The problem is that you can't set the core and RAM speed separatly. Most Voodoo5 cards come with 6ns RAM chips, some of them have 5.5ns.
I've flashed my V5 cards to v1.18, but it didn't have a noticeable effect.
There are hacked BIOS versions with slower RAM timings floating around, these are supposed to help if the RAM can't keep up.
wrote:wrote:Glide was never meant to run 32-bit. The games look perfectly fine without it anyway.
It does look good, but sometimes you get that slight rainbow or banding effect with 16-bit colour. Does it also mean that many Glide games won't take advantage of the V5s large texture support?
Most of the time you are too busy playing the game to notice things like that. It's usually only in screenshots from old game reviews that you notice those things. The rest of the time you are too busy running around trying not to get your head shot off to worry about it.
I don't agree with that. I can and do notice the difference between 16bit and 32bit when playing most games. Quake 3 is probably the best example like d1stortion said, you can even see it when you're firing the shotgun.
I don't like Quake 3 a lot anyway 😜. Besides, that game can be played without problems on whatever modern machine. They same may apply to UT with UTGLR, but there seems to be just something special about the lighting with Glide in this game (Unreal too) that I can't quite put my finger on.
wrote:I don't agree with that. I can and do notice the difference between 16bit and 32bit when playing most games. Quake 3 is probably the best example like d1stortion said, you can even see it when you're firing the shotgun.
Kingpin also looks pretty cack when running in Glide mode. The colours are off (and look a bit patchy), the gamma is way too high by default and the textures look a bit too soft! It's pretty bloody fast though 🤣.
wrote:You can force 32-bit with V.Control for Glide/OpenGL/Direct3D.
Looks like a handy util, but i still don't see anything for aspect ratio correction (usually referred to as monitor timing with other cards drivers). You can create customs resolutions and refresh rates, but you can't change the aspect ratios for certain 4:3 and 5:4 screen resolutions... So you end up with some games either looking squashed, stretched or have edges missing 😒.
I may be wrong, but aspect ratio correction was hardly a common feature in the early 2000s.
Aspect ratio scaling isn't something I remember seeing until DVI was commonplace. Old notebooks sometimes have a scaling/stretch on/off option but that's all. Desktop LCDs sometimes do aspect ratio scaling though.
PowerPie, what monitor are you using anyway? Since you are building a retro rig, may I suggest getting a good CRT?
Also, the fsaa 4x on voodoo 5 5500 works with highest quality only at 640x480 with decent frame rates. 800x600 is already 'pushing it' and anything more is just a slide show. Voodoo 5 6000 could manage more though, but the point and the real value of 5500 lies in the fact that OLD glide games that have a fixed resolution (640x480) look much better. A shiny example is NFS2:SE. It looks and acts beautiful on V5 5500 - also combined with 3D shutter glasses!
Yeah, it looks a lot better on a CRT. John Carmack called the AA the best on the market.
"Voodoo 5 addresses the fill rate limitations the Mac has been living with in a dramatic fashion, delivering well over twice the pixel rate of existing Mac products, as well as the best anti-aliasing on the market."
From here.
Basically - you are playing wrong games with it 😜
Or even better - for the games that you want to play, you dont need Voodoo - nor do you need a retro machine for that matter (nor a GF4 MX) 😉
wrote:Basically - you are playing wrong games with it 😜
Or even better - for the games that you want to play, you dont need Voodoo - nor do you need a retro machine for that matter (nor a GF4 MX) 😉
It's all about compatibility and getting the most from the Win98 era. A modern PC doesn't cut it when it comes to older games as we all know 😉.
The Voodoo 5 is good for Glide games (although not all of them), but it's quite a bit slower compared to other cards from around the same time... I personally think it's a well over-hyped piece of retro hardware and i actually prefer the GF4 MX440 (with a Glide wrapper if i decide take that route). At the moment though i'm trying to get voodoo 2 working, but i have a feeling it's a duff board 😒... I have a separate thread for it.
You seem to have bought a lot of duff hardware lately!
I got my first V5 myself and I can't understand your disappointment at all (I'm a bit disappointed myself, but that's another story 😁). Quick testing showed it's almost twice as fast as a higher clocked V3 in UT, what more can you ask for with performance? The only slightly annoying part are those grinding fans but that's what I use headphones for anyway. I don't get why you rave about those bland low-end Geforce cards, they are most certainly not more compatible with games until 2000 than a V5. If you got it for playing Morrowind you missed the point anyway. A MX440 won't display shader effects in that game neither btw. DX8 stuff is where modern hardware should mostly cut it, but the Voodoos are special in their own way for certain games 😀
wrote:You seem to have bought a lot of duff hardware lately!
It's always been a lottery getting stuff of feebay and i've had my fair share of bad luck with it lately. It's mostly down to idiots listing their hardware as 'tested' when it blatantly hasn't been... Some people will go as far as powering it up and then say it's in full working order. And then there's the sellers who don't know the meaning of 'refurbished' 😒.
wrote:I got my first V5 myself and I can't understand your disappointment at all (I'm a bit disappointed myself, but that's another story 😁). Quick testing showed it's almost twice as fast as a higher clocked V3 in UT, what more can you ask for with performance? The only slightly annoying part are those grinding fans but that's what I use headphones for anyway. I don't get why you rave about those bland low-end Geforce cards, they are most certainly not more compatible with games until 2000 than a V5. If you got it for playing Morrowind you missed the point anyway. DX8 stuff is where modern hardware should mostly cut it, but the Voodoos are special in their own way for certain games 😀
the GF cards work better with both D3D and OpenGL games... The V5 is only good for Glide and is pretty sub-par when it comes to anything else (compared to the Geforce and Radeon cards at the time). Enabling FSAA bogs it down way too much and it doesn't even look that good!
I didn't get the V5 for Morrowind.. Running that game on old hardware was just an afterthought as it currently refuses to run on my Win 7 PC. I can most old games smoothly with 4x FSAA and anisotropic filtering using a 64MB Geforce 4 MX440... I can't do that with the V5 without it turning into a slideshow and looking like someone smeared vaseline on my screen 😒.
Obviously people have different opinions and this is mine. I'd rather have a 12MB Voodoo2 or a pair of them alongside a Geforce card for those old Glide games, and have a much better card for D3D and OpenGL (hardware T&L is a bonus too) 😉. Maybe the V5 will perform better with the Powerleap 1.4GHz Tualatin Celeron i'm getting?
wrote:the GF cards work better with both D3D and OpenGL games... ... I can most old games smoothly with 4x FSAA and anisotropic filtering using a 64MB Geforce 4 MX440... I can't do that with the V5 without it turning into a slideshow and looking like someone smeared vaseline on my screen 😒.
Obviously people have different opinions and this is mine. I'd rather have a 12MB Voodoo2 or a pair of them alongside a Geforce card for those old Glide games, and have a much better card for D3D and OpenGL (hardware T&L is a bonus too) 😉. Maybe the V5 will perform better with the Powerleap 1.4GHz Tualatin Celeron i'm getting?
What I can tell you is that my GF GTX 560ti totally OWNS voodoo 5 5500 in every single D3D and OpenGL game available today. It also owns voodoo 5 5500 in FSAA and in every D3D and OGL playable game in Windows 7 and Windows XP (which basically covers 90% of the games you are trying to play on a retro computer). BTW, it also owns GF4 440, but only by a very slight margin 😜 😜 😜
The point is:
my friend, if voodoo 5 5500 is too slow for you, then you are probably playing wrong games (or the right games but on a wrong rig). Here's a tip: you can have Voodoo 2 installed in an ivy bridge Core i7 system and it will probably work (actually I'm about to test this myself over the weekend since I just got my 3770k). So, if D3D+OGL in a perfect eye candy mode is a must, trash the 'retro', go modern + V2.
...and yes, V5 will perform much better on a faster CPU (but don't expect wonders). I noticed difference in fps scaling up to ~1.8Ghz. Afterwards, its almost constant (tested with up to 2.4Ghz mobile barton).
Oh the irony... 😉
I'll actually buy that GF4 MX440 would be better for some old games that produce screen tearing on faster cards (I had that painful experience when upgrading from a really crappy 6500) but most of the time it should be either "retro" (Voodoo) or as modern as possible IMO.
Btw elfuego, V2 in a Core i7 system is a pretty retarded idea imo. Sure it's theoretically possible, but first of all I would be worried about the hot temperatures in modern computers; then, even if he gets it working in Windows 7 with some stupid fixes (he already said he doesn't want XP on his modern rig) he would either have to deal with playing on a 1080p screen with 1024x768 or whatever, or get another monitor. And game compatibility problems galore. So my solution is to simply go XP on the modern machine for those old games that suck on V5, if one can take running such a disgusting obsolete OS on a super high end computer 😁
wrote:What I can tell you is that my GF GTX 560ti totally OWNS voodoo 5 5500 in every single D3D and OpenGL game available today. It also owns voodoo 5 5500 in FSAA and in every D3D and OGL playable game in Windows 7 and Windows XP (which basically covers 90% of the games you are trying to play on a retro computer). BTW, it also owns GF4 440, but only by a very slight margin 😜 😜 😜
Do they have Windows 98 drivers? can you get an AGP 560Ti? The answer is obviously no. I don't think people understand the fact that i want to use my PIII rig to run Win95/98 era games and Geforce cards take most of the workload away from the CPU (unlike the Radeon and V5 cards which need more powerful CPUs)... AND i can run all the old games in 32-bit with full FSAA and anisotropic filtering without it hurting the framerates or the CPU too much (the V5 chokes too much with this!).
wrote:The point is:
my friend, if voodoo 5 5500 is too slow for you, then you are probably playing wrong games (or the right games but on a wrong rig). Here's a tip: you can have Voodoo 2 installed in an ivy bridge Core i7 system and it will probably work (actually I'm about to test this myself over the weekend since I just got my 3770k). So, if D3D+OGL in a perfect eye candy mode is a must, trash the 'retro', go modern + V2....and yes, V5 will perform much better on a faster CPU (but don't expect wonders). I noticed difference in fps scaling up to ~1.8Ghz. Afterwards, its almost constant (tested with up to 2.4Ghz mobile barton).
A voodoo 2 will burn with a modern rig... And I AM playing the right games (well maybe except for Morrowind). The V5 is just too slow compared to Geforce & Radeon cards from it's era and it's as simple as that 😉. I'll stick with a Voodoo2 for the handful of decent Glide only games 😀.
There are plenty of old D3D and OpenGL games that don't run on Windows 7... That's the reason i have my Win98 PIII machine. Not all of them work with WinXP either, and i hate jumping through hoops just to get a game running with an unsupported OS 😜.
I don't care about the V5 anymore and have just given it away (as it was given to me for free in the first place)... I just need to get this damn V2 working properly (fresh install of Win98 tomorrow as a last resort 🙄).
I decided to pull out my capture card and make a Voodoo5 FSAA video. I captured NFS3 Glide, 3DMark2000 and Quake3. All 640x480. Quake3 is at 32-bit color. CPU is a PIII-S at 1050/100.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/2387i8qlg8cz918 … video_60fps.avi
Youtube ruins everything so I put it on Mediafire. This way you get my original encode, 60 fps, and no horrid scaling.
wrote:The V5 is just too slow compared to Geforce & Radeon cards from it's era
Thats not exactly correct. During its time of release the only card capable of beating it was the GeForce 2 GTS, and even then it traded blows, especially when FSAA was enabled. Comparing it to the Geforce 4 MX 440 is not fair in that respect, since the MX 440 is refined technology from almost a couple years later.
For what its worth, if you stuck with Direct X 7 generation games and prior, and Glide titles and Open GL titles from that time line (2000 and prior), the Voodoo 5 is more then fast enough to handle said games. If you plan to run a lot of early Direct X 8 generation games or many titles that used Hardware T&L, you are better off the the MX440.
On a side note since it was mentioned, the X-Men COTA Dos port, I was only able to get that game to display correctly with a S3 Trio64. It would not work correctly with any other card I have on hand, so I cant really fault 3DFX for that one since I couldn't get the game to display on even an S3 Virge or older ATI Mach64 or anything.
