other than the piss poor FPU, the K6-III 400 or faster actually performed about the same as a PII
edit: just looked on egay... voodoo 3s are way more expensive than even the crappy geforce fx 5200 pci!
so I guess I'll just settle for the radeon 9250 still... GLide be damned 😒
wrote:other than the piss poor FPU, the K6-III 400 or faster actually performed about the same as a PII
That's true. But we're talking about 3D games and that is heavily FPU oriented. If you want to play Microsoft Word or Excel, sure they are about equal. 😀
wrote:edit: just looked on egay... voodoo 3s are way more expensive than even the crappy geforce fx 5200 pci!
so I guess I'll just settle for the radeon 9250 still... GLide be damned 😒
How about a PCI GeForce or TNT2 instead? It's a better old game choice than a Radeon. Trust me.
BTW, when I look up completed Voodoo3 auctions they appear to sell for $10-20.
Watch this one:
http://cgi.ebay.com/3DFX-VOODOO-3-2000-16MB-G … =item20b77de3ca
if I were to take something older... I rather have a GeForce over a TNT2... still a faster/better GPU
too bad nvidia's 2D video quality always sucked compared to ATI
Not all of NVIDIA's old cards are blurry. In fact, I think most of them are fine. But yes some of them are definitely blurry.
I have a TNT, TNT2, GeForce 256, GeForce 2 MX, GeForce 2 Pro and GeForce 3 that are not bad at all. 😀 You could go after a GeForce 4 MX PCI. aka MX4000, MX440, etc. That would be pretty nice overall I think. Try to get something fanless.
Best is still a cheap Voodoo3 if you can snag one.
Also, regarding TNT2, it wouldn't be a bottleneck. You are overestimating a K6-III in 3D games. TNT2 ~= Voodoo3.
^ agreed.
wrote:the whole point of me even wanting a new video card is so that I can at least finally play quake2 on that machine...
I had a K6-III + i430TX + Voodoo Banshee at the time, and it was plenty fast for games like Quake 2, Unreal or Half-Life.
not blurry, but the color rendering/quality overall... ATI tends to have better gamma control and color correctness in my experience
Who cares about color correctness if you are missing like say the fog of a scene because your Radeon doesn't support the retro fog table method? That is what you'll run into with some old games if you get a Radeon. They all have spotty DirectX 5/6 support.
The Quake and Unreal games should be fine though. All Unreal based games are by far fastest and look best with Glide however. Unless you get into UTGLR renderers but that's going to probably be the slowest route with a K6.
Quake2 doesn't even have proper gamma control. Also its gl output is crap, and it'll look crap no matter what card it's running on.
Quake2 will run on almost anything - including PowerVR PCX1 and even overpriced tower Amigas with staggering 13mb per second pci bridge buses going to a bottlenecked-to-hell Voodoo3 which should not perform 6fps, but it does...
that's true.. but I was just ranting about nvidia's shortcomings 😀
guess I'll try to find any of the old skool geforces then... as long as I can get them cheap!
For your K6 system I second the Voodoo3 suggestion, for drivers alone
3dfx focused on speed, so if you want fast Quake2 on K6 go for them. They actually use 3dnow! optimizations 😀
also, quake2 supports 3dfx's gamma path so you can real gamma on 3dfx
BTW the worst possible choice for a k6 system is a PowerVR card. their drivers rely exclusively on floating-point precision on the cpu...
I've noticed the higher end Voodoo's are getting more expensive. Same for Voodoo 3 PCI, prices are going up towards ridiculous levels. Voodoo 3 AGP can still be found for cheap now and again. These cards aren't rare, but it seems theres always many people bidding, driving prices up.
It seems Voodoo's are liked amongst retrogamers. And the same goes for me, I've always had a soft spot for the Voodoo's.
Apart from Glide, they have a few other benefits compared to many other cards:
*They just work, no weird corruptions or other driver issues or bugs (unlike many of their contemporary competitors).
*Because of their "flaw" of practically being PCI cards electronically wired as an AGP slot, they have less issues on older more buggy AGP boards.
*Compared to other contemporary graphics cards, they have much better driver support, because people seem to keep making new drivers for them, unlike many of the more obscure graphics cards.
And also most of them don't need active cooling (unlike the early GF's).
And about K6, I suppose they have MANY downsides compared to Slot 1, but once running, for me they seem about as fast as a P2 or a Celeron of equal speed.
Another thing is, at least here in The Netherlands, it seems SS7 AT boards are way more common then Slot 1 or s370 AT boards.
SS7 is also more flexible, there are as many as 5 different manufacturers for Socket 7, each one having at least 2 different chips. Theres just so much choice!
wrote:And about K6, I suppose they have MANY downsides compared to Slot 1, but once running, for me they seem about as fast as a P2 or a Celeron of equal speed.
Ever played Serious Sam or Red Alert 2 on both?
P2 crushes K6 in those. 😀
wrote:wrote:And about K6, I suppose they have MANY downsides compared to Slot 1, but once running, for me they seem about as fast as a P2 or a Celeron of equal speed.
Ever played Serious Sam or Red Alert 2 on both?
P2 crushes K6 in those. 😀
I have actually tried RA2 on such a board, iirc it was a K6-2/300@333, but I assumed it was because of either the SB64 or that Blade3D PCI I had in there 😜
wrote:3dfx focused on speed, so if you want fast Quake2 on K6 go for them. They actually use 3dnow! optimizations 😀
For Quake 2 the only way to go on a K6-2 or better is to use AMD's in-house 3DNow optimized exe for Voodoo 2+ and software mode. As far as I know this is by far the most effort put into 3DNow for a game.
From
http://falconfly.de/
Readme
http://www.falconfly.de/info/readme-amd-quake2-v320.txt
Actual patch
http://www.falconfly.de/downloads/amdq2320.zip
what in the world is this thing?
http://cgi.ebay.com/intense-3dfx-voodoo-/2207 … =item336590f32d
Isn't it a Voodoo Rush with TV out ? It has the Alliance chip. I had one of those in the past...
Yup that's an Intergraph Intense 3D Voodoo. It uses the Voodoo Rush chipset combined with a slow & blurry Alliance Semi AT3D chip. Not worth having. They have compatibility problems and are slower than a Voodoo1.
well I missed that auction for the voodoo 3 today... mad bid war in the end anyway, oh well
I'm not in a hurry anyway 😀 I'll just have to keep looking 🙁
wrote:well I missed that auction for the voodoo 3 today... mad bid war in the end anyway, oh well
I'm not in a hurry anyway 😀 I'll just have to keep looking 🙁
Where are you located?
