The symptoms would fit with a bad RAM chip... Both Quake II and Unreal take pretty full advantage of both TMUs, so that part must be working fine, but it's possible that there's some difference that causes Quake II to hit a bad spot in a memory chip where Unreal and 3DMark99 don't.

I don't know how you would go about thoroughly testing the memory on a Voodoo card though, aside from touching the chips to see if any get hotter than the rest...

Yeah I have a couple of Voodoo 2s with bad memory. 🙁

A memory testing add would be awesome.

I have problems with one of my Voodoo 2 cards as well (texture colors get all screwed up and random crashes). I had almost given up on the card until I tried it in SLI mode with the VGA cable connected to the other working Voodoo card. To my surprise that worked.

I don't know if you have tested the card in SLI or not, but if you haven't, give it a try, might circumvent the problem.

I tested the card in SLI mode. The results are the same. Sometimes I can even complete 1 or 2 benchmarks in Quake 2 before it crashes. I just don't understand how come Unreal plays fine? For hours???? Unreal uses glide doesn't it?

Edit: In connection with using two different cards in SLI I heard that if one card has 12 and the other has only 8 MB, the system will use 8 Mb on both cards and "disable" the rest.

Is it not possible to manuall disable 4 Mb of memory somehow? Maybe - if I'm lucky - the faulty one will be among the chips disabled....

Have you (accidentally) overclocked your card? I came across some driver packages which set the clock to 95MHz and my Voodoo2 didn't like that at all. It wants 90MHz and not a MHz more.
There are some overclocking tools for the V2 as well as an environment variable for games using the glide interface. If the clock value is okay try lowering it below 90MHz.

Nope, it hasn't been overclocked. I have two of these cards. I installed the faulty one, removed it, and just plugged in the other card and it worked fine. Drivers are Voodoo 2 dx6.1 reference drivers.

Is there a difference between the API Unreal and Quake 2 use? Quake 2 = 3dfx Opengl, but how about Unreal?

Quake 2 uses OpenGL only, Unreal can use Direct3D, OpenGL and Glide as rendering interfaces.

Yeah, that's what I thought. Sooooo....can it be that somehow the card can use native glide but cannot use opengl? Because all the games I tested the card with used Opengl: Heretic 2, Sin, Quake 2. All of these crash the card but not the system, I can ctrl+alt+del my way out and close the game....

Dhall wrote:

Edit: In connection with using two different cards in SLI I heard that if one card has 12 and the other has only 8 MB, the system will use 8 Mb on both cards and "disable" the rest.

Is it not possible to manuall disable 4 Mb of memory somehow? Maybe - if I'm lucky - the faulty one will be among the chips disabled....

If you use the Fastvoodoo 4.6 drivers you can connect a 12mb card with a 8mb one. Both cards will then run at 8mb.

You must be sticking to the official drivers, because FastVoodoo 4.6 comes with 4 different opengl drivers to try. For these you dont have to reinstall the whole driver, you just put the opengl32.dll into the game's directory.

Not having much luck here. Upgraded drivers to the latest dx7 reference ones. Then installed Mismatched SLI. The games still crash. It is either that hte faulty chip is in the first 8 MB used, or the mismatched SLI uses 12 Mb since these cards are not "mismatched", they are the same.

There are tons of environment variables which control how the Voodoo behaves. See here http://www.mdgx.com/3dfx.htm.
Maybe you can reduce the amount of memory by setting SSTV2_FBI_MEMSIZE and SSTV2_TMU_MEMSIZE.

Thank you, will definitely have a look at those!