VOGONS


First post, by Ozzuneoj

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BIOS reports 3dfx Voodoo3 1000G. It is a Gateway OEM version of the 3dfx Velocity 100, which is simply a 143Mhz Voodoo3 2000 with only 8MB of memory and one TMU disabled in Glide and OpenGL (not D3D) via software or BIOS. It is not the same as the other Voodoo3 1000 without a heatsink, which is a 125Mhz 16MB card without any TMUs disabled.

I got one of these little guys several years ago and had odd graphical corruption in Glide and eventually gave up on trying to fix it.

For example, this is Descent 3. When outdoor areas aren't visible, it looks totally fine.

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Once you can see the outdoor areas out a window or door however, it looks like this:

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Also, in Need for Speed: High Stakes the HUD textures are severely messed up.

Fast forward many years and I now have three of them. Problem is, they all do the same thing in Glide! They work totally fine in Direct3D, so I'm guessing it is related to that disabled TMU.

I have done quite a bit of searching and I have yet to find anyone else complaining about this issue. I have tried Voodoo3 1000 OEM drivers, Velocity 100 drivers (since that's what it really is), and AmigaMerlin Voodoo 3/4/5 drivers. All of them exhibit the same issue.
It also doesn't change when I add the registry entry mentioned here to enable the second TMU. It is worth noting that the Anandtech article says to put it under Display\0000\Glide, but on my particular system (which I test lots of video cards on) it is under Display\0019\Glide. I doubt that would matter though, since that is the key for the current video card. I even made 100% sure by deleting all other entries for different Display drivers under that registry key.

... but what boggles my mind is that no one else seems to have these issues. I think I first had this problem like 6+ years ago.

Currently testing it on a 440BX board with an 850Mhz PIII in Windows 98SE.

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.

Reply 1 of 4, by leileilol

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That fog table's shot to hell. There was a recent Glide fix done to do something about that on single TMU V3s

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long live PCem

Reply 3 of 4, by Ozzuneoj

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Ah, that has to be it! Thanks guys!

Hard to believe that this was JUST discovered less than two months ago after being broken all this time.

I will test out that patched glide2x.dll!

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.

Reply 4 of 4, by Ozzuneoj

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eddman wrote on 2024-03-30, 01:00:

Yep, that was it!

I pasted that Glide2x.dll into the windows\system folder, overwrote the old one, and now the 8MB "Voodoo3 1000G" (Velocity 100) is working perfectly fine in Descent 3 and NFS: High Stakes. The games I tried only let me go to 800x600 likely due to the lack of VRAM, but that's fine... I find that any Voodoo3 is much more playable at 800x600 in heavier games from 1999-2000. Because of that, I think the 8MB Voodoo3 cards are a bit of a diamond in the rough, at least now that this issue has been fixed. There probably aren't a ton of games that run great on a V3 that need more than 8MB at 800x600. Generally, if you want to achieve higher FPS at higher resolutions in more complex games, you'll want to just get a Geforce of some kind.

Now for some blitting from the back buffer.