brostenen wrote:

I think other brands just made products that made consumers choose that instead of 3DfX. In reality. It was the consumers that k […]
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I think other brands just made products that made consumers choose that instead of 3DfX.
In reality. It was the consumers that killed off 3DfX. Though 3DfX were in kind of the same situation as Commodore.
Promised projects were not realised in time and so on. Bad company economy.
I only know of one company that have survived these kind of situation's. Namely Apple.
3DfX, Eagle, Commodore and others have all had a somewhat kind of same end of life.

Their biggest gamble and downfall was the acquisition of STB; they went all-in, manufacturing and selling their product on their own. A delay on delivering one generation of cards wiped them out.

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Hi again, I see this topic has turned into an interesting point of retro pc history 😀. And yeah, the interview I was talking about the other day is indeed this one from Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MghYhf-GhU). I had the opportunity to listen at it (really interesting) and summarizes some of the points you guys were talking about: mainly the acquisition of STB (and the end of the partnership with board makers that moved to Nvidia) as the most important reason for 3Dfx bankruptcy. I'm learning lots of facts these days, love this hobby!

Following topic, when I arrived home from my trip today in the morning I found this beauty in the mailbox waiting for me to test 😀 :

So I installed it in my 'test machine' (the SS7 board that is not mounted in the case 🤣) and got very impressed, at first with the video output quality. I don't know why, but with the Geforce it is clearly worse and blurry at least when used in these particular systems. It doesn't happen, however, in newer systems (the VGA image quality of both the GF2 and the Fx5200 is perfect on the Athlon XP as it should be), so first doubt is more clear now: these cards are not the best for really early AGP systems, at least for SS7 in these particular boards (Ali). Still don't know the source of the blurriness, but that's it. We were expecting this, anyways: Not a great idea to re-use stored boards here 🤣

Talking about games: it's also confirmed (as you also said) that both V2 and V3 are quite overkill due to (the lack of) power from the CPU, and that Glide is better when available in slow machines. However, I found that V3 image quality is a bit better. Performance is, at first sight, the same for the two cards because both are limited by the cpu and it's shown in the few games I had the chance to try today. I also appreciated that this card heatsink gets extremely hot, so it may be OK to use Phil's method and add a silent fan on top of it (thank you Phil for the guide!)

So I'm thinking about swapping the Geforce+V2 'inappropiate' combo for the V3 in the built system, launch a few more games and test it better during the weekend. I think I'll enjoy it more because I don't have to swap video outputs anymore and finally uninstall 3D control center to use one card or another, which is annoying. And I'll save the V2 for a future and more powerful project!

Still have to test it further, but I'm pretty happy with this card 😀

In SS7 machines the V3 is a great choice. There are quite a few AGP chipset issues and because the V3 doesn't really use AGP it causes no issues 😀

It does draw quite some power, and that can be an issue for some motherboards. So here you can down-clock the card for example or just go with a 2000 or Velocity 100.

Image quality is indeed great and consistent across cards. With NV it can be all over the place. Compatibility with games is excellent I must say. In readme files the V is always mentioned, there are often patches on the CD and I think back in they every games developer tested their cards with V. I don't thin I ran into a single driver issue yet, the card just works and makes for an easy retro life 😀

DOS compatibility is also great. In Wing Commander III, NV cards have this flicker when going from room to room. The V avoids this. Even DOSBox has the flicker issue. Apart from that though NV are great in DOS also.