I found out that you can't flash Mac cards in a PC (the EEPROM isn't detected for whatever reason) but you can do it from a Mac using Graphiccelerator I believe it's called 😀
Here is my Radeon 64MB VIVO I bought back in 2000, well its not the original but one they sent back after mine died in 2002. Still have the box and everything.
I was disappointed with this card coming from a Voodoo 3. I was sold on "32-bit color" but I couldn't really tell much of a difference at all with the current gen games I had. Or maybe if I played Giants or Black & White with a Voodoo 3 I might have been, wow this is lame, i dunno. Dungeon Keeper 2 didn't seem to play any different, well now I had bump mapped lava...
Highlights:
$280 was expensive, but the hype man, the hype.
Driver issues galore with many games at the time, this was a real pisser, I know, I really do.
No real speed gains over Voodoo3.
I remember one time just getting the driver to work properly with my current monitor drove me nuts.
DVD was only ho-hum but did work
It died 2 years later, but was replaced with same card. I've actually been downgraded by ATI before.
64mb did nothing for games at the time.
Should have went with nVidia, but I shot for underdog and failed.
Yeah I went the ATI route back then too. But I did it for the cheapness of Radeon LE and 8500 LE. 😉 $70 and $90, respectively. Their drivers sucked something awful back then indeed. But if you ran the somewhat intangible 32bit color, Radeon became pretty competitive with GF2 GTS. Radeon is far more efficient. 16bit color was another story though.
In retrospect, I think the most practical card of the time was either Voodoo5 or a GeForce. If you required the best OpenGL, go NVIDIA for sure. Otherwise Voodoo5 gave great quality, speed and compatibility, and signal clarity.
wrote:No real speed gains over Voodoo3.
Cannot believe that. The jump from 3dfx 16 bit to 32 may not have been huge, but at high resolutions Radeon should clearly outrun Voodoo3. I myself upgraded to GF2MX from V3 and was not dissapointed.
If he had a weak CPU or played a lot of games that worked best with Glide, I could see a Radeon seeming similar or even worse. On even the fastest K6 III+ for example you'd be better off with a Voodoo3 quite often. Something else to consider is how non-3dfx AGP cards were often unstable or performed unpredictably on non-Intel chipsets. The "good old days". 😀
I was running a Abit BX6 R2 with a Cleleron 500a flip chip clocked at 800.
Wow, can't find find any Radeon reviews with a Voodoo 3 thrown in there, they are all about the Geforce and the GF2, or everything else runnning 32bit color.
Sounds like I'm gonna have to put these 2 in a battle for pink slips. 😉
