Geri wrote on 2026-05-22, 17:18:

Because you was a clueless unemployed tihrd world youngster - as you have explained - and you got mesmerized by the succesful ad campaigns of 3dfx and you did everything to get it.
Now you see buying the 5090 as an irrational spending, bc now you are a grown up with healthy judgement, and couldn't be mass-manipulated into buying the overpriced hardware.

If you would be a kid now, maybe you would be manipulated by tiktok videos and paid influencers again to buy some brand new nvidia card, but to compare it with something else, the voodoo2 was the shiny cabrio which is already unusable if the rain starts to pour, and the 740 is a suzuki sedan which you use to pick up your groceries.

I think you're assuming too much dude, but you're still wrong. And even if I would have wanted to buy a 740 here I think I never saw one in stores, only heard about it in magazines (reviews were not great). I have a Diamond branded one now and it's a nice card, very good display quality and decent performance, but at the time it would have made no sense for me to get one. I already had a 2D card so the Voodoo2 was clearly the best choice, and the price difference with competing stuff was minimal compared to what we see today, despite you insisting that it was "10 times more expensive" or whatever.

Whether you want to accept it or not, until the TNT2 and especially GeForce, 3DFX was the undisputed leader, in particular when it comes to performance. Which is what mattered the most back then, watching 3D games going from slideshow to a fluid experience was what cemented the 3DFX brand, regardless of how badly they handled things down the line. And I'm not a 3DFX fanboy, while the original Voodoo and Voodoo2 did wow me for a while, the V3 was such a disappointment to me that I quickly moved on.

Geri wrote on 2026-05-22, 17:18:

You dont have to, because i still have a voodoo2. And in my ali chipset based socket 7 system i had to try multiple drivers when i put an amd cpu in, otherwise the drivers were crashing. Then the same issue with an athlon, again, multiple drivers had to be tried till one finally wanted to work. I have checked last year, and when trying games from late 90s there were more games not running on the voodoo2 than games running on it due to various bugs and reasons. The g200 or the tnt1 did far better job, those usually manage to run games even from 2000 and being consistent in delivering enjoyable experience.

I have multiple Voodoo2's and they all work perfectly with games from that era, so it must be a problem with your setup. 🤷

TheMobRules wrote on 2026-05-22, 19:01:

Whether you want to accept it or not, until the TNT2 and especially GeForce, 3DFX was the undisputed leader

The leadership of 3dfx was disputed far earlier, by the arrival of the riva 128 by nvidia.
I dont see buying a voodoo2 being a good decision unless you had to toss something into your overclocked pentium mmx setup.

TheMobRules wrote on 2026-05-22, 19:01:

in particular when it comes to performance. Which is what mattered the most back then, watching 3D games going from slideshow to a fluid experience was what cemented the 3DFX brand

That was the experience with the voodoo1, when it got released, it wiped the floor with the virge and rage2 cards.
But until the arrival of the voodoo2, a lot have happened.

The riva128 and permedia2 arrived with comparable 3d performance to the voodoo1 in 1997, yet these cards are capable of doing 2d, multimedia, windowed 3d, and suddenly 3dfx had to come up with something fast.
They decided to come up with the voodoo rush, that card was cursed with a lot of driver issues, then they released the voodoo2 as an attempt to keep the crown.

I view the voodoo2 as a failed product, because it didn't worked out in the way 3dfx wanted to, even if the card was very nice on paper, and i will list it why i think so.

-Due to the previously mentioned issues with compatibility and drivers, lack of windowed 3d, the theorical perforance stays trapped in the card in the majority of games. Only in a handful games can this performance be unleashed, and in most titles, the superior performance doesn't exists at all. Cards like the tnt1 and g200 offering better overall experience and compatibility.
-The card requires three giant chips and a giant external dac, making the card very expensive (and taking away the potential profit from 3dfx which could be spent on designing future products or better drivers).
-The card is too large. You couldnt install it to some motherboards because there are other components in the way (such as the cpu cooler). Other manufacturers are being able to release high end cards from half the pcb size.
-The magic of real time 3D with bilinear filtering is gone, the first timers advantage is gone because other companies are catched up.
-Resolution is limited to 800x600 due to ancient multichip design originating from 1994. This is not as big of a jump in quality, yet this is basically the only real selling point of the card compared to a voodoo1.
-The voodoo2 stays more as a replacement to the voodoo1 than an actual answer to the competition.
-Especially after developers start to optimize games on nvidia, ati, 3dlabs, matrox, and 3dfx is just became one of the cards in the line:
-The graphics detail is frequently inferior to competitors on the voodoo2. Textures are still limited to 256x256 and rendering to 16 bit - other companies already can do 24 or 32 bit, 512x512 textures, meanwhile on 3dfx even the texts are blured in some games.
-Developers which bothered to even support glide, quickly leaving the ship.
-The card takes an extra pci slot, which is problem if you had 2 or 3 in total.
-Inability to release a truly cheap, low end and midrange variant of the card, and the high-end quality just uncreachable with the ancient design.

These problems are due to the design of the voodoo2, and not because there is some issue with my setup.
In contrast the TNT1 is free from all of these problems, and the voodoo2 is an expensive toy compared to it.

NorsteinB wrote on 2026-05-22, 12:39:

How does it fare on the compatibility side, though?
Sadly it is not part of Gona's compatibility matrix, does it have glitches in Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit, Pinball Fantasies etc?

I can confirm my Palit Daytona i740 8Mb has perfect compatibility with Jazz Jackrabbit (as long as the Turbo Pascal bug is fixed, or else my PC is too fast for it, but that's a CPU issue, not graphics).

The card I can confirm to have issues is Tseng ET4000, and to a lesser extent - Matrox Mystique (with the scrolling).

I have not tested the other two games.

For 8-bit palletized textures and table fog, the earlier assumptions were correct. i740 supports 8-bit palletized textures, as seen on FF 8 demo, but does not support table fog (as seen in Thief 2 The Metal Age )

songoffall wrote on 2026-06-04, 19:40:

For 8-bit palletized textures and table fog, the earlier assumptions were correct. i740 supports 8-bit palletized textures, as seen on FF 8 demo, but does not support table fog (as seen in Thief 2 The Metal Age )

Thanks! I've added the relevant info to the Vogons wiki, citing your post as well as the i740 datasheet as references.

songoffall wrote on 2026-06-04, 19:40:

For 8-bit palletized textures and table fog, the earlier assumptions were correct. i740 supports 8-bit palletized textures, as seen on FF 8 demo, but does not support table fog (as seen in Thief 2 The Metal Age )

So many decent cards of this era gutted by the lack of table fog. You would think that it was radioactive.