The reason is: I recall textures looking quite different up close and being rather disappointed when my new PC back in 1999 came with a TNT2 where games actually looked worse because up close textures were a blurry mess whereas the Voodoo applied some kind of detailed texture up close.

Just use Unreal Gold with the latest unofficial patch. Problem solved.

I know but are there other elements that the Voodoo does worse/better?

It depends. Voodoo has much better texture filtering in come cases.

it is not so much a glide vs. direct3d question as a question of how things were implemented on a per-game basis. the unreal d3d renderer was in a beta state for a long time. but even with glide there are visual differences that widely went under the radar, check this page to see how much the game can look different depending on patch and whether your card does multitexturing or not: https://www.kentie.net/article/multipass/. i'm actually not sure myself what the author means by "original version of unreal" under one of the voodoo3 screenshots, as in my experience, unpatched pre-gold unreal will simply not run on voodoo3.

the real reference look is perhaps the software renderer, and it's actually pretty impressive in it's own right.

Just to be clear. Cards without multitexturing do not render additional sky layers. For example the moon/planet is missing on the first shot. Additional layers are present in the software renderer.

If you're playing a lot of Unreal, the S3 Savage 2000 is an interesting chipset with its Metal API. I think I posted some screenshots of its textures years ago on Vogons.

Game support. John Carmack hated D3D hence Q1/Q2 didn't support it. Almost everything supported Glide between 1997-1999, either directly or through a miniGL.

Here's the old thread on the Savage 2000, but it was pre-Photobucket disaster. Kind of funny how all the textures are now equally blurry.

S3 Savage 2000

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-01-23, 17:40:

Just to be clear. Cards without multitexturing do not render additional sky layers. For example the moon/planet is missing on the first shot. Additional layers are present in the software renderer.

As a quick question, Is multitexturing involved with how my UT2K4 screenshots are sometimes missing the character, or sometimes missing the building? [7600GS, P4, XP, ScreenShotAssistant] It's a funny glitch -- it's rare, and a screenshot taken the moment before or after will be fine. Seems to rely on a weird alignment of stars.

If you already have a V2 why don't you run the 2 side by side and compare the differences? Yeh the 233 wont be fast enough to actually play the game but should be ok to get a feel of the difference. Or put the V2 in the P3 and see what you think.
Ultimately its down to personal preference if its worth it or not.

Another option is using nglide, a P3 and Ti4600 should be ok I think? Unless your like me and find that option soulless

Unreal's a little complicated, given the different revisions and releases it went through.

When Unreal first came out, it didn't have multitexturing in GlideDrv for a few months and it was a pretty bright game that actually resembled the softdrv's appearance well for the most part. I think it was v208 that added that to GlideDrv for the Voodoo2. And when this change happened, Unreal's lighting got darker as it had changed blending functions for the multitexture combine to work. Later Unreal patches (~224) would alter this GlideDrv to shift the lightmap data up to compensate for the darkness the multitexture changes brought. The overbrights that were once there are lost (for V2/V3+) and the detail textures also render differently (they subtract with a depth trick to smoothly fade them out). Kentie's D3D10 renderer is based around this appearance.

And then there's the D3DDrv, which was evolving separately and had various stages of disrepair as much learning had to be done. In the end, its appearance differs by having more detail texture layers which are on by default, which would bring it to be slower, and play as leverage for dumb "nvidia it's a shit! VooDoo Best" pissing contests.

Anyway that's for Unreal, but on a Voodoo card there's also subtle Glide->Direct3D differences in the form of the different dither table matrix used (Unreal usually uses 2x2). Direct3D also uses 2x2, but generally, Glide games (including OpenGL/MiniGL drivers that go through the API) use a 4x4 dither with noticeable dither subtraction artifacts on blended textures that cause overdrawn stuff to appear like waffle blobs, and that's not accounting for the blurry video filters... (by the way hypersnap sucks at reproducing them)

pewpewpew wrote on 2020-01-23, 21:04:

As a quick question, Is multitexturing involved with how my UT2K4 screenshots are sometimes missing the character, or sometimes missing the building? [7600GS, P4, XP, ScreenShotAssistant] It's a funny glitch -- it's rare, and a screenshot taken the moment before or after will be fine. Seems to rely on a weird alignment of stars.

UT2004 uses vertex shaders for some parts (mainly maps and 'rigid' model stuff) so perhaps the driver's goofing with that.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2020-01-23, 17:40:

Just to be clear. Cards without multitexturing do not render additional sky layers. For example the moon/planet is missing on the first shot. Additional layers are present in the software renderer.

It's still rendering. It's just that GlideDrv blends the lightmaps far differently for single TMUs. Here's how it is on a Voodoo2 in the initial Unreal release when it didn't support multitextures (which would also represent Voodoo Graphics/Banshee behavior). I ghosted my way up to the skyroom itself to break the illusion and make what it does clearer. The moon is 'missing' because it's placed above the lightmap plane (when it's still additive blended, they could've just dropped it below the sky anyway but given the skyrooms were some of the LAST things Unreal development went through in the last few months, i'd rule dev oversight more than "multi texture superior!!!"..., and given the many late Unreal screens had been taken on GlideDrv, i'd think this darker sky is intentional and disregarding how it looks in software (and in later, multitexture) was another dev oversight. As i've said before, Unreal isn't the perfect graphic hardware judging game when there's various Epic fails)

If it were early 98 and I were in Sweeney's shoes and were to make sky/water have some parity with softdrv in a multi-pass renderer, i'd subdivide and bake lighting to vertex colors for blended surfaces. Dark.unr would then be 'dark' as Jeremy War would be aware and have more lighting control for a better, intendedly 'dark' sky with the lightmap on the background clouds instead.

Well I installed my spare Voodoo2 (instead of going for a Voodoo3 stand-alone card but it's only 8MB) and yeah the difference is quite big. 3DFX has this odd rainbow-like effect on textures, it's hard to explain (I think it comes from compressing the textures?). You clearly see banding and it's not as crisp as with D3D but I dunno, it looks very ... unique. I tried Hexen 2 with and without Voodoo and while Voodoo performance is slightly worse, I prefer its looks. Going to try Unreal next.

That would be the video filter i've mentioned a billion times at this point. Be aware about it, and also be aware that you can control it with an environment variable (if you want even more blurry streaking or just want it off). Every Voodoo has them and the intention is to smooth out the dither so it'd approximate a higher percieved color depth. Nowadays it would be percieved as a mild "chromatic aberration shader effect"

try SSTV2_VIDEO_FILTER_THRESHOLD 0xFFFFFF 😀