

So what are the V1 "only" games? The pack in Mech Warrior comes to mind, or can that be supported by later gens?

swaaye wrote:

A Voodoo2 may be able to be coerced into playing the older games too, but it's not a guaranteed thing.

set SST_GRXCLK=90
set SST_FT_CLK_DEL=0x4
set SST_TF0_CLK_DEL=0x6
set SST_TF1_CLK_DEL=0x6
set SST_VIN_CLKDEL=0x1
set SST_VOUT_CLKDEL=0x0
set SST_TMUMEM_SIZE=2

Mike 01Hawk wrote:

So what are the V1 "only" games? The pack in Mech Warrior comes to mind, or can that be supported by later gens?

Try this, although it's actually list of DOS GLide games instead of Voodoo1-only games.

Yeah, I would suggest that most if not all of those dos only games won't work with a Voodoo5 (well I've heard of some V5 Tomb Raider patch, but don't know if it really works).

Still you might get them working with a V2.

Mechwarrior 2 3dfx Version is allready Win95, but special anyway, as I had difficulties to get it runnig even with a Voodoo 1. It uses a quite early version of the glide api and will not run with later ones.
(see: http://www.geocities.com/k_lupinsky/ )

There is a another option if you have time and both cards laying around:
Using a Voodoo1 and a V5 in one system. But you might have to do some driver tweaking and "glide switching", and as you can't play all games at the same time it might be too much hassle after all.

Update:

So intrestlingly enough.. I ended up getting an EPOX board that is almost identical to the Abit. Same chipset though. Waiting on ebay to get my v5.... at the recycling center is was at they had a v3 3k for $2.. so picked it up. I decided i want to jump in and get my system built 😀

Fired up Janes f15 and dang.... all i can say is that i don't remember it looking anything like that!!!

Now i really can't wait to get my v5 and crank the AA up

prophase_j wrote:

I ended up getting an EPOX board that is almost identical to the Abit.

Would that be the KTA3+(Pro)? A very nice board, had one of these for years (survived 4 CPUs, from Duron 800 up to AXP 1700+). Could do 150 MHz FSB easily. Those were the days... 😉