Platform choice Amd/Intel

This is what I have

On the left Amd system:
Athlon64 3200+ venice@2.2ghz
Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M rev2, s754

On the right Intel sistem:
Pentium E5800@3.2ghz
Asrock 775I65G v2, s775

And the rest is
- Soundcard Diamond Monster mx300(aureal vortex2),
- 2x1gb corsair ddr400@2-3-3-7
- ssd bx500 120gb, native on intel, pci to sata card from silicon Image on amd
- 450w corsair sf psu

What I mean with platform choice.

Both sistems are fine when used with 64mb. But using it with 128MB gave me some issues.
It worked fine under WinXp, but under Win98, some icons were disappearing and if I played around with windows it would eventually crash. Games worked, to my suprise, but I had to have a direct shortcut on the desktop, cus if I went into my computer Im risking a crash. Overclocking would amplify this issue.

Anthonys suggestion was. Remove r145! And that fixed the issue. Future cards wont have this problem. So I cleaned the wall of text describing it, theres enough crap on one side of this topic as is.
So to conclude platform choice. It was ment to be more analitical, with comparison of benchmarks on both platforms, but since I spend most of the time troubleshooting 128mb, it came down to this.

It works now on both platforms.
They are both faster than what a voodoo 5 needs. But Amd/via had some random non-boots on restart issues(before any remove r145!), that Ive never seen with other cards. Intel one is also a bit nicer to work with, usbs are faster using easy2boot to install win98 from usb, has native sata, and E5800 is just a beast, not that it helps the v5. Memory controller is also a bit stronger on intel, can run tighter timings on the ram. With radeon x850 I got around 270fps in q3 on athlon64 and 400fps+ on e5800, 1080p all maxed.

So, Intel platform will be used.

This is taking its time, so might as well start and update later, or I will forget most of what happened 😀

Games tested and testing methodology

System specs:
Pentium E5800@3.2ghz
Asrock 775I65G v2, s775
2x1gb corsair ddr400@2-3-3-7
Diamond Monster mx300(vortex2)
ssd bx500 120gb
450w corsair sf psu

Win98se, rampatched, directX9c
WindowsXp sp3, directX9c

Every test was ran 3 times, best score was picked, unless something seemed off, then was tested a couple more times. Exception is Unreal, where flyby #3 was always picked.
Settings were always maxed, 16bit color selected, if trilinear filtering was present it was selected (Drakan wouldnt allow it). Sound stuff al high if present, a3d and shit enabled, doesnt matter with such a powerfull cpu, vsync off.
All tests are games Im interested in, so they need to work 😀. I would test 1600x1200 too but this resolution always gave me problems in quake titles, so its not present.
3dmarks 99,2k,2k1 were also tested on some, but for driver choice its not included, will be in the 64v128 comparison.

3dmarks
Stock bench button click.

Quake 2 v3.2
OpenGl
Bench, demo1.dm2

Quake 3 v1.32 gog
OpenGl
Bench, Four.dm68

Half-life: Oposing force demo
OpenGl
Bench, blast
This is how it looks like: https://youtu.be/xeUnlZla600?t=26
You can get it here.

Unreal v226
Glide
Bench, Unreal (castle flyBy)

Unreal Tournament Gold v436
Glide
Bench, UTbench.dem... A bit more realistic for this game, than flyby.
This is how it looks like: https://youtu.be/_S4qCr77jJ8?t=95
You can get it here.

Drakan v445
Direct3D
Bench, builtin +fpstest

MDK 2 demo
OpenGl
Bench, "test settings"

Driver choice

Going into this I was thinking, well reference as a starting point and it only gets better then!!! Yea.. nah.
No settings were changed, unless there was a problem and I could find the setting in 3s.
Performance could also be different if stock settings are set more for image quality, so keep that in mind, but a test is a test.

At first I didnt really find much informations about drivers, except the standard recomendation use official,am,raz.... But later on found a nice test, for xp.
Read at voodooalert.de, voodoo3 version.
And a nice article on 3dhq drivers.
Also a nice collection of drivers at falconfly

Windows 98se

Driver tested:
- Reference 1.04.01b _ 21 Nov 2000
- AmigaMerlin 2.9 _ 28 Dec 2002
- 3dhq 1.09 beta10 _ 13 Feb 2003
- Raziel64 Evo 1.00.09 _ 12 Jul 2004
- Raziel64 Evo 1.01.16 _ 06 Oct 2004
- Mikepedo 1.1 _ 29 Oct 2002
- Mikepedo 1.0
- x3dfx 1.07
- x3dfx 1.08.04
- Nudriver5 _ Dec 9, 2001

Few words

Using the card in 128mb and glide games, though tested only unreal, but should be the same for all, it displayed texture curruption, from slight, to fullblown rainbows.
This goes for all, except Raziel 1.01.16!!

This is how it looked like:
https://youtu.be/zvlZWTvak0A

And this is Raziel
https://youtu.be/qhnanZdK3KY

Reference 1.04.01b
All-around good driver, might run into problems with later titles, but for what I tested, they worked fine, performance was all-around good, best in Drakan.

AmigaMerlin 2.9
This is the one I had high-hopes for, since its very recommended. It was problem free, but performance was lower than ref. Could be just default settings. Lots of options in the menu, compatibility should be great.

3dhq 1.09 beta10
Also very high hopes for this, since Ive used their drivers in XP and got a feel how they compare, they also come with the V.control controll panel instead of 3dfx tools.
By default they come with 2xfsaa enabled, so this had to be disabled. And Quake 2 didnt work fullscreen, would just freeze after a few frames. Ran fine Windowed, not quite sure whats going on here. Ofc this is easily fixed by replacing opengl icd or whatever its called in the quake 2 folder, but for the test this is why this driver has 0fps in q2.
Tied for fastest opengl perf.

Raziel64 Evo 1.00.09
This was a mess.
First I had some horizontal lines not rendering, performance was as expected, but ... well look at the picture. In the settings, Digital SLI, had to be set from Enabled to Default and that fixed it. Same for newer version of the driver.

OpenGl worked, glide not at all, stopped testing there.

Raziel64 Evo 1.01.16
Thats a bit better. Fastest Opengl performance, tied with 3dhq, the only driver that had fully working glide with 128mb, comes with temporalAA library?
D3d - Drakan showed some shadow problems as can be seen bellow.

Mikepedo 1.1
Drakan shadow problems. Opengl didnt look that promising, removed from test.

Mikepedo 1.0
This one worked a bit better, except for glide. Like someone increased the brightnes, everything is washed out.

x3dfx 1.07, x3dfx 1.08.04, Nudriver5
1.07 had drakan shadows problem, 1.08.04 worked fine, but OpenGl was kinda slow Q3 gave 40fps, while others were around 68fps. You can see where it slows down, maybe theres some aa stuff that isnt fullscreen going on, or force 32bit on certain stuff...
Nudriver5 had similar behaviour as x3dfx, all 3 removed from test.

Charts

Quake 2

Quake 3

Half-life: Oposing force

Unreal

Unreal tournament

Drakan

Mdk2

So conclusion time. You cant really go wrong with official 3dfx drivers, atleast for games in this era.
But getting a few more frames in openGl games and more costumization options is always welcome.

Me personally, Ill use Raziel 1...16, and replace the d3d.dll(3dfx32vs.dll, 3dfx16vs.drv) with the ones from AmigaMerlin.
Fully (I guess) working driver, with some perf benefit and working glide in 128mb mode.

UPDATE after a few months. This RazielAm29 combo works fine, good performance. Finished blood2, mdk(1) and drakan, also tested a bunch of other games. 128MB has some texture corruption in sw: roque squadron when using glide, mdk2 demo, when you get to play the doctor he is black. And I dont mean it in a racial way, he is just all black, could be resolved in full version of the game, havent played it yet(also didnt try 64mb). Thats about it, older stuff, some newer, it just works as expected. Well recommended.

Drivers Windows XP sp3

First a short-notsoshort intro.
Running under WindowsXp, well... It aint great!
I was having some problems with the first driver, then the second, then the third, one of them is sure to blow me away how good it is, so I will do a deep dive there and maybe I can skip a test or two. But no, after doing all I planned, I had to go back again, to get the numbers that were missing, because out of the 7 drivers I tested, exacly 0 drivers could run all of the 7 games I use to test.

Yes could be a configuration issue, or some software incompatibility, maybe the game needs a patch (most of them are on the last official one, except demos) and so on ... So your experience could be different, but as a whole Im sure Im not doing a disservice to the card. Im also suprised there isnt more talk about this online. Voodoo 5 and WinXp is just not a great experience, yes could work, but a great experience doesnt mean could.

Anyway, since the card has no official Xp driver, people working on them, deserve a bit of praise. They managed to make the card work in Xp and be usable, yea it has some problems, but overall for the effort and time invested, all I can say is, you are all amazing and thank you.

Drivers tested:
- 3dhq 1.09 beta10
- SFFT 1.9
- SFFT alpha41 Mod
- SFFT alpha59
- AmigaMerlin 3.0(xp)
- AmigaMerlin 3.1 R1
- AmigaMerlin 3.1 R11

Few words

First lets cover 64vs128. Basicly same situation as before. Margin of error stuff for this 7 games. AM r1 and r11 and sfft a59 showed a 1fps improvement in q3. And q3 is a really repeatable test and usually has no error.
Two amigas R are also the only drivers that have no artifacts running 128mb in unreal(s).
Also, unrealated (get it?), I added 1600x1200 cus I noticed in win98 that it works just fine on the current monitor. And every card, if it has artifacts in glide, using 128mb, it doesnt have them at this resolution!

What issues I encountered?
- Freezing, crashes to desktop, game working fine, then closing it and crashing the driver, transparent sli lines, pink sli lines, opengl mode not supported, black screen on game start and so on...

3dhq 1.09 beta10
- Install procedure: Run installer, at the end asks if you want to install 3dhq tools (thats just v.control)
This driver feels like theirs from win98. Q2 still doesnt work, the rest does, performance is good - great. But I had lots of freezes with it. Not crashes, but freezes in game, all the games 😁.

Oh right, got this puppy starting unreal tournament, think I changed the resolution and it went away.

Barely finished the benchmarks, but got everything. Also the only one that I can actually show Drakan numbers.
But because all of the freezes (and it really is random, HL, three runs no problem, lets do one more, freeze..) I dont recommend it.

SFFT 1.9
- Install procedure: Run setup.exe, reboot, after install controll center of your choosing, none comes with the driver
q2 low performance, at first I thought vsync was on, disabled it in 3 ways, enabled it, some change, but nothing worth mentioning. Also if I start and end the bench, gives 67fps, thats not exacly vsync limited on a 60hz.
At 1600x1200 got pink lines showing.

Half-life, openGl mode is not supported, couldnt run the game.

q3 got pink lines on 1600x1200, but they went away after I changed resolution and then went back to 1600x1200.
Unreal worked, but then crashed the driver when I closed the game.

Ut freeze in menu.
Drakan black screen on launch.
Mdk2 on first run crash, then it works. This goes for all drivers, except forgot which one, will write it down there.

SFFT alpha41 Mod
- Install procedure: Install from dpinstall.exe or manually, set dxmode, after install controll center of your choosing, none comes with the driver
HL works, but random freezes, Unreal driver crash on exit, UT freezes sometimes ingame, Drakan black screen on launch, mdk2 had one freeze.
Out of 3 sfft drivers tested, this is the one I would prob pick.

SFFT alpha59
- Install procedure: Run setup.exe, reboot, after install controll center of your choosing, none comes with the driver
Q2 slow, 1600 pink lines, HL openGl support, UT seemed stable playing it, did crash the driver on game exit. Drakan black screen on launch.
Compared to a41 q2 slow here, unreal seemed more stable playing it.

AmigaMerlin 3.0(xp)
- Install procedure: Run driverSetup, run tools
q2 normal perf, but freezed on 3rd run. q3 also freezed a couple of times.
Unreal had sli lines (never seen this before 😁)

UT freeze in menu, drakan didnt work.
Would say the worst from 3 amigas.

AmigaMerlin 3.1 R1
- Install procedure: Install manually from device manager, reboot, set dxmode, reboot, install cc of your flavour (has tools)
The one I have, came with latest MesaFx, didnt use it.
q2 works! Also no pink lines in 1600x1200, did crash once, but just once. HL worked, could freeze. UT freeze in menu when changing resolutions, game works, had a long session, just dont go in the menu 😁.
No artifacts for 128mb in glide. Drakan worked but froze, also had sli lines and shadow problems (long time no see!)

The only driver that didnt crash the first time starting Mdk2.
Even with all the problems described, this is the driver I would pick. Fast, works, with occasional crashes, d3d in older titles prob wont work, or will it?

AmigaMerlin 3.1 R11
- Install procedure: find compiled dxtn.dll (dxtn compression) and replace the placeholder in the driver install folder.
Then install manually from device manager, reboot, set dxmode, reboot, install cc of your flavour(has tools with it)
q2, slow, 1600x1200 pink lines, also got this when I exited, could paint something with holding the mouse button. I forgot, but think I got this also in one sfft driver once.

HL black screen when starting the game, Drakan freeze mid benchmark.

Charts

Quake 2

Quake 3

Half-life: Oposing force

Unreal

Unreal tournament

Drakan

Mdk2

So conclusion time.
Is there the obvious pick for WindowsXP? No.

OpenGl problems can be sorted(if present) with the use of WickedGl or MesaFx. Not sure how would I approach Drakan, tried "Enable auto mipmaps" that I found for lots of d3d games, but no change.
I was most dissapointed with Unreal tournament having problems. I mean if you gonna have one game working perfectly, its this one.

I would go for Amigamerlin 3.1 R1 and then troubleshoot on the fly. This one won me over with no 128MB artifacts, and q2 not having that slow fps issue. Out of sfft I would go for alpha41 mod. Not sure what to do for older d3d games if they have problems like Drakan did.

.
.
.
OS Comparison

I will just squize this into this post.
Performance, well, when I saw the chart, I was quite surprised being this even. Expected win98 would be faster in most, if not all cases. But its the opposite, yes margin of error. But it is what it is!
But, win98 proved to just work. While XP has a whole shitton of problems with the video driver. If it works for you and the games you play, good for you. No arguing that XP is the better os. I will mostly stick to 98.

64MB vs 128MB

As previous 7 games showed, theres not really much of a difference between the two settings, margin of error territory.
So lets check some "theoretical" tests with 3d marks. Os win98, drivers again Raziel merlins evolution!

3d Mark 99

Testing at default 800x600x16 adding aa and then increasing the resolution.
Looking at the scores, no real change. Standard "margin of error". But looking at "texture size" test, theres a difference!

Scores

This is how it looked like, at 1600x1024+4aa
(yes I even edited the video!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt4hKhlVFBY

At 8mb texture size it starts getting worse for 64mb, while 128mb chugs allong just fine.
At 32MB texture size, last couple of squares are corrupted using 128MBvram.

3d Mark 2000

Same behaviour on Texture size test here, except no texture corruption. I remember seeing some when I was testing drivers and using the refference driver, but none here.

Scores

3d Mark 2001
I started with this one and with 128mb config, wrote down results, switched to 64mb. Eh fuck... dumbass... why didnt I start with 64mb to even see if my settings work....
Anyway.. Default settings, 1024x768x32, no real change there.
But when you add AA, with 2x, the score improves about 5%. Alright.. now were onto something,... Nop... Cus pushing it any further would just lockup or crash to desktop, out of memory!

How it looked - textures sometimes load with delay, if at all, and the eventual lockup or crash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrFk2P9FosU
vs 128. Like Nvidias leather jacket man would say.. It just wurks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY9f5LOGZI0

Scores

So lets try a game, something that is playable but a bit pushing it for this card.

Unreal Tournament 2004

Ofc I again started with 128mb and too high details. But for storytelling, lets go in ascending order.
Recorded a demo on my favorite map and used "demoplay ndemo?timedemo" to benchmark. Using latest official patch, forgot which version.

Normal texture detail

As before, as long as you have enough memory, there wont really be a difference.

Scores

Higher texture detail

Its been a while, I dont even remember if I ever saw what happens if you run out of vram.
This is how it looked like in-game. At 800x600!!!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSLbmhx4Wao

Scores

So lets lower it a bit.
Maybe some inbetween setting, that will slowly break the game when the resolution increases?

High texture detail

This was a perfect example. It works just fine up to 1024x768. But at 1280x1024 you start to get more common stutters, when everything just slows down, then resums.
Averages show a bit of a difference, but slowdowns were very noticable, and 128mb just didnt have them.

Scores

And this is how it runs. Not bad, not great either, but is playable.
https://youtu.be/8aZmLMb4mmI

So conclusion time!
Does more memory make the card faster? NO!
EXCEPT if you run out of memory...
Then its the difference between taking -1 fps hit for higher textures or unplayable.
That limit will be reached even if cranking up AA, so helps there a bit too.

Did the voodoo 5 need it when it was released and would it help it look better in benchmarks? No
Is it worth risking an upgrade reheating the original voodoo to put more memory on it? Maybe??

I sure dont mind having more and Ive been using it just as 128mb, switching to 64mb just for this tests.
Its not really that hard to hit the limits of 64MB(thats basicly 2x32MB) and then you are having a powerpoint presentation.
On the other hand, you are fine for 95% of titles that this card can handle....

Cooling optimization and Overclocking

Put some more heatsink on it, that small backside one really helps.

Polished the main heatsinks
This is how it looks, not very good, mat color, rough to the touch.

Plan was, use 800 grit to flaten it a bit and polish with 2000. Yea right, it was really uneven. So I went 400,800,1200,2000.

So 2 moons later of doing this

End result. Shitty picture, but before was mat, now you can see the reflection, looks really good in person, feels smooth to the touch. You can see some original pattern still on the edge, its still hasnt flattened that out(cus its higher), even with 7 moons of polishing, god damn I can barelly feel my fingers 😁, but no matter since the chip doesnt touch there.

This is what I ended with, noctuas a40x10 flex, with low-noise adapter (resistor), moved the card resistor to give 12v instead of default 5v. Results in about 8v-9v and 3.5k-3.7k rpm on the fans. You can still hear the cards fans, but barely.

Temperature testing was done with the ir temperature mesurer, taking readings from the backside pcb at the center and right side directly on the resistor(ofc after mod mid point on the heatsink). Take these readings with a grain of salt, since its not the most accurate way of measuring.
I tried to make up for the lack of quality with quantity, so 3 days stock testing. And its only been one day for the mod.

I was really hammering it for the load test after the mod.

How it affects stability? Well before at 180mhz was stable, 183mhz was borderline, could crash, more than that would maybe do one quick bench then lock up.
Now 183mhz is rock-solid, 186mhz runs for about 15min but would eventually lock up. So maybe I could get one or two mhz more, but I dont wanna have a 3h Drakan run where I forget to quicksave and blam, will stay at 183mhz.
Not a record breaking overclock, kinda average, but hey, wont say no to free fps.
For overclocking I used that "vsa100 oc"tool.

About 10% more mhz results in about 10% more fps

Cus top chart kinda sux, here are just the numbers

- Driver settings aka tunning, mesafx, minigl, temporalAA ...

- Super duper benchmark

Love it! I own 4 (!!) of his cards now, but not this one. Congratulations on the purchase, he does amazing work.

I would be interested to see 3dmark2001se 64mb vs 128mb benchmarks if possible!

Need heatpipe cooling to keep the chips super cool. Awesome card in any case.

I plan to use 99-03 3dmarks, quakes and unreals. If I get everything in working order, for superduper benchmark with other cards, Ill see how many games I can add, that arent a pain in the ass to bench 😀
Cooling yea.. Its fine as it is, still Ill do some small tweaks. Initial oc testing showed this particular card didnt really win in the silicon lottery, so nothing extreme, just want silence and not being able to cook food on it.
(although if you think about it, fans could chop vegetables, and you put a small pan on the gpu, basicly a cooker - 3dfx stew)

Great card, congrats! 😀

I am looking forward to see more tests. 3DMark01 should show some difference 64 vs 128 MB, at least with Voodoo4 4500 I managed to boost the score by 100-200 points by adding the additional memory.

Btw - do you have your Win98 properly patched? I see you have >512 MB of RAM, which can present some problems.

I do run the patch, cus I use 2gb. But today I had a fresh install on the amd system, thats why its only 1gb, it installs fine with that.

Moments ago Anthony helped me troubleshoot the missing icons situation on 128mb, but then drivers wouldnt install, it was a "throw your mouse to the wall if its wireless situation".... And yea, in the end, 1gb was the issue (card almost went to the bin, as a last resort I desperatly tried with one 512mb stick). Had enough of win98 reinstalls for one day, will describe the situation tomorrow, just first to replicate the issue, might help someone in the future.

i might be wrong, but standard windows 98se has a lot of problems with video cards with more than 64/128MB of vram, and these issues are bigger when you have 512mb of ram or more.
the only way i got working a geforce fx5200 (128bit) with 256mb of ram was lowering the system ram to 256mb, anything bigger and the os would crash badly
the test system was a katmai p3 450mhz in an epox ep-bx3 with only standard devices for the age (20gig ide hdd, standard kingston pc133 ram, crystal CX4237B isa, 3com etherlink 10/100 pci)

Before a few days ago, I was using himemx and a limit set to 512mb. With a radeon x850xt that has 256mb. Never had any problems. Just for installing os, or booting into safe-mode, before I could install the patch, I just removed one 1gb stick, and left it with 1gb. Also worked. I am aware there are issues, but honestly didnt really experienced it before, I was either patched or had no issues 😁

About a week ago I switched to Loews mempatch, kinda preffer it now, yesterday was the first time(fresh install (for the 30th time this week 🙁 )) I had some issues and yes I did forget to patch it, just left it running with 1gb.

I’ve been looking into a pci 5500 for my dual processor build.

I’m curious, as someone who has gone through the infuriating troubleshooting process you described with your new card on basically all the pieces of retro hardware that I own. Would you say that these cards are less stable than a genuine one or is this just the tweaking tax that you pay for having more settings?

I’m thinking of getting a pci voodoo 5500 and soldering the dvi port onto it, but this is also an option. I like the 128mb option, and that ram is faster than what the genuine ones had right?
Also, digital output is a must for me, so hdmi is a welcome addition.

The problems (well to be honest it was just one and thats fixed too) that Im facing, dont exists on the original one, cus there arent(without modification) any v5 with 128mb, or compatibility with newer agp, or hdmi, new features bring new challenges!

If you run it as original, its gonna act as original.
Memory(on this one) is 6ns, so 166mhz rated, same as original.

Great to hear you solved the problem 😉.
So, HDMI is working (4:3 ratio) ?
Can you choose PCB color or heatsink type (copper vs alu) when ordering ?

Yea hdmi works. Some widescreen resolutions are either missing or (1920x1080) have wrong timings, not the cards problem, but the drivers. This can be solved following these instructions, also the reason I went to bed at 3am today 😜. I have a few cards and this is the first one that worked in 1080p on digital output in win98!!!

For customizations, you have to ask Anthony directly. I wanted a blue pcb, as you can see how patient I am, I have a red one. Its a really low-number production(niche market inside a almost non-existent market) and he cant just order one pcb made, he has to buy batches, so you know, it doesnt cost anything to ask. He is quite open to feedback and does changes (thats why theres a white 6000 series) if theres interest.