What about Voodoo 3?

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Was Voodoo 5 codenamed RAMPAGE? I can never remember. But if so, didn't it come with a giant wall wort?

Your best bet for DOS Glide are the Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo2 cards. Banshee and anything after (V3, V4, V5) shouldn't be considered substitutes for the all-around DOS Glide usage.

Banshee isn't that similar to the V2 at all. That single TMU (opposed to V2's dual TMUs) really hamper performance for almost all of those games worth playing that uses lightmaps

collector wrote:

Ask hardware questions in Marvin. This forum is for Windows games.

I'm sorry about that. Can any admin move this post or should I post it there all over again?

Buy both.

ElectricMonk wrote:

Was Voodoo 5 codenamed RAMPAGE? I can never remember. But if so, didn't it come with a giant wall wort?

Voodoo5 is VSA-100 (Rampage is the unreleased 3dfx board), and no it did not come with a giant wallpack power supply. The un-released Voodoo 5 6000 originally included an external power supply called "Voodoo Volts" in the design, but they were not a commercially released product (and they are extremely rare). I think the best replacement for a Voodoo2 would be another Voodoo2 - they aren't terribly hard to find on ebay, at least currently. 😀

Dude just buy both you will thank yourself later, the Banshe isn't worth much but with the difficulty and rising prices those cards are getting harder to find. As for the Voodoo 5 that is easily $100-150 value there and is very hard to find cheap so unless you are starving just buy both.

ElectricMonk wrote:

Was Voodoo 5 codenamed RAMPAGE? I can never remember. But if so, didn't it come with a giant wall wort?

No Rampage was the codename for the unreleased product from 3Dfx that was supposed to come out after the Voodoo 5. Supposedly ~2001.

The Voodoo4/5 are essentially the same design, they're both based on the VSA-100 chip. The Voodoo 4 4500 uses one of them and the Voodoo 5 5500 uses 2 of them in SLI on a single board.
Now, the Voodoo 5 5500 draws more power than most cards so it requires a 4pin Molex from your power supply, nothing too fancy.
You may have mixed it up with the unreleased Voodoo 5 6000 which used 4 chips on a single PCB. This would have probably required an external power adaptor.

Voodoo Banshee was my first proper 3D card, and that's about the only value it has for me compared to a V3, which is definitely faster than both Banshee and V2 (V3 2000 is about equal to V2 SLI).

Those are some weird prices going on fbay currently. I'd say get the Banshee if it's under $10, otherwise try to score one of the ubiquitous Voodoo3s for just as cheap.

And Banshee/V3/V4/V5 makes a nice 2D DOS card especially if using a CRT--compatibility is excellent with this combination. I have a V3 with CRT myself. As for 3Dfx/GLide DOS games, stick with Voodoo Graphics, maybe V2, for the least hassle.

F2bnp wrote:

No Rampage was the codename for the unreleased product from 3Dfx that was supposed to come out after the Voodoo 5. Supposedly ~2 […]
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ElectricMonk wrote:

Was Voodoo 5 codenamed RAMPAGE? I can never remember. But if so, didn't it come with a giant wall wort?

No Rampage was the codename for the unreleased product from 3Dfx that was supposed to come out after the Voodoo 5. Supposedly ~2001.

The Voodoo4/5 are essentially the same design, they're both based on the VSA-100 chip. The Voodoo 4 4500 uses one of them and the Voodoo 5 5500 uses 2 of them in SLI on a single board.
Now, the Voodoo 5 5500 draws more power than most cards so it requires a 4pin Molex from your power supply, nothing too fancy.
You may have mixed it up with the unreleased Voodoo 5 6000 which used 4 chips on a single PCB. This would have probably required an external power adaptor.

I think you are correct. It's been so long since the 3dFX/nVidia wars that I most likely got them confused. Wasn't Rampage going to use the 4 VSA-100s for a type of Temporal Buffer, for motion Blur, etc... ?

You sure the Voodoo 2 is gone for good? I heard some video cards can be revived in an oven of all things.

zstandig wrote:

You sure the Voodoo 2 is gone for good? I heard some video cards can be revived in an oven of all things.

That's like the trick when early X360 adopters would wrap their consoles in heavy towels, while it was powered on. The idea is to get it hot enough to melt the solder a little, and allow it to "re-seat", and make better contact.

The only time I've ever put electronics (besides a fancy oven thermometer) in a running oven, was when I was testing Single Board Computers, to simulate them being in a sealed NEMA4 outdoor enclosure while in direct summer sunlight. And even then, I never took the temp about 250F. They were all running at the time, and I think the Soekris managed to function for hours at 200F, before finally keeling over.

ElectricMonk wrote:

I think you are correct. It's been so long since the 3dFX/nVidia wars that I most likely got them confused. Wasn't Rampage going to use the 4 VSA-100s for a type of Temporal Buffer, for motion Blur, etc... ?

No; like I said Rampage was the unreleased next-gen GPU. It was supposed to be 3dfx's answer to the GeForce 3. The 4x VSA-1000 was Voodoo5 6000 which is also what used the external power supply ("Voodoo Volts"). All multi-chip VSA-100 devices support 3dfx T-Buffer, which can do things like motion blur in supported applications. So the 5500 can already do that out of the box. The 6000 is just "bigger and faster" over the 5500, owing to having another two GPUs. 😊

Thank you all for your replies and help! I ended up replacing my old Voodoo 2 with another Voodoo 2. I figured my processor isn't powerful enough for a Voodoo 5 optimized performance plus I still want to enjoy some of the Dos glide games.

I'll be sticking around here as you guys are very helpful and it's the just the perfect place to be for a retro computer gamer.

That's a good choice. My test have shown that a 500 MHz CPU is a good match for a single Voodoo 2.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

That's a good choice. My test have shown that a 500 MHz CPU is a good match for a single Voodoo 2.

I'm actually now looking to build a more powerful PC using a P3 motherboard running an 800 Mhz CPU. This could be my Voodoo 5 machine, or maybe should I look for more horse power?

I've never worked with a Voodoo 5 so I don't know 😒

But my gut feeling is that such a card could use a faster system. Voodoo 2 SLI / Voodoo 3 would be a good match for a Pentium III 800. Is that a Slot 1 machine with 100 MHz FSB or a Socket 370 machine with 133 MHz FSB?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I've never worked with a Voodoo 5 so I don't know 😒

But my gut feeling is that such a card could use a faster system. Voodoo 2 SLI / Voodoo 3 would be a good match for a Pentium III 800. Is that a Slot 1 machine with 100 MHz FSB or a Socket 370 machine with 133 MHz FSB?

It is indeed a slot 1 with 100 MHz FSB. But I haven't tried it in years, I really hope it's still working.

As for the V5, I heard it doesn't work at all in a P4, that's why I'm aiming for a P3 machine at moment.