I'm not familiar with the set up you are using. Having said that, Voodoo is ATI and is setup as a crossfire, Nvidia is SLI. I'm not sure if there is an issue with SLI on ATI cards but, that may be part of the issue.

Nvidia purchased 3DFX and used it's SLI tech in its own cards I believe.

I run a lot of newer SLI and Crossfire builds and more familiar with those. Just thought it may some quirky issue with compatibility issue.

Do you remember having installed any Glide wrapper such as nGlide before on that machine? Getting always the same score regardless of the number of cards and resolution leads me to believe it could actually be using the Radeon through a wrapper instead of the Voodoos.

Not all games from the 3Dfx era were user-friendly when it came to select the actual 3D accelerator and library (Glide, OpenGL, Direct3D) you wanted to use, and in some cases it all came down to manually copying and overwriting config files and libraries in order to use the Voodoo. I believe Quake 3 is OpenGL (even though it supports 3Dfx), so it may be defaulting to the Radeon.

So my suggestions would be:

- Try some native Glide games where you can select the 3D device/library if you have any (such as Unreal)
- Test the Voodoos with a crappy main card without 3D support (such as an old PCI VGA) to discard the Radeon being the cause of the issue
- Reinstalling the OS is never a bad idea if you suspect driver issues

Compenstine wrote:

I'm not familiar with the set up you are using. Having said that, Voodoo is ATI and is setup as a crossfire, Nvidia is SLI. I'm not sure if there is an issue with SLI on ATI cards but, that may be part of the issue.

Even though it was nVidia that bought 3Dfx assets, the SLI technology used in more modern GPUs is substantially different so there aren't many similarities beyond the general idea of increasing 3D performance with additional cards (even the SLI acronym has a different meaning for nVidia cards).

Nvidia purchased 3DFX and used it's SLI tech in its own cards I believe.

Nvidia SLI has nothing in common with old 3dfx SLI.

MobRules I will try to test as many of those suggestions as I can however I can only select Voodoo and 1024x768 in Quake 3 when both cards are installed. The performance seems to fit that of a single voodoo card not my 9800 running a wrapper and this is on Win98SE, I've never installed a wrapper on this machine.

The 3DMark 2000 test forces you to select the card you are benchmarking and it will only allow 1024x768 when both cards are installed otherwise it only allows 800x600. Those are where I got the benchmark numbers from, it seems unlikely its using the radeon there which is also much faster.

Serpent Rider:

You are correct, I looked it up and though 3dfx was bought by NVidia they never used the SLI tech.

Well I'm doing some benchmarking again and seeing there are some differences with 2 enabled but it still doesn't seem to scale at all the way Phil's videos do. I'll check more and report back when I have more data.

Yeah, with such a powerful CPU I believe you should be seeing a considerable performance increase with SLI vs single card (at least for 800x600 and lower, 1024x768 I think stops scaling at fairly low CPU speeds).

I don't use FastVoodoo myself since I have a matching SLI set, so I don't know about its potential issues. But another thing you can try is to test each Voodoo separately with the official 3Dfx drivers and see what kind of performance you get there. That way you can also rule out FastVoodoo issues or malfunctions on one of the cards.

Yeah the difference between SLI and a single card is like 3FPS, so almost within the margin for error. I'm not sure what is going on with this but its going to take more investigation.

I just ran quake with only the standard VGA drivers installed for the 9800Pro and got the same results. The problem with the display getting corrupted after using the voodoo cards to play a GL game only occurs when the catalyst drivers are installed. Seems like a conflict there but not the conflict that is causing no SLI scaling.

Going to just run the Diamond Card individually with its official drivers and do some testing.

something is definitely going on with your setup.

just happened to be troubleshooting my voodoo2 rig so i ran these benchmarks for your comparison.

benchmark default settings. 90mhz clock on voodoo2. fast voodoo 2.4.6

800x600 settings

800x600 results

1024x798 settings

1024x768 results

not sure if related but, i was having all kinds of lockups and crashes whenever i used my voodoo cards. turned out to be a defective adaptec 4 port usb 2.0 card. once i removed that, everything ran perfect again.

V-sync on maybe? 1024x768 is almost twice the amount of pixels but it should still be faster compared to a single card at 800x600. Did you try 800x600 on the sli setup? How does that scale?

Theres no notable scaling at any resolution. It scores the same in the benchmark regardless of SLI or single or resolution.

I also don't think its sync because 3dMark doesn't come close to 60 FPS while Quake III will routinely go up to 90+ FPS. However no FPS increase in SLI.

So 640x480, 800x600, or 1024x768 all score the same with or without SLI.

I can't figure it out, I'm going to try and find a matching card I guess and see if its just a problem with the FastVoodoo drivers. Don't know when I'll source this but thanks for all the suggestions, I will update when I get more info.