I'm sure others will disagree, but I remember this card feeling a little long in the tooth in the 1GHz era.

Not so much about the processor, but a V3 is good for Unreal at 1024 x 768. Anything beyond that, especially newer Direct3D games might struggle on this card.

At various times I've used a voodoo3 with a k6/3, an Athlon 700 and dual Athlon 1600s.

I didn't do any benchmarking, but the Athlon 700 combo felt spot on to me - nicely balanced system without cpu or graphics card constraining the other too much.

I remember reading somewhere that the V3 doesn't scale much beyond 1ghz.

I would think the usual 866mhz-1100Mhz P3/Athlons.

i would surely name barton running at 166*12.5 or 13 and kt333 board.

Mine seemed to be very well matched to my coppermine PIII 933Mhz.

BSA Starfire wrote:

Mine seemed to be very well matched to my coppermine PIII 933Mhz.

I've got one with a 1ghz Coppermine and it works really well. It runs Red Baron 3D + Full Canvas Jacket just as well as my Athlon 1400 with SLI V2 cards. The advantage with the V3 is that the image quality is much better and it can also go beyond 1024x768.

Does anybody know how to benchmark Voodoo 2 cards with 3DMark2001SE? I'd like to see the comparison between the two systems.

That's a DirectX 8 benchmark. Better use something older.

philscomputerlab wrote:

That's a DirectX 8 benchmark. Better use something older.

Yah, but how to force 3DMark to use only the V2 cards? My Athlon 1400 has a Ti4600 as its primary display.

I was originally just going to ask you directly because I knew you would have the answer. 😉

Voodoo 3 was my first GPU I ever bought and I paired it with an AMD K5 PR166, which runs at 116 mhz 😵 , and it was still awesome!

KT7AGuy, try 3DMark99Max. I tried to test a V2 SLI system with S3 for the main video and it reported that I did not have a compatible 3D accelerator. In 3DMark99Max V2SLI does not shine btw. Too old I guess, 3DMark has always been about bleeding edge hardware.

philscomputerlab wrote:

That's a DirectX 8 benchmark. Better use something older.

Not strictly. The Voodoo3's caps will only skip the Nature, pixel shading and dot3/env bump tests.

So, I guess 3DMark can't benchmark the V2 cards. Well, if all I can use is a particular game's FPS counter, then Red Baron 3D is what I'll stand by as it is strictly a GLIDE game. In that case, the V3 with a 1ghz Coppermine CPU performs just as well as SLI V2 cards with a 1.4ghz Athlon CPU.

You can benchmark V2's in 3dmark 99\2k\2001 just fine.
Check the 3dmark99 and 2001 posts here on vogons.
I've done it many times.

I guess the Athlon XP 1600+ power will come in handy if i try to play Unreal coop with several players online. Either that or Unreal Tournament Operation Napali with all it's heavy scripts.

I would either use the timedemo of Quake 3 Arena (with MesaFX OpenGL to Glide wrappers of course) or use Tirtanium. It should be ideal for both the Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 3 cards 😀

Here is a picture I found from a scaling test on a german pc website:

I don't think there is much gain after 1Ghz with Voodoo 3 cards.

This is my system:
K6-2 500MHz
256MB SD100
Chaintech 5RSA
Voodoo 3 3000 16MB AGP

I haven't really run into a "cpu wall" so far.

Arctic wrote:

I would either use the timedemo of Quake 3 Arena (with MesaFX OpenGL to Glide wrappers of course) or use Tirtanium. It should be […]
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I would either use the timedemo of Quake 3 Arena (with MesaFX OpenGL to Glide wrappers of course) or use Tirtanium. It should be ideal for both the Voodoo 2 and Voodoo 3 cards 😀

Here is a picture I found from a scaling test on a german pc website:

I don't think there is much gain after 1Ghz with Voodoo 3 cards.

This is my system:
K6-2 500MHz
256MB SD100
Chaintech 5RSA
Voodoo 3 3000 16MB AGP

I haven't really run into a "cpu wall" so far.

I love how the TNT 2 Ultra and the Rage 128 pro are just a straight line haha!
Also the voodoo 5 scalling hasn't stop at 1Ghz yet, so just maybe the voodoo 3 can do a bit more with a cpu above 1Ghz, even thought it would be neglectable

KT7AGuy wrote:

Does anybody know how to benchmark Voodoo 2 cards with 3DMark2001SE? I'd like to see the comparison between the two systems.

It's a DirectX benchmark, so you have to have DirectX drivers. It works fine under Windows 98 - performance is pretty abysmal though, even with P4 2GHz. 3DMark00 will run much better (and thus can probably better illustrate differences between the two). The 3DLabs Windows 2000 drivers only support GLide, so you can't run DirectX applications on them. I've never had luck getting the 3rd-party Windows 2000/XP DX drivers working for Voodoo2, but they're out there if you're interested in trying them.

To the Voodoo3 - is it PCI or AGP? If it's AGP you're basically limited to Kx266 or Kx333 AMD platforms for the "best" but if it's PCI you can stick it in anything with a PCI slot; there are probably i7 machines that fit that criteria. Performance-scaling wise I'm sure ~1GHz is probably nearing the top-end, but if you're buying all new parts, why not go with the AthlonXP and call it a day?