chinny22 wrote on 2022-05-03, 21:32:GF FX and below all have great backward compatabilitly including dos support. Go for the best performing card you can as older c […]
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GF FX and below all have great backward compatabilitly including dos support. Go for the best performing card you can as older cards dont offer any real benifit.
If your pairing a Voodoo with a nvida card then the V2 is the more elegant option been an addon card so all video signals come out of your AGP card.
Voodoo 2 has slighty better dos compatabililty as well.
BUT the V3 has slightly better image qualility and a bit faster.
Voodoo 3 doesnt really make use of AGP, PCI is fine. I have a simialr setup with a GF4 Ti4600 hooked up to 1 screen and the V3 hooked up to a 2nd screen, yep 2 screen Win98 setup! Works really well with glide games automaticly playing on the V3 and everything else on the GF4. Only Powerslide doesn't like this out of my games so I disable the GF4 in device manager for that game.
I've lost track with which CPU your using? IF the CPU isnt powerful enough to feed a later GF card that may be a reasion to step down a little, likewise depeinding what AGP slot the motherboard has may affect which card, but I suspect this will be fine.
Oh and dont worry about Win3x support, you can just use the gerneric SVGA driver that comes with windows
This is a awesome resource on dos compatability
https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/
For the life of me I can't open that DOS_TESTS page. Never could actually 😁 I'm not behind some kind of firewall or something too.
My CPU currently inside is a P3 500mhz, but I have a 600 and a 733 ready (733 is the fastest consumer grade CPU from 1999 that I could find) socket 370 with a VIA 133 Apollo chipset.
I've a limit - this PC must not contain parts post-1999, it's the "ultimate 90s machine", so even tho I have some GF2s and GF4s, I'd prefer TNT2/Voodoo/GF256 setup, but I see varying levels of compatibility. Especially with DOS and W3.1. Like AGP voltages being an issue, DOS scrolling not playing nice with GF256 or TNT2, using 3 GPUs (Voodoo2/3 PCI+NVIDIA AGP+S3) and so on.
Is V3 really that less compatible with older 3Dfx titles? No community patches, disabling TMUs, and such, to achieve V2 levels of compatibility?
kolderman wrote on 2022-05-03, 22:42:
I have a via c3 ezra 1ghz that covers that range. Gf2, v2sli, awe64g, audigy2. Works well.
That's probably 1 year too "late" for my '99 PC. AWE64g ISA and Audigy2 PCI I presume?
Gmlb256 wrote on 2022-05-03, 23:06:For a late 1999 build, I would go for the GeForce 256 (or a later one up to GeForce4) + Voodoo2 for best compatibility. The S3 v […]
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For a late 1999 build, I would go for the GeForce 256 (or a later one up to GeForce4) + Voodoo2 for best compatibility. The S3 video card can be used for covering corner cases like 15bpp color mode in DOS games.
If going for the Voodoo3, make sure that it is a PCI card so you could switch between PCI/AGP as the primary video card in the motherboard BIOS settings. Alternatively both Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 can be used at the same time provided that you installed first the Voodoo2 drivers.
Pet peeve of mine: The GPU term cannot be used to indicate every video card, only the ones supporting hardware T&L and/or shaders can be called that way. 😜
chinny22 wrote on 2022-05-03, 21:32:
Oh and dont worry about Win3x support, you can just use the gerneric SVGA driver that comes with windows
The generic SVGA driver is much slower, lacking any GUI acceleration. This is noticeable with higher resoltuions and color modes.
Regardless, one would stick with 256 color mode on Windows 3.x and won't be really missing much as consumer software is concerned though.
Frankly, I'd just like W3.x to be bootable, and be a more or less a desktop with shortcuts to games, maybe some old software for kicks and laughs. If it can do that, I'm fine.
I know GF256 (DX7) is the first "GPU" 😉
Still on the fence about V2 vs V3...
PS to all: apparently S3 Savage is looks better in UT/Q3, but I'd not consider getting it just for that, and I don't know if Matrox' G200/G400 are a better pick over TNT2/GF256/V2/V3...