I ran a Voodoo on a s478 system with a 3.06ghz Pentium4. Probably something unique to the Sis chipset, because I wasn't able to get the same success on an Intel 845 board with a slower P4.
https://pixelworkbench.com/2019/12/15/ ... 1-review/

Wow, that's quite impressive!
Dit you try other DOS games except Tomb Raider?
According to my own tests Tomb Raider seems to be the most forgiving when paired with faster cpu's (while Starfigter 3000 seems the most limited).

I checked my hardware, I don't have a system with a Sis 651 chipset, but I do have an Asus P4S533 with a Sis 645DX chipset.

Unfortunately I have no time to test anything this week, but I can't wait to give it a spin next week and see if I can get the same results! 😁

if static linked games failed to initialize voodoo in dos, then run any normal game like carma and exit and re-run static game. that works for me.

Well I finally was able to do some testing on the Asus board with the SIS chipset.
It seems that going for a SIS chipset actually makes a difference!

I paired the board with a Pentium 4 HT running at 3.06 Ghz.
When I tried to start GLquake with the voodoo 1 I got a colorful screen and the system crashed, which is a known issue when running this card at a 133 bus-speed.
I then went into the bios trying to change the bus-speed, but I could only increase it, not decrease it.
When I started playing with the memory multiplier (not doing 1:1) stability increased, I was able to do a benchmark in glquake, but I did see some graphical glitches.
As soon as I tried any dos-game It would immediately hang unfortunately.

Then I downloaded the manual for the motherboard.
I discovered I can change the bus from 133 to 100 with jumpers and switches on the motherboard, thereby eliminating the need for those speeds in the bios.

After changing the bus-speed to 100 (and hereby lowering my cpu speed from 3.06 Ghz to 2.3 Ghz) I tried again.
Glitches in GLquake were gone immediately.
Tomb raider (static linked version) worked.
Shadow warrior worked.
Fatal Racing crashed at startup.

Trying Anthony’s method by running shadow-warrior before fatal racing didn’t seem to work in this case.

At this point I ran out of time for testing, but wanted to share my findings so far.
I want to continue testing over the weekend.

Well it took me some time to do additional testing, but I can confirm that a voodoo 1 works great with a 3,06 Pentium 4 on a SiS chipset (running at 133FSB!).
Fatal racing not running was due to a missing sound-card (even though I disabled sound in the setup). After installing an ESS-SOLO1 Fatal racing worked great!
All the games from my list seemed to detect the voodoo 1 and work.
I did have to restart the system occasionally after running multiple games after each-other, but after a reboot it would always work.
Compatibility from pure-dos was a lot better compared to running the games from Windows 98 (did crash or glitch occasionally).

Another interesting find was that Incoming did not have any graphical glitches on this system!
On my slot 1 system, the glitches already start at 450 mhz, but somehow on the SiS chipset it just works…

The bugs I had with quake1 disappeared when I put some active cooling on the voodoo1 by placing a large fan in front of it.

Since SiS made chipsets up to the core2 era, this does make me curious if it would be possible for even faster systems to work with a voodoo 1 😁
Does anyone out here have such a board and is willing to test this?

That's neat! It is my experience that issues/stability with Voodoo Graphics vary a lot from one PCB design to another.
What exact card are you using for your tests?

I have 2 voodoo 1 cards:
-Diamond Monster 3D Rev E
-Anthony's King Shaman (voodoo 1 in SLI)

I still wouldn't recommend this motherboard for a voodoo 1 setup.
Every game I try works, but I do experience instability at certain points.
For example every time I startup or shutdown Expandable there is a high chance the system will hang, but once it runs, it runs absolutely flawless.

how well does the voodoo1 scale with a faster cpu?

underage wrote on 2021-06-18, 00:23:

how well does the voodoo1 scale with a faster cpu?

I think you will have great performance improvements up until 300mhz. After that it is just minimal until about 450mhz.

I don't have much time this week, but I will do some benchmarks.
However I do agree with Aebtdom that a standard voodoo1 doesn't scale well above the 300-500 Mhz range.
The King shaman does however have more headroom due to the extra TMU per voodoo 1 and having 2 voodoo 1's in SLI.

This post is more for finding the fastest system on which you can still get a voodoo 1 to run without issues rather than creating a sane build for a voodoo 1 (I don't think many people here own a King Shaman or Quantum3D SB100).

True, at least i know for sure that the fastest amd processor will be the athlon k7 1400B the thunderbird model 4 aka A1400AMS3B.
After that the fsb goes to 133mhz.

In theory, you could mobile mod a TbredB which gives it unlocked mobile multiplier (NF2 problems with that) run it at 100 and use up to 24x. But the 2400 and 2600 desktop have 15 and 16x out of the box, so would run 1500 and 1600mhz on 100/200. The barton 2600 and 2800 266 models also have 15x and 16x multis. (You can mobile mod a Tbred A or palomino also, but typically won't get more than about 1800 out of either.)

Beware if you want an ISA slot and a 1400B though, you might not find a motherboard that supports both ISA and a multi over 12.5... but mods can be done, it's an extra bit that might not have a jumper, but can be done with socket mods or wire tricks. However, mobile multi control might still work.

Interesting findings, but man... I have a hard time understanding the usefulness of running a P4 with a... Voodoo 1, when even Pentium MMX CPUs are bottlenecked by this card 😁
Even if you want to build the ultimate all-rounder, a Voodoo 2 would be much more versatile, with better image quality and also 98% compatible. 😀

bloodem wrote on 2021-06-21, 16:59:

Interesting findings, but man... I have a hard time understanding the usefulness of running a P4 with a... Voodoo 1, when even Pentium MMX CPUs are bottlenecked by this card 😁
Even if you want to build the ultimate all-rounder, a Voodoo 2 would be much more versatile, with better image quality and also 98% compatible. 😀

I don't know if all platforms have this issue, but I have found a lot of Voodoo 2 patches for DOS games are speed limited. For example, I can't run Descent II at anything higher than 400mhz on my VIA C3, which is roughly equivalent to a pentium II at 200mhz. The software renderer doesn't have the issue.

Maybe Voodoo 1 patches are less sensitive? Or maybe it is just my setup.

Well I was finally able to do some benchmarks.
I used the following CPU’s:
-Intel Pentium 4 HT Northwood 3.06 Ghz (512KB cache) on SIS 645DX
-Intel Celeron Tualatin 1400 Mhz (256KB cache) on Intel 440BX
-Intel Pentium III Tualatin 1133 Mhz (512KB cache) on Intel 440BX running at 850 Mhz (100 Mhz FSB)
-Intel Pentium II Deschutes 400 Mhz (512KB cache) on Intel 440BX

For The GPU’s I used:
-Voodoo 1: Diamond Monster 3D Rev e
-Voodoo 2: Diamond Monster 3D II 12MB Rev ?
-King Shaman

The King Shaman is a very special card, due to it being a voodoo1 in SLI.
So I benchmarked it in three different ways:
-SET FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=0 this option gives the highest FPS by removing v-sync, however due to the SLI setup this creates some kind of interlacing effect in fast moving scenes, I don’t use this option for actual gaming. In the benchmarks this will be shown as KS_S0.
-SET FX_GLIDE_SWAPINTERVAL=1 now the interlacing is gone, but as the benchmarks show, performance also takes a hit. In the benchmarks this will be shown as KS_S1.
-SET SST_SLIDETECT=0 This removes the SLI turning the King Shaman in a single voodoo 1 with 2 TMU’s and 4 MB per TMU (so a voodoo on steroids). In the benchmarks this will be shown as KS_SLI_Off.

Please note that even though the benchmarks of Expendable and Drakan ran on the 1400 and 850 Mhz CPU’s, they had significant graphical glitches.
Those glitches were absent when paired with both the 400 and 3066 Mhz CPU’s.

The Drivers I used:
-For Voodoo 1 and King Shaman, I used Ciacarhaman’s drivers
-For Voodoo 2 I used FastVoodoo2 4.6 drivers

The benchmarks I did were:

-Drakan Retail
-Expendable Demo
-MDK2 Retail
-GLQuake Retail demo1
-Quake II Retail demo1.dm2
-Quake III Demo demo001
-Quake III Demo demo002
-Quake III Retail four
-Unreal Retail Timedemo
-Unreal Tournament Cityintro

For cards that supported 800x600 I also did benchmarks at that resolution.
This is the first time I did some benchmarking, so please forgive any mistakes I made.
For example I made a mistake on the Drakan benchmarks at 1400 Mhz with the voodoo 2 (accidentally picked the Geforce 440 that was in the system) so I had those removed.
Due to the amount of time it took to create those benchmarks I didn’t want to redo that benchmark, and thought the remaining benchmarks would give a nice overview anyway.

Some interesting results I found:
-The King Shaman with SLI disabled performs similar in DirectX games as a normal voodoo 1. It seems the Quantum3D DirectX drivers are not optimized to take advantage of the extra memory and TMU. Glide and OpenCL do show significant gains.
-The Voodoo 1 has a slight benefit of a 3066 Mhz over a 400 Mhz cpu in very demanding games like Quake 3, however even with the faster cpu cannot produce playable framerates
-The King Shaman does benefit from the faster cpu’s, but produces very similar results between 850, 1400 and 3066 Mhz. Due to compatibility with DirectX games, the 3066 system is however still an interesting system.

So here are the benchmarks:

I upgraded to a Tualatin 1266 (512KB cache) which runs at 950 Mhz due to the 100 Mhz FSB.
Interestingly, when I run Phil's dos benchmark suite, it's almost always faster than the 1Ghz tualatin celeron due to the double amount of cache.

Therefore it seems issues with a voodoo 1 on a 440BX chipset are solely related to the clockspeed of the cpu and not with the performance the cpu actually can deliver.
Any statically linked game I try runs fine on the 950 Mhz cpu, while the 1Ghz celeron gives a lot of issues.

Only issue I found with the 950 Mhz so far is that is sometimes doesn't like to run 2 different static-linked games after eachother without a reboot in between.

Very impressive that you managed to get the Voodoo Graphics card working on such fast computer. 👍

One little pet peeve of mine though: These Voodoo cards you benchmarked aren't GPU, they're just really 3D acceleration cards without 2D capabilities and T&L.

Sorry to revive an old topic, but I just managed to put together a retro-pc based on an duron 1200 on a ECS Elitegroup k7zva mobo and tried to install the skywell magic 3d plus voodoo card with 8mb ram I saved from my first pc in the ninetees.

Hardware is automatically acknoledged by windows and drivers are updated to the latest available ufficial version, everything seems fine but when I start up a game using it i get a blocky magenta screen and system hangs.

Tested games were tomb raider, screamer 2 and wipeout 2097, always the same output.

Fsb set for the duron 1200 is 100mhz and I know that over 450 mhz processor this card has issues, but as here people has succeded in running it at higher speeds I wonder if there some settings I can tweak to try to make it work.

I'm pretty sure that 3dfx card is working because before the duron I had a faulty slot A pentium III 500mhz and I could "play" expandable demo experiencing the expected fuzzy colors. In that case 3dfx was coupled with an nvidia mx 2 400 32mb and now it's coupled with a sapphire radeon 9000 128mb, don't know if this could have an impact.