VOGONS


First post, by AndreaColombo86

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Hello!

To the possessors of a Voodoo5 5500: what system are you using it in? What games do you play on it? Do you max them out? Do you use FSAA?

I’d like to play the following games but I don’t know if I can afford 1024x768 with 2x FSAA on them:

Half-Life
Quake II
Quake III Arena
American McGee’s Alice
No One Lives Forever
System Shock 2
Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force
Unreal Gold
Unreal Tournament
Kingpin: Life of Crime
Deus Ex
Dungeon Keeper 2

Reply 1 of 16, by The Serpent Rider

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In a sense, FSAA is useless on Voodoo 5, if the monitor can handle 1600x1200 or higher resolution.
There's a neat trick with 4x FSAA and cranking up negative texture LOD in the driver which creates pseudo anisotropic filtering effect.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 2 of 16, by AndreaColombo86

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My monitor does support 1600x1200 @ 85Hz, but I wouldn’t dream to play at that resolution on a Voodoo5 other than the 6000.

Reply 3 of 16, by Joseph_Joestar

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Personally, I only use my Voodoo cards for games which have Glide support. Anything that solely uses D3D or OpenGL will look and run better on a high end Nvidia or ATi GPU. From your list, the Unreal games and Deus Ex are worth playing on the V5 since they look better in Glide mode. But this really comes down to personal preference.

I like playing Win9x games at 1600x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF added on top, even though most of them don't have enough texture detail for that resolution. To do that, I use a Radeon X800 card.

My retro builds

Reply 4 of 16, by The Serpent Rider

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AndreaColombo86 wrote on Yesterday, 18:01:

My monitor does support 1600x1200 @ 85Hz, but I wouldn’t dream to play at that resolution on a Voodoo5 other than the 6000.

Not in 32-bit color obviously, but that is true to low resolutions with FSAA too.

I must be some kind of standard: the anonymous gangbanger of the 21st century.

Reply 5 of 16, by mwdmeyer

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I'm running my V5 AGP on an Athlon 1.2GHz w/512mb Ram and Windows 2000. Play most of those games well 😀

Vogons Wiki - http://vogonswiki.com

Reply 6 of 16, by AndreaColombo86

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mwdmeyer wrote on Today, 03:12:

I'm running my V5 AGP on an Athlon 1.2GHz w/512mb Ram and Windows 2000. Play most of those games well 😀

Thank you.

What games in particular have you tried? Can you use FSAA with them?

Reply 7 of 16, by mwdmeyer

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I normally only do 1024x768 and jaggies don’t normally worry me 😀

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Reply 8 of 16, by AndreaColombo86

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I was also thinking 1024x768, though I’m torn between two competing points of view.

On the one hand, using a 3dfx card means embracing a very specific aesthetic. At the same time, for me it means scratching a very old itch (V5 was my dream card when it released and I couldn’t get one back then).

On the other hand, I’m worried jaggies will bother me to no end. Also, FSAA was kind of the selling point of the V5, so playing with one without using it is kind of like going to Rome and not visiting the Coliseum 😅

Reply 9 of 16, by Garrett W

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It's been a while since I used my Voodoo 5. Paired with a fast enough processor (I suspect ~1GHz+) it generally performs somewhere between the Geforce 256 SDR and Geforce 256 DDR, so think GeForce 2 MX, though it can outperform the 256 DDR depending on the scenario. This will depend on the resolution and game used however, generally speaking the Voodoo5 is weaker in low resolutions, it tends to flex its muscles at 1024x768 and above.

Here's an interesting comparison with mostly later games.

FSAA 4X is nice, but it's only really usable for games that are locked at 640x480, so especially useful for older Glide games. FSAA 2x is not that useful IMO.
In general, you can expect half the performance for every step of FSAA applied. So, in terms of performance, the following applies, roughly:

2x FSAA Voodoo 5 ~= Voodoo 4 (V5 is quite literally 2x Voodoo 4 VSA100 chips!) ~= Voodoo 3 3000-3500 ~= Voodoo 2 SLI
4x FSAA Voodoo 5 ~= 1x Voodoo 2

I hope the above is readable, basically at 4x FSAA the Voodoo 5 performs roughly on par with a Voodoo2, though obviously without the texture thrashing issues of the Voodoo 2 which has split memory pools for framebuffer and texture memory. So it is fine for 640x480, less so for 800x600 and above.

Pushing negative LOD bias is indeed kinda like fake anisotropic, it's actually quite nice. Of the games you mentioned, the Unreal Engine based games will run better on the Voodoo 5 than any other card of that era and generally speaking more "correct", as the D3D renderer on these games was a bit dodgy at times. Hope this helps.

Reply 10 of 16, by st31276a

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A friend of mine had one in 2002-2004 ish in an Athlon 1.2 with 512MB. He upgraded to a Geforce 4 MX440. I remember how impressed he was with the geforce’s FSAA, so I presume it was better.

He gave the 5500 to me, but it could not work on my Intel 850 based AGP4x slot.

I still have it, but it is not currently in any system, as I have nothing for which this card would be ideal. I tested it a decade or so back in a 440LX system with a P2-333 and it works, but obviously not to full potential. Currently in a box in the garage.

This is actually quite a difficult card, as it is 3.3V AGP2x and therefore does not work on most P4’s. Core era stuff is also out of the question, being PCI express and all that. Probably an Athlon or a Tualatin will be a good match, of which I unfortunately possess none.

One day when I stumble upon something suitable I will utilize it.

Reply 11 of 16, by AndreaColombo86

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@Garrett

So in your opinion 1024x768 with 2X FSAA isn’t much of an improvement over just 1024x768?

How do I do the negative LOD thing? (Apologies, I’ve never had this card so I’m not very familiar. I hope to put my build together within 3 months or so)

Reply 12 of 16, by Law212

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I'd love to find a voodoo 4 or 5.

Reply 13 of 16, by AndreaColombo86

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Law212 wrote on Today, 15:07:

I'd love to find a voodoo 4 or 5.

Voodoo5 5500 AGP is fairly easy to find, if a bit pricey.

Reply 14 of 16, by Law212

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AndreaColombo86 wrote on Today, 15:11:
Law212 wrote on Today, 15:07:

I'd love to find a voodoo 4 or 5.

Voodoo5 5500 AGP is fairly easy to find, if a bit pricey.

Thats the thing. lots of things are fairly easy to find but the price is insane . I can find a copy of wlfenstein or prince of persia, but do I want to spend what people are asking ? No

Reply 16 of 16, by ElTentakel

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The Serpent Rider wrote on Yesterday, 17:57:

In a sense, FSAA is useless on Voodoo 5, if the monitor can handle 1600x1200 or higher resolution.
There's a neat trick with 4x FSAA and cranking up negative texture LOD in the driver which creates pseudo anisotropic filtering effect.

You get a higher performance hit when turning up the resolution. Since the Voodoo 5 has a rotated grid FSAA, it can create an additional "step" on the X and Y edges with only 2xAA, but you have to increase the resolution 4 times to get the same result. And for 4x FSAA you need 16x Resolution. Of course, the image is more blurry with FSAA.