VOGONS


First post, by ptr1ck

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

After building my Voodoo 2 SLI rig, I noticed the performance of the oft-recommended FastVoodoo 4.6 was not very good. SLI was not boosting performance of Direct3d for me any more than single card although the System Information tab said SLI was detected. I tested this on 98 and ME. I tested with identical cards and with mismatch. I then looked at the voodoo2.inf and noticed a pile of changes, like overclocking the cards to 93mhz and disabling vsync. To be blunt, I am not a fan of hidden tweaks just to enhance benchmark scores or inflate FPS at the cost of quality, which is what I got with the FastVoodoo 4.6, except I didn't have the performance.

edit: 9-5-22
The Tribute driver I had posted didn't always launch Glide for me, so I ditched it.

Last edited by ptr1ck on 2022-09-07, 04:28. Edited 3 times in total.

"ITXBOX" SFF-Win11
KT133A-NV28-V2 SLI-DOS/WinME

Reply 4 of 5, by ptr1ck

User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

After fully assembling my KT133A rig, I couldn't get Glide to initialize for anything with the Tribute drivers although they performed amazingly well with my Nforce2 board. I couldn't get these, the FastVoodoo or the official 3.02.02 drivers to work. Direct3D worked fine, but when going to start Glide, I would get a total system freeze in place of the 3Dfx splash screen. The cards worked fine in SLI in XP, but not in 98SE or even ME.

I thought it was related to the plethora of KT133 issues; I had been having a lot of difficulties with getting the GF4 stable in it. On a whim, I decided to try the 3.03.00b beta driver and surprisingly it worked! I then took this driver and swapped in the 3 Glide files from 3.03.03 and it then worked again.

I will be reinstalling 98SE on the machine and making notes of things. There seems to be a specific set of drivers I need to stick with on this combination (KT133A, GF4, V2) for it to work right. The next thing I am going to try is a mix of 3.02.02 and 3.03.00b. I will use 3.02.02 as basis and copy in the 3 glide files and 3 control panel related files and give that a test. I'm not sure if it's a widespread problem, but for me, control panel is all messed up with version 3.02.02.

Edit:
They are now working for my KT133A... Wiped the partition and did a fresh install of 98SE. This is the first time I have used the George Breese PCI Latency Patch and it's made a HUGE difference in network performance alone, but that's for another thread. I'm not sure if that made the difference for the Voodoo cards initializing, but they are starting Glide for me now.

I did create a "hybrid" driver and used it initially on this install and it worked correctly. I then uninstalled it through control panel and then device manager before restarting and installing the Tribute driver. The only other non-standard thing I did for this install compared to last was to install Directx 7 then install Directx 9. Last time I went straight to 8. I don't know if there is any value to installing all the versions.

Edit 2:
Back to not working after installing these again. Freeze after 3Dfx logo. The only main change was that I moved my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz back to PCI #5 to be beside my ESS Audiodrive. I had an Intel Pro 1000 GT there while it was working well. I am going to try moving the cards back to where they were. If that doesn't work, I will verify the hybrid driver's functionality as well. Last step will be clean install number 42...

"ITXBOX" SFF-Win11
KT133A-NV28-V2 SLI-DOS/WinME

Reply 5 of 5, by eightbit

User metadata
Rank Newbie
Rank
Newbie

Excellent driver package! It was like you read my mind.

Today I set up an V2 SLI rig and was looking for something exactly like this. I am using one STB Black Magic card and one Creative Blaster V2...both 12MB models. I also tried the stock drivers and mismatched SLI files worked, but like you it did not work great. The FastVoodoo drivers work too, but I agree with "too many tweaks"....and the performance was not where I wanted it to be with those either.

I tested your Tribute set and it is excellent. Unreal Tournament plays better with this set of drivers than the others....and much better than the FastVoodoo set.

That said these drivers for me are a keeper. Thank you for your contribution!