Apollo 13 is one of my all time favorite movies

gex85 wrote on 2020-01-27, 16:40:

So I set up a test bed with my ECS P6S5AT, Intel Pentium III-S 1400 MHz (hail to the king!) and 512 MB of DDR RAM, running Windo […]
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So I set up a test bed with my ECS P6S5AT, Intel Pentium III-S 1400 MHz (hail to the king!) and 512 MB of DDR RAM, running Windows 98 SE.
(BTW, there's an excellent thread about this board over here: SiS 635T (ECS P6S5AT) – Hail to the King)

Happy to report that the card indeed seems to be in perfect working order, at least it did finish 3DMark2000 with no visible image defects at all.
The 1024 x 768 x 16bit default benchmark gave me 5177 3D Marks, which seems to be about what you'd expect from this setup.

That's quite a bad score and doesn't speak for the Voodoo5. My latest build with a Pentium III 750 MHz, 256 MB PC100 SDRAM, and a Geforce4 MX 440 (basically a Geforce2) already scores 4863 points in 3DMark2000, so just about 8% slower.

derSammler wrote on 2020-01-28, 12:04:

That's quite a bad score and doesn't speak for the Voodoo5. My latest build with a Pentium III 750 MHz, 256 MB PC100 SDRAM, and a Geforce4 MX 440 (basically a Geforce2) already scores 4863 points in 3DMark2000, so just about 8% slower.

Wasn't the Voodoo5 competing with GeForce2 anyway? I'd expect similar results but maybe I remember things wrong.

Yes, and according to Wikipedia, the 5500 was slower than a GeForce 2 GTS. Makes me wonder why people care about Voodoo5 cards at all and even using them. I would never even think about building a retro PC using a Voodoo5.

As it's been said before, probably for the Glide only games.

derSammler wrote on 2020-01-28, 13:20:

Yes, and according to Wikipedia, the 5500 was slower than a GeForce 2 GTS. Makes me wonder why people care about Voodoo5 cards at all and even using them. I would never even think about building a retro PC using a Voodoo5.

Oh so you meant that it's "quite a bad score" in general, but not unexpected. I agree of course.
Well there's always glide and 3dfx nostalgia, many of our choices in this hobby are not rational but based on other parameters. My PIII for example has a Voodoo3, which I guess is another thing you would never do 😀

Retro activity of the day: Watching 1986's famous "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" movie. I had a crush on Sloane Peterson (Mia Sara) back then...

the best all around its the voodoo 3 IF you want Glide support, there's no point spending in voodoo 4 and 5.

my main retro pc its a k6-2 500Mhz, 256MB, Soyo 5EHM 1.3 1mb L2 (via mvp3) and a voodoo 3 2000 PCI 16Mb. Its almost the perfect pc for games until 2000 and rock solid (well, aside from Windows 98 SE quirks...)

Living wrote on 2020-01-28, 13:56:

the best all around its the voodoo 3 IF you want Glide support, there's no point spending in voodoo 4 and 5.

my main retro pc its a k6-2 500Mhz, 256MB, Soyo 5EHM 1.3 1mb L2 (via mvp3) and a voodoo 3 2000 PCI 16Mb. Its almost the perfect pc for games until 2000 and rock solid (well, aside from Windows 98 SE quirks...)

Voodoo 3 has compatibility issues with a lot of early Glide games and it is really featured crippled for a lot of games from 1999/2000. It's a good card for a SS7 but it is certainly not the 'all you need is' card IMO. If I could get a Voodoo 4 I would immediately swap out my Voodoo 3 for it in my Duron 1300 build.

konc wrote on 2020-01-28, 13:32:

derSammler wrote on 2020-01-28, 13:20:

Yes, and according to Wikipedia, the 5500 was slower than a GeForce 2 GTS. Makes me wonder why people care about Voodoo5 cards at all and even using them. I would never even think about building a retro PC using a Voodoo5.

Oh so you meant that it's "quite a bad score" in general, but not unexpected. I agree of course.
Well there's always glide and 3dfx nostalgia, many of our choices in this hobby are not rational but based on other parameters. My PIII for example has a Voodoo3, which I guess is another thing you would never do 😀

Sure, in absolute numbers the score is not good, a GF2 will outperform a Voodoo 5 pretty easily. But during its development, the Voodoo 5 wasn't meant to compete with the GF2 anyway - if it had been released as planned, its opponent would have been the GeForce 256.
I am not too much into the whole 3dfx nostalgia thing myself, probably because I never owned a Voodoo back in the day and started playing with them when they had long become "retro", but I can't deny that there's a special fascination to it. And if I want more performance, I can always fire up another retro machine with a GF2 Ti or better.

My son got a major computer upgrade today. His previous case was too small for the new parts so I gave him an old favourite:

The insides are somewhat less authentic - this would have housed a late K6-2 or early P3, now there's an i3-7100, 8GB RAM, 250GB NVMe SSD and an HD4850 neatly bridging the divide between the original contents and the new platform. The system was an upgrade from a C2Q-8200 which was brought to its knees by all the redstone in my boy's Minecraft creations. Minecraft is notoriously single-threaded, so a very fast dualcore is just what the doctor ordered.

Now I have gotten that out of the way I should have some time for proper old stuff this weekend.

Been getting back into playing Sega Genesis games on an actual Model 1 system I have. Thinking about adding a screen to the console in some way. (Though maybe that's not really possible?)

Thought about doing that myself, but I like my DVDO Edge and my 43" TV with the DVDO Edge ratio set to 4:3 using RGB C-sync. Going to need to fix my multi A/V board as the headphone jack audio gets either soft or loud AF for my Genesis Model 1 that I built several months ago.

Still, the idea of having some form of portability is nice in it's own way. 😉

Living wrote on 2020-01-28, 13:56:

the best all around its the voodoo 3 IF you want Glide support, there's no point spending in voodoo 4 and 5.

I just stick to Voodoo1. I have one of them Orchid, and the only Glide game that I play anyway, are Need For Speed 2 SE.
I did have a V3-3500 and tons of V2's some time ago, yet I sold them, as my need's are more suitable for a GF2-GTS.
Actually. I am using GF2-GTS, GF3-ti300 and GF4-ti4200 on and off, and I see no need for V4 or V5.

That said. 3dFX are computing history, and that alone are worth owning some Voodoo of any type.

Bruninho wrote on 2020-01-28, 13:35:

Retro activity of the day: Watching 1986's famous "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" movie. I had a crush on Sloane Peterson (Mia Sara) back then...

That is a classic. However I like Wargames better. So many great movies came out of the 1980's.
It is just that most special effects from that decade, have not aged well. Like the hotel scene in Terminator, were the machine tries to fix the eye.

Snagged one of these off Amazon.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01H1U6PR … 0?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Only interested in the easy eject of the 2.5" SSD in my Win ME build. For easy disk images and restores, using Macrium Reflect (running on my XP retro).

It "trims" the drive on restore, which is a right bonus, if that bothers you, given the peanuts cost of 120GB SSD's now.

Spent all morning optimizing a DooM map, Outer Base, which is a port of the first level of Quake II. So, a de-make. Alas, I had to cut a lot of detail out of it to keep vanilla DooM from freaking out and crashing due to VisPlane overflows. Still, it translated well enough, and doesn't really overload you with extra ammo and armor, keeping you from being a walking god when you end up in E1M2. Later Q2 maps are waaay too 3D to translate into DooM, as are many other games with memorable maps.
https://www.geocities.ws/oldternet/wads.htm

Cool ! I made some Doom and Doom2 maps back in the day, and many Bf1942 maps later on too.

I've taken a few days off of playing Wizardry 7 to do some DOS VGA benchmarks on my various PCI graphics cards. So far I'm limiting the platform to P75 and since SVGA games are largely unplayable at that speed, not doing an SVGA benchmarks. The plan is to eventually re-run all the benchmarks with my POD200 and include SVGA results there. I'm testing 14 different chipsets, but I'm bummed that I still don't have an ET4000 or ET6000 based card. They're just too pricey whenever I look.