It's not all that useful to emulate Voodoo 5 fully in software.

Probably around a 3x improvement in both CPU and graphics emulation vs V17 on my current machine (i7-7700k). Maybe. Depending on unknown possible improvements in emulation efficiency and newer CPU architectures etc.

I never understood why people kept asking these questions when PCem was alive; I mean, how long's a piece of string? It's even more meaningless now PCem's dead.

Could at least help in documentation to port at least some Voodoo emulation like Voodoo 2 and 3 2000/3000 to DOSBox, now that PCem is dead.

DOSBox-X is getting Pentium II emulation soon, and IF we had these new cards emulated there, games like Grand Prix 3 would be playable there.

There's some that never took how fast moore's law went through 94-02 so all the advancements assumed to be a trivial blur there. STB 3dfx's marketing scheme doesn't help assumptions, as well as the cult status coming off that (enough to fall for fake 3dfx companies). Voodoo3 emulation entitlement was already assumed to be an 'easy' iteration of the Voodoo2 and no one was asking about the Banshee...

(personally much much much prefer other 1st gen 3d (rage, msi, rend) before any v4/v5/tnt/pvr/etc. I was never interested in Voodoo4/5 in the day, and it wouldn't really bring more games to play that a V3 couldn't anyhow)

There's also the whole apathy on giving back in the whole 'open source movement' in the past decade coming from a bunch of different factors and that's affected many, many different smaller projects that are not overly established on PR and/or funding. Like even with the recent displeasure of GTA remasters lately, OpenRW is relatively unknown in the hubbub over source ports as that's a years ongoing project that doesn't play every GTA3 game perfectly yet as it's not a decompilation, and there's many that believe nethack is dead, etc. not to mention the "free speech" license's own various social problems.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-11-29, 21:11:

It's not all that useful to emulate Voodoo 5 fully in software.

I wonder what would be more likely to be released sooner or later: PCem-like emulation or FPGA Voodoo5?

songo wrote on 2021-12-05, 10:35:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-11-29, 21:11:

It's not all that useful to emulate Voodoo 5 fully in software.

I wonder what would be more likely to be released sooner or later: PCem-like emulation or FPGA Voodoo5?

Why even bother with all that .. there is a guy who reverse engineered a ES sample Voodoo 5 6000 and built one for himself, IIRC he got a few wealthy backers from that and is now making to select order V5 6k GPUs for people, even going so far as to mod them to be more powerful than 3DFX ever intended and to remove the bugs it came with, even has custom drivers for it. IIRC there is another team doing the same for the Voodoo2 since the chips for that are also plentiful and the hardware is exceptionally well known.

Its not like the VSA 100 chips are rare nor hard to buy, so why would you go the FPGA route ...talk about money to burn. If I was going to go FPGA then it would be the 3DFX ES Rampage GPU that never got released, VSA with Hardware T&L and programable functions mmmmm so tasty.

leileilol is on point, V1+V2 seems to cover all the exclusive glide games. All others 1st Gen cards are the ones in need to be emulated.

Agreed. V1 and V2 are enough. Maybe include V3 3000, since some early 2000 games that support voodoo card like Grand Prix 3 don’t recognize V2 and earlier cards for some unknown reason, but it can see a V3 2000/3000 for some reason… maybe, add to a V2 emulation code a bit of V3 stuff, without fully emulating it, just to make games identify the card and work under V2?

songo wrote on 2021-12-05, 10:35:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-11-29, 21:11:

It's not all that useful to emulate Voodoo 5 fully in software.

I wonder what would be more likely to be released sooner or later: PCem-like emulation or FPGA Voodoo5?

Yeah, I bet that we see fpga voodoos soon with the prices and demand of those cards it’s only a matter of time.

FPGA is more likely, although still won't happen anytime soon, because software emulation of VSA-100 is just redundant. It doesn't bring anything useful, which can't be done with simple API wrapping.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-12-08, 01:50:

FPGA is more likely, although still won't happen anytime soon, because software emulation of VSA-100 is just redundant. It doesn't bring anything useful, which can't be done with simple API wrapping.

Do you still have the overhead if using a wrapper ? Like does that mean that glide and the installed card driver is now being processed?

here's a little quick timeline i wanted to do, which could definitely be done better and explicitier with huge citation dumps but still. there's an effective W9X gap here starting with DX7 gen hardware where wrappers can deal with well, and V5 isn't even a DX7 card so what'd be the point. One of the fond things about V5 that's stated as unique features (towards Geforce2/Radeon) are the temporal anti-aliasing and the T buffer or whatever that sounds like extreme cache and memcpy hell and that pink PCem compat bar as illustrated won't stretch further from it. The AAA games coming out in 2002 already had treated the V5 like they do with a TNT, R128, Kyro, G400 etc.

leileilol wrote on 2021-12-08, 06:24:

here's a little quick timeline i wanted to do, which could definitely be done better and explicitier with huge citation dumps but still. there's an effective W9X gap here starting with DX7 gen hardware where wrappers can deal with well, and V5 isn't even a DX7 card so what'd be the point. One of the fond things about V5 that's stated as unique features (towards Geforce2/Radeon) are the temporal anti-aliasing and the T buffer or whatever that sounds like extreme cache and memcpy hell and that pink PCem compat bar as illustrated won't stretch further from it. The AAA games coming out in 2002 already had treated the V5 like they do with a TNT, R128, Kyro, G400 etc.

Besides this thread name, I am actually interested to know if dithering and table fog has been emulated. The other one I remember is palletted textures. Then there was some 22-bit colour from Voodoo4/5? to counter it's weakness of having bad 32-bit color support (perf.).

Are the voodoo TAA or buffering technique glide3.0 exclusive? I have seen Glide 2x and earlier is well emulated instead, perhaps they add to the reason

Dither and table fog are already emulated for the V1/V2/Banshee/V3 family. "22-bit color"'s just V3 marketing on the 2x2 box filter the Banshee introduced (...and also emulated *cough*).

When V5 first came about, they didn't have HWT&L to stay relevant and competitive with the Geforce2, so they emphasized more on anti-aliasing (which GF2 also had), scalability of upcoming models to have more chips, and the FXT texture format which 2 games used (to not much of a degree compared to S3TC)

Voodoo5/VSA-100 notables features are:

Forced 32-bit color mode in Glide
Irrelevant with API wrappers.

FXT texture compression
Irrelevant due to obscurity and lacking prominent examples like S3TC pack for Unreal Tournament.

Rotated-grid super-sampling
Irrelevant on modern hardware.

Pseudo-anisotropic filtering
Achieved by combining negative texture LOD and AA. Not required with true anisotropic filtering support.

T-Buffer
Never being used outside of tech demos and essentially just a robust implementation of motion blur and depth of field effects.

High quality linear texture filtering
Ironically, replicated by DirectX 10 hardware without any sort emulation or API wrapping. And DX7-DX9 hardware just can't do it anyway.

Bruninho wrote on 2021-12-05, 16:59:

Agreed. V1 and V2 are enough. Maybe include V3 3000...

Voodoo 3 2000 and 3000 are there already in PCem V17. At least, they are selectable with the right ROMs present.

"New graphics cards added - 3DFX Voodoo Banshee, 3DFX Voodoo 3 2000, 3DFX Voodoo 3 3000, Creative 3D Blaster Banshee, Kasan Hangulmadang-16, Trident TVGA9000B "

Yes, but PCem is dead now. I was talking about porting them to other emulators such as DOSBox. It has been a decade and it still has only Voodoo 1.

Bruninho wrote on 2021-12-08, 17:52:

Yes, but PCem is dead now. I was talking about porting them to other emulators such as DOSBox. It has been a decade and it still has only Voodoo 1.

Voodoo 1 was about the only card with noticable support by some DOS games. And even these were few. So for DOSbox, it seems fitting to keep it at that.

What is the definition of "dead" in software? This whole Vogons place is lively about things presumed dead in software and hardware. In most cases no source code either.
Sarah Walker used the word "dead" in reference to PCem as well, some days ago...

I'll be a little disappointed if today's CPU still can't soft-emulate 90's GPUs. 😮