Greetings Back!
Well, the idea of a Voodoo 3 built-in graphics card sounds very exotic and appealing.
Lemme give ya a quick run-down on what I know about the Voodoos... Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 boards were 3D only boards... that's it. NO 2D graphics at all. That meant ya had to have another 2D only graphics card in your machine to be able to see pretty much anything.
That changed with the Voodoo 3 and Voodoo Banshee (which is basically a "lite" Voodoo 2 integrated into a fully-rounded 2D card). So in my case I use the Geforce 2 for everything except when a Glide game kicks in.
I've liked my Geforce 2 so much that I pretty much shyed away from Voodoo 3s and 5s to tell you the truth. The idea of playing Glide games was an upgrade after I built my machine. I thought "Woah! I can play some nice 3D games in DOS just by finding a "add-in" card for cheap on ebay!". That pretty much proved to be true, although the games I could actually get working were just a precious few. Here's the list:
Descent 2 (worth the price of admission in my opinion)
Tomb Raider (with a special set of "fake-out" environment variables mentioned elsewhere on the board)
GTA 1
... Keep in mind that this is only in DOS, the choice of games is much higher with Windows.
I got Dreams to Reality working also, but only with a genuine Voodoo 1 board. I've spent a lot of time trying to get Blood and Carmageddon working, but to no avail. I'm hoping maybe I can get these games to go properly with the Banshee when it gets here. I'm looking for a copy of Elder Scrolls: Redguard... I simply haven't tried that one yet but it looks good.
Besides a Demo or two, that's really all the games I've been able to get running with a real voodoo card in DOS. Very few. It was MUCH harder than I expected to get everything working right, even just for this handful of games! Glide is a pain, but it does look beautiful when it works.
Since your mobo has a Voodoo 3, you might be in for even more of a challenge, although there is some hope- but you are going to be forced to use Windows. If you can get the drivers set up for your Voodoo 3 in windows (which is also a pain, but at least it's not as game-by-game, well... not as much)... you can install games with Glide support there and expect them to look nice.
But the Voodoo 1 games (most of the dos ones are listed at www.glidos.net) might be very very difficult to run on a Voodoo 3. Getting Voodoo 1 games to run on a Voodoo 2 was quite a challenge, and a Voodoo 3 is yet another generation. If you don't like technical problems that boarder on programming, I'd recommend sticking to Glidos or Dosbox for these things, and just use the horsepower of a modern processor.
Oh, but to answer your question, I am hoping that the Banshee replaces all three cards in my machine. I'm not really taking advantage of the Geforce's 3D capacity at all, so it's just there as a Vesa-VGA card. I've heard good things about the Banshees VESA compatibility since joining to board, and since it's got a Voodoo 2 built-in, I'm going to give it a shot.
Um... and specific examples? My big acid test was Ultima 9. That one had native support for Glide and/or OpenGL. I had this big beefy dual Voodoo2 SLI setup and thought that I could surly get nice performance out of Ultima 9 in Glide mode. Well, as hot as the Voodoo2 got, the Geforce 2 could still out-perform them bar none. Disappointing kinda.
But really, I thing the reason I stuck to DOS was that companies are still technically making Win98 games, and there's no way most new games are going to run nicely on a P2 400. I just didn't want to have to make a judgement call on each game and potentially waist a lot of time and then get disappointed with the resulting framerate. Also, Windows games tend to take up huge amounts of hard-drive space and/or require a CD. I had to draw the retro-line somewhere, and for me it was Windows.
I don't have any windows games installed on the P2 anymore (the Soyo has since taken over in that respect), so I can't give you too many specific speeds if you want comparisons. I'm sure you can get a lot of games to run very nice 'n fast on a P2 or P3 with a respectable graphics card. Anything with the Quake 2 engine (Alice, Medal of Honor, etc) should be beautiful.
Oh, and yeah, I can talk about Roland goodness for entirely too long if you like 😉. I have some other tips too... until recently I didn't think it was possible to run Neo Geo stuff at full speed on this rig. I've since found a way. So if you're into consoles, a 400 mhz machine can deliver all the way through the 16 bit era.
Hehehe... so that's the long story.
So yes... newbs unite! Welcome aboard yourself!
FRUNGY FRUNGY FRUNGY!
**Don't forget to enjoy the sauce**