Define "run". You probably don't want to play Doom 3 on a voodoo 5.

kolderman wrote on 2021-01-14, 18:03:

Define "run". You probably don't want to play Doom 3 on a voodoo 5.

'Ugly but with playable framerate' - and that's how Doom 3 runs on V5 AGP on youtube clip.

Also check HL2 - it runs much better than Xbox port (and og. Xbox has GeForce 3).

I'm sure we can go further than those games.

Now, when Duke Nukem Forever 2001 build finally leak, could some try to run it on V5?

DNF is not that technically advanced. All that does more than stock UnrealEngine1 are skeletal models and video textures.

More advanced games would probably be a fillrate-hungry GTA3 game or UT2003/2004, which still wouldn't be feature complete as a Geforce2 or even a Kyro and have visual issues...

While you can't run Halo, you can probably run Tribes 2 which had its technical art inspired by Halo's earlier footage. Sacrifice and Giants were also technically similarly demanding.

songo wrote on 2021-01-14, 17:58:

Hi, I was a big fan of early 3dfx back in the day, scored Rush / V2/ V3 (Voodoo 2 was my 3D accelerator, switching from SoftMode to Glide in Quake 2 was mind-blowing back then) but unfortunatelly, I dropped modern gaming in 2001 thanks to retared arm race and stuck with my Pentium 200 MMX rig for almost decade - it was pretty cool period when I have learnt how to respect the power of hardware and squize every bit of it.

As an aside (from voodoo being not so great beyond about 2000) i'm impressed you stayed with 200mmx for a decade 😀

what years were they?

I'm sure a P200mmx has more power than generally thought of but interesting if you got it working fine with early 2000's internet and games etc

I remember people talking about games like Max Payne as very late (probably too late) titles that ran on it but I still wonder how much well. The Voodoo5 concept as often discussed I imagine find older game to run better and with its main feature the anti aliasing enabled. But newer titles were already oriented to other generations of gpu imho. Some newer games ran with modded drivers or tweaks or whatever but not exactly as originally intended to be.

Call of Duty.

The sad thing is when the voodoo5 came out, all anyone could talk of was this new thing called a GeForce. 3dfx was basically a weird has-been at this point. None wanted a v5, and no-one cared what it could run. The v6 might have been interesting, but it never came out and would have been too expensive.

Of course in retrospect we see things very differently, but because of how well it runs earlier titles, not later ones. The v6 is a genuinely interesting question though, I believe it can run some later games admirably well.

As often discussed realistically the problem came with the Voodoo3 release that should have never been and not even called this way at first, burning the importance of such brand/number with a sort of "Banshee II". Beside a very fast old generation games oriented card, it was a just as old concept. The VSA-100 felt what the V3 needed to be a couple years before and still old considering the SLI logic, the Glide compatibility, not necessary bad things but still living on the old successes to have a reason to be. The V5 5500 wasn't a bad card and reviewed with positive words but not enough for the price/time changing/alternative offer. And even if the card was cheaper still wasn't the best marketing road without a new generation chip. Like imho the NV40 did with the whole NV3x previous GPUs basically making people to forget all that period.

All the Avenger/VSA-100 products could have had some reasons if existed a couple years before at least... after the double chip 5500 version, the V5 6000 realistically should have never even entered the on paper design idea. We were talking about 250nm complex not running cool chips when already 180nm chips existed with DDR memories and at that low freqs still locked to the equally slow SDRAM memories.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAQDlUAHx_U

I mean this is just speculation , but if rampage had been actually released and soon enough and 3dfx shifted away from glide and directed its attention wholly to direct3d and opengl maybe 3dfx would have held on at least a little longer.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-06-01, 12:42:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAQDlUAHx_U

That's depressing... it looks like my old ATI Rage IIC, when trying to run something like a NFS Porsche... 🤣

AppleSauce wrote:

but if rampage had been actually released and soon enough and 3dfx shifted away from glide and directed its attention wholly to direct3d and opengl maybe 3dfx would have held on at least a little longer.

They simply couldn't, because they were burning money in doubtful investments and relying on obsolete hardware designs since Voodoo 2 release.

gerry wrote on 2022-06-01, 07:08:

As an aside (from voodoo being not so great beyond about 2000) i'm impressed you stayed with 200mmx for a decade 😀

what years were they?

I'm sure a P200mmx has more power than generally thought of but interesting if you got it working fine with early 2000's internet and games etc

1998 - 2008, 32 MB ram, S3Virge + Voodoo 2 which I downgraded to Voodoo Rush once V2 died.

I haven't got access to web 'till 2008, first titles that became almost unplayable were released in 2000 (Daikatana, Deus Ex), 2001 was even worse and by 2002 I could not play anything new but it only as far as native PC gaming goes. I discovered emulation so add to ~20 PC legacy TONS of games from SNES, Gameboy, Megadrive, C64, ZX Spectrum and even Playstation (yes, there were games playable on that hardware via VGS and Bleem!)... I never run out of games.

Oh, and arcades emulation, especially CPS1 (Callus), CP2 (Winkawaks) and glorious SNK which provides new games even in 2003 via Neoragex - King of Fighters 2003 and SNK vs Capcom Chaos.

The closest released product that could be on the level of a Rampage "what if" is PowerVR Kyro:

- they're old first-gen 3d rivals
- a lot of the old architectural stuff from their first card still remains, and becomes a problem to some technical shortcomings (tiles and the lack of an exposed depth buffer)
- ditched their proprietary API (SGL) for focusing on only Direct3D and OpenGL support (...though technically their GL ICD still goes through SGL2)
- came post-Geforce256, and as such, relegated to the budget segment to be competitive.

leileilol wrote on 2022-06-01, 04:15:

More advanced games would probably be a fillrate-hungry GTA3 game or UT2003/2004, which still wouldn't be feature complete as a Geforce2 or even a Kyro and have visual issues...

As youtube material prooves, those games runs kinda ok on V5.

After doing some research I've found that someone manage to fire up Resident Evil 4, 2007 geam!

https://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=5656

Is it fake? So hard to believe if it's real.

There's a video floating around YouTube of someone running Doom 3 on a Voodoo 2 sli setup.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-06-01, 16:15:

There's a video floating around YouTube of someone running Doom 3 on a Voodoo 2 sli setup.

Heck, even LGR did it.

Imho the above Rage IIc example might be correct. Even the Rage IIc can actually run Unreal Tournament and Thief II games which are far more demanding than the card is supposed to run but with a fast CPU/FPU and @ 400x300 and without any tweaks or whatever.
The point is that going for few features, quality, resolutions, tweaks and whatever to make the game looks like it was supposed to appear, doesn't mean that beside the technical success to make it run on a V5 card means that the game is running as intended. Which of course can be understood, Doom3 was not nearly oriented to run on those cards, I remember it on the Radeon 8500 and 9700 and those were the type of GPU complexity the game required and needed to really look as supposed to.

Sure such demanding test are interesting to see it running on old cards like the Doom engine basically running on whatever game console powerful enough to run it each with variable differences from the PC original game.