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.

Having had a chance to compare Voodoo1 vs Riva128 vs Intel i740, I came to some very interesting conclusions.

Riva 128 does have comparable performance to Intel i740, but the image quality, both 2d and 3d, is ass. I would never pick Riva 128 over Intel i740 - there is no upside here.

Both of these cards outperform a Voodoo1 on a faster system (PII 300/Mendocino400/PIII 733) by a significant margin, offering Voodoo1 framerates at 800x600. Voodoo1 has very good IQ in 3d and the best features among the three cards.

Looking at this, you can kinda see why people held on to their Voodoo1 cards and upgraded to Voodoo2.

That was my opinion as well. So many cards would be perfectly serviceable Voodoo replacements, if not for the missing table fog. The i740 is otherwise excellent and can sometimes be found onboard some Pentium 4 motherboards. I also recommend it 10/10.

It would have been nice to see a world where Intel continued producing video cards alongside the major competition. Their embedded solutions were serviceable but always lagged severely compared to whatever the current generation of dedicated cards were available at the time.

Kahenraz wrote on 2026-07-01, 16:50:

That was my opinion as well. So many cards would be perfectly serviceable Voodoo replacements, if not for the missing table fog. The i740 is otherwise excellent and can sometimes be found onboard some Pentium 4 motherboards. I also recommend it 10/10.

It would have been nice to see a world where Intel continued producing video cards alongside the major competition. Their embedded solutions were serviceable but always lagged severely compared to whatever the current generation of dedicated cards were available at the time.

I think TNT2 M64 is what ruined Intel's onboard graphics cards - and the fact that Real3D, the power behind i740, was no longer developing its successors, because they were shuttered.

songoffall wrote on 2026-07-01, 13:33:

Riva 128 does have comparable performance to Intel i740, but the image quality, both 2d and 3d, is ass. I would never pick Riva 128 over Intel i740 - there is no upside here.

Riva128's had a longer driver support window at least, as well as a dither table. A lot of the assness comes out of the lightmapped games where blending takes a hit on color precision, but there's still plenty of games that don't have lightmaps which look fine (that everyone conveniently forgets, unless there's Forsaken numbers on the line).

That's true. I forgot to mention that the Riva 128 has the best dithering pattern of any card of that generation and anything that came after. ATI had the absolute worst pretty much forever. It's one of the reasons I will often hesitate choosing ATI over Nvidia for 16-bit colors.

Kahenraz wrote on 2026-07-02, 08:46:

That's true. I forgot to mention that the Riva 128 has the best dithering pattern of any card of that generation and anything that came after. ATI had the absolute worst pretty much forever. It's one of the reasons I will often hesitate choosing ATI over Nvidia for 16-bit colors.

Yikes. That seems like something of a unique perspective there. I just don't see how a Riva 128 competes with 3dfx for 16 bit dithering, rendering quality, or low 1% frames. That time in 1999 when I accidently bought a Velocity 128 instead of a Velocity 100 was an experience of utter disappointment so extreme it carries with me clearly to this day. In Halflife, the 3dfx card had vibrant smooth 16 bit color that was close in quality to other card's 32 bit color. The Riva 128 card looked like bleached grainy sand stone under the white hot sun of a pixelated desert . Did they eventually fix the Riva drivers or something?

I agree that ATi's 16 bit dithering was not good, but the rage128 line had strong enough 32 bit performance that you could pretty much play with 32bit color with minimal penalty and skip the dithering all together. Those that are using earlier ATi rage cards to play 3d games are usually doing it for a very specific reason and dithering quality isn't going to stop them.

https://b31f.wordpress.com/2025/08/04/older-but-faster/
Dithering is a sore spot. The Riva 128 shows an overly grainy image, and while noise isn’t quite as irregular as with the Radeon VE, it’s much more prevalent.

To clarify, I was referring to non-Voodoo cards with regards to dithering. I just happen to like the way the Riva handles it and absolutely hate the way ATI does it (only noise or pattern options), so I am somewhat bias.

leileilol wrote on 2026-07-01, 23:52:

songoffall wrote on 2026-07-01, 13:33:

Riva 128 does have comparable performance to Intel i740, but the image quality, both 2d and 3d, is ass. I would never pick Riva 128 over Intel i740 - there is no upside here.

Riva128's had a longer driver support window at least, as well as a dither table. A lot of the assness comes out of the lightmapped games where blending takes a hit on color precision, but there's still plenty of games that don't have lightmaps which look fine (that everyone conveniently forgets, unless there's Forsaken numbers on the line).

The DAC is also quite mediocre, and the 2d image quality is noticeably lower than i740 - and completely outclassed by a Matrox Mystique.

Kahenraz wrote on 2026-07-02, 20:14:

To clarify, I was referring to non-Voodoo cards with regards to dithering. I just happen to like the way the Riva handles it and absolutely hate the way ATI does it (only noise or pattern options), so I am somewhat bias.

While I agree that ATI Rage's handling of dithering was disgusting, i740 does not have the problem. You should do a side-by-side comparison if you get the chance.

leileilol wrote on 2026-07-01, 23:52:

Riva128's had a longer driver support window at least

I would like to point out the i740 has win2000 and win xp drivers.
Meanwhile nvidia didnt bothered to create a d3d compatible XP driver for the riva128.