Harekiet wrote:

And then you finally get the verite and it ends up in the box together with other old videocards. Collecting stuff is brilliant 😀

Hehe, I don't plan to, not immediately. I want to test out the rendition exclusive games, especially Indy Car Racing II. I bought that game new back in 1997!

They do seem to become more and more rare. I searched through completed listings on Ebay, and you had to go back to December 2011 to find anything on the American one. The German section had the Miro one which was linked earlier in February going for 22.50 euro. I could also not find anything on Amibay or Vintage computer within the last year.

I finally built a W95/Rendition box just to play IndyCar Racing II in 3D! Since I have a Rendition 2 card I needed the Verite 2 DosFix to get it to run but you're fine on a V1000.

ICR2/3D is really incredible btw - a real highlight of the early days of 3D. It predates the 3dfx patch version of Nascar Racing 2, and of course GPL. A real treat if you have a Rendtion board.

I went digging. Here's a particularily rare old version of VQuake the googles can't find.

Trying to capture video from the speedy3d version of Whiplash, but the game won't listen to ssutil or renutil to set the refreshrate at 60hz. Atm it's 75hz and then both VGA capture and HDMI scaling won't sync properly. The only thing I can do is to make it go to 85hz, but any other setting either just gives 75 or 85hz. I have captured other stuff at 640x480 with both 75hz and 85hz and it works, but Whiplash with the rendition patch does not want to cooperate.

I want to do a comparison video with the SVGA software mode, S3 Virge, Rendition and 3DFX (CGL mode looks just like SVGA). The other API's I have no major issues with to capture. The best I can do atm for the Rendition is either to capture the LCD screen with my HD Sony camera or be stuck to 467x367 resolution on the video (which sucks since the game runs at 640x480). Also for a good comparison I want to use the same capture method on all API's. Using the Avermedia Game Broadcaster HD.

Am I missing something with the DOS refresh rate utilities? Card is Diamond S220 with 1.36 BIOS.

Can add that the Rendition version of the game is by far the best to play in!

I have an 8MB V2200 in my Dual 200MMX box, and I was mucking around with Quake1 today. Testing vQuake vs GLQuake (Rendition OpenGL) vs GLQuake (3Dfx OpenGL). The 3Dfx card is a Canopus Pure3D 6MB Voodoo1.

- When running GLQuake with the Rendition OpenGL ICD, the framerate drops to a crawl when you bring the console or menu up, or a full-screen effect (like entering water or getting hit)
- Also when running GLQuake with Rendition OpenGL, none of the brightness or gamma settings in-game have any effect and the picture is very dark. Brightness is fine in vQuake and 3Dfx OpenGL
- When running vQuake, bright parts of the image seem to be a bit fuzzy, like TV interference? Not present in 3Dfx OpenGL, or Rendition OpenGL.

Any ideas on these 3?

Otherwise, the performance was pretty even between the 3. All very close to the 25FPS mark at 640x480, GLQuake a bit faster for both cards than vQuake.

My lists for Rendition:

Rendition RRedline (Win95) Games List
(Verite 1000, 2000)
-------------------------------------
BigRRed (Glide-to-RRedline wrapper)
Grand Prix Legends
Heretic 2 (vHeretic2)
Hexen II (vHexen2)
MDK
Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries
Mechwarrior 2: Titanium Edition
Myth: The Fallen Lords
Quake II (vQuake2)
RRedline demos from demo competition
SODA Off-Road Racing (Papyrus)
Sub Culture
* Formula 1
* Front Page Sports: Ski Racing
* Heavy Gear

Rendition Speedy3D (DOS) Games List
(Verite 1000, 2000)
-----------------------------------
Descent II
Descent II: Vertigo
EuroFighter 2000 (EF2000) v2.0
EuroFighter 2000 (EF2000) + Graphics+/TACTCOM
IndyCar Racing II / CART Racing
NASCAR Racing II
Quake (vQuake)
Rebel Moon
Scorched Planet
Tomb Raider
VR Soccer 96
Whiplash
* Fatal Racing

* = need verified

I have an 8MB V2200 in my Dual 200MMX box, and I was mucking around with Quake1 today. Testing vQuake vs GLQuake (Rendition OpenGL) vs GLQuake (3Dfx OpenGL). The 3Dfx card is a Canopus Pure3D 6MB Voodoo1.

I don't totally understand the combination of Dual Pentium MMX 200 and a Rendition card. The best fit for Dual Pentiums would probably be NT (3.51 or 4.0) while Rendition cards are mostly useful in DOS and Windows 9x. To be true I'm not sure about the NT drivers but you'd have no Direct3D, not sure about RRedline, maybe OpenGL. AFAIR the beta Windows 2000 drivers have no 3D support at all.

- When running GLQuake with the Rendition OpenGL ICD, the framerate drops to a crawl when you bring the console or menu up, or a full-screen effect (like entering water or getting hit)
- Also when running GLQuake with Rendition OpenGL, none of the brightness or gamma settings in-game have any effect and the picture is very dark. Brightness is fine in vQuake and 3Dfx OpenGL

Did you try different driver releases? According to
https://sites.google.com/site/martinsguistuff … ation-resources it is best to use the Gold MiniGL driver.
I assume you refer to the latest beta drivers? Those are not necessarily the best drivers to use in games, they especially have more bugs than older drivers from eg. Hercules.

- When running vQuake, bright parts of the image seem to be a bit fuzzy, like TV interference? Not present in 3Dfx OpenGL, or Rendition OpenGL.

Any ideas on these 3?

Otherwise, the performance was pretty even between the 3. All very close to the 25FPS mark at 640x480, GLQuake a bit faster for both cards than vQuake.

- Did you enable triple buffering for GLQuake?
- vQuake could be CPU limited. According to http://www.vintage3d.org/verite2.php it should be possible to get more than 30 fps with a faster CPU.

I've been experimenting with Unreal and my Thriller 3D 4MB (V2200). I read some old usenet posts about the OpenGL renderer being written with V2200 in mind and got curious. As some know, D3D mode doesn't work well.

I tried Unreal v220 and Unreal Gold. Both work in OpenGL mode, which I enabled by editing Unreal.ini. I used the V2000 driver version 3.0b5 and its OpenGL ICD. It appears to run similar in speed to a Voodoo1 and looks good, but without detail textures or mip mapping. As with Voodoo1, you probably want to run 512x384 to get the speed up a bit, but the game didn't want to run at that resolution.

finally snagged an 8mb v2200 on eBay. If it works... it will replace my 4mb S220 and run alongside a pair of voodoo 2s SLI. When it arrives I'll post performance comparison in Indycar Racing 2 rendition version.

tincup wrote:

finally snagged an 8mb v2200 on eBay. If it works... it will replace my 4mb S220 and run alongside a pair of voodoo 2s SLI. When it arrives I'll post performance comparison in Indycar Racing 2 rendition version.

haha, so it was you who got that card. I was thinking of bidding, but let it go as I already have a rendition card and really don't need another. I doubt you will see much if any performance increase with that card. On my S220 the game is already running at its frame limit of 30 fps with everything set to max.

couldn't resist haha... but it should run closer to 30fps in all situations such as race starts. Average fps doesn't always convey peaks and vallies and feel at the wheel can feel smoother even though the fps may seem identical. Finally getting ICR2 running in 3D has been a holy grail for me and I wasn't passing up on the part - not a bad price all considered - assuming it works:)

tincup wrote:

finally snagged an 8mb v2200 on eBay. If it works... it will replace my 4mb S220 and run alongside a pair of voodoo 2s SLI. When it arrives I'll post performance comparison in Indycar Racing 2 rendition version.

Oh, so your the one who nabbed it. I was bidding on that Legend QDI card. Never heard of the brand though.

felt sure if i mentioned it I'd meet the competion here on Vogons:) only 4 bids though. I'd heard of the 4mb QDi on these pages so thought it was worth a gamble. The Hercules might attract a lot more attention.. we'll see if it holds it's own..

EDIT: here's a pic.

swaaye wrote:

I've been thinking about Rendition hardware lately.

That's a great beginning 😀 Makes a casual reader to be sorry of being so ignorant about the matter... Got some questions though. sorry if this sounds stupid... 😀
Might this Rendition V1000 'offloading of triangle setup step' be of help with the video performance in benches like PCPbench?

"V1000 can be faster if the CPU is slow enough. This is because V1000 fully offloads the triangle setup step of the rendering process and it uses DMA transfers, unlike Voodoo1."

486 chips are so slow as I have ascertained... and surely might use some help.

also does Rendition 2x00 have the same ability?

*
big thanks for making this deep and extensive account!

V1000's triangle setup engine was special at the time because Voodoo1 only partially has it. Voodoo2 remedied this. Almost all GPUs from then onward have it. Voodoo1 was just less ideal for a very slow CPU, but Voodoo1 is far superior to V1000 in almost all other cases.

486 motherboards usually have PCI problems. Verite uses DMA transfers and even some Pentium boards didn't support this properly. So I'm not sure if there would be an advantage to V1000 on a 486 or if it would even work correctly.

swaaye wrote:

V1000's triangle setup engine was special at the time because Voodoo1 only partially has it. Voodoo2 remedied this. Almost all GPUs from then onward have it. Voodoo1 was just less ideal for a very slow CPU, but Voodoo1 is far superior to V1000 in almost all other cases.

486 motherboards usually have PCI problems. Verite uses DMA transfers and even some Pentium boards didn't support this properly. So I'm not sure if there would be an advantage to V1000 on a 486 or if it would even work correctly.

Thanks for the reply! Indeed caution is the part of valor when running after vintage hardware. Otherwise it ends up useless... The matter is I've spotted a person selling a bunch of old cards and it looks like Rendition V22(?)00.

V1000 is no match for Voodoo, but maybe ~this~ type is more powerful and less tricky?
That is, if the DMA is supported OK, can it be potentially helpful?

That looks like a Hercules Thriller 3D 4MB PCI to me, which is V2200 yes. The only V2100 card is the Diamond Stealth II S220 (which turns into V2200 after a BIOS update anyway).

swaaye wrote:

That looks like a Hercules Thriller 3D 4MB PCI to me, which is V2200 yes. The only V2100 card is the Diamond Stealth II S220 (which turns into V2200 after a BIOS update anyway).

Then the only question left is, was that special DMA support quite solid with these 2x00 cards.

If that be the case, might a 486 board (one ~good~ in the DMA department) benefit from it, potentially?
(Potentially being the word here, I realize it's a risk in any case.)

I've heard of many kinds of rendering enchancements but such DMA usage sounds as something special.
Could it be a resource present in the chipset that is normally overlooked and unused... but could be brought into play to get better-than-usual (say, S3 Virge) results?

P.S. PCPbench seems quite 'simple'... could it benefit from such things, at all 🙄

Other cards use DMA too. Rendition may have been one of the earlier users of it, but it became quite common (eg AGP has DIME). Rendition really pushed DMA in advertising because it was perhaps an advantage to Voodoo's PIO transfers and they wanted you to know it.

Virge GX/DX are competitive in speed with V1000. The problem with S3 of course is terrible D3D support (and no OpenGL), but Rendition isn't much better frankly. Both companys' cards are best used with games that run a proprietary API.

DiME is a lot more then DMA, both are distinctive options of AGP.

swaaye wrote:

The problem with S3 of course is terrible D3D support (and no OpenGL), but Rendition isn't much better frankly.

I strongly disagree, V1000 does wonders compared to Virge.