wrote:offtopic fact: there's powervr sgl lib/development headers on that disc bundled with a matrox driver by accident - these are extremely hard to find nowadays as powervr are still supersecret superclosed about even developers making stuff on their old obsolete APIs.
Where?
I'm looking around my m3D CD and I cannot find any developer stuff.
🙁
[Edit]
You're right, I'm looking at the SGL headers now...
IIRC Voodoo2 wasn't a 1997 release. January 1998 is very close to 1997 though
wrote:IIRC Voodoo2 wasn't a 1997 release. January 1998 is very close to 1997 though
Your post stirred the memories back to life. I now remember the Voodoo2 delay into 1998. I remember the Creative 3D Blaster Voodoo2 being first to come out I think...
wrote:-16-bit dithering is good but maybe not the best
AFAIK Voodoo2 calculates internally with 22 Bit which results in better 16 Bit dithered images. This is nicely compareable if you take a shot of a Riva128 that does 16 Bit calculation internally.
f.e. in Q3.
wrote:3Dfx Voodoo² (1998) STB Blackmagic 3D 12MB cards in SLI and single (aka Voodoo² 1000) […]
3Dfx Voodoo² (1998)
STB Blackmagic 3D 12MB cards in SLI and single (aka Voodoo² 1000)Notes
Voodoo2 Driver kit Version: 3.02.02 (final 3dfx)
This Voodoo2 driver also had a transparency bug very similar to the G200 one I talked about earlier, but it affected D3D instead of OpenGL. It was easily spotted looking at some glass textures in games like Jedi Knight or Alien vs Predator that were supposed to be translucent, but appeared opaque instead. Every 3rd party driver released after last 3dfx reference driver used its D3D core, and therefore suffered the same bug. I would recommend to rollback to previous 3.01.01 reference driver in order to avoid this problem.
ah, the voodoo² ... had the creative 12MB version when it first came out.... it lasted long enough so I upgraded from a v²SLI setup to a GF2/GTS 🤣
wrote:This Voodoo2 driver also had a transparency bug very similar to the G200 one I talked about earlier, but it affected D3D instead of OpenGL. It was easily spotted looking at some glass textures in games like Jedi Knight or Alien vs Predator that were supposed to be translucent,
Hmmm. I didn't notice it but apparently I didn't get to the JK windows.
wrote:AFAIK Voodoo2 calculates internally with 22 Bit which results in better 16 Bit dithered images. This is nicely compareable if you take a shot of a Riva128 that does 16 Bit calculation internally.
f.e. in Q3.
Oh it is much better than Riva 128! 😁
All of the 3dfx cards seem to do 32-bit internal calculations but the final output is obviously dithered 16-bit (except V5 of course). Voodoo2 apparently has a 1D filter in its RAMDAC. This is a dithering enhancement but it can also cause image artifacts. Voodoo3/4/5 have more complex RAMDAC filtering and that's when they came up with the supposed 22-bit thing. I've read that 18-bit is probably a more realistic claim. This article has info on 3dfx's various dithering tweaks.
http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/59/
But I do think some of the cards do a bit better job than the Voodoo2. Newer cards like G200 and TNT maybe. It's hard to judge without seeing them in motion.
wrote:ah, the voodoo² ... had the creative 12MB version when it first came out.... it lasted long enough so I upgraded from a v²SLI setup to a GF2/GTS 🤣
😁 I never had a Voodoo2 back then. I ran a Voodoo1 alongside various things for years. I went Mystique -> G200 -> TNT -> G400 basically. Sometime in there the Voodoo1 ended up in a drawer due to lack of use. In retrospect I think a 3dfx card was the best choice and a Voodoo3/5 were probably the best cards for all games until GeForce 3.
swaaye, would you mind if I post here the 3DMark99 image quality tests of the few cards I have ? It would be PNG screenshot slideshow like the ones you use.
Sure it would be great to see them.
Fun fact: The Intergraph/Permedia cards were used in Quake2's earlier GL screenshots officially released by id software. Note that the Quake2 code has a built-in permedia workaround to force mono lightmapping so that is intended behavior. There's also some Permedia hackage in Quake3's code I think.
This thread rocks. I have an old SiS 6326 which I'm going to try and setup. Wish me luck 😜
😁 It's a way to get some use out of all of these useless cards!
Hey I've heard of the G400Max outperfoming every card of its era(except the GeForce256 of course), is it really that great?
funny trivia:
ah, permedia2 chip.... Amigaz and I used them in our amigas in their "amiga forms" .... wanna see how they look like?
both have 8MB sgram, and both connect to custom PCI buses on Amiga4000 and Amiga1200 ppc accelerator cards respectively...
I'm trying to upload the 3DMark99 image quality tests of the few cards I have. Problem is, when I try to create a slideshow in imageshack, it always gives me this error: "Failed to upload your picture(s): Internal error".
The pictures are PNG and are already uploaded into imageshack. Then I select the images I want for the slideshow, and click on the option "create slideshow", and then gives me that error during the creation. Any ideas ?
Added super fantastic graphs. I haven't posted my Rage 128 stuff yet but check out what has to be legendary ATI benchmark optimization going on.
