c64z80 wrote:Ok, i will just have to be watchful and see what happens 😒
Did 3dfx ever make any Isa video cards, or was Isa seen as very obsolete when the first voodoo came out?
There are many on other forums who say just pci and a few say they did make Isa cards but no conclusive answer. With many 3dfx games being dos games it does not make a lot of sense why they would have only produced only pci cards (even with Isa bottlenecks) because most dos systems were Isa, so they would be leaving a large part of the dos 5.0+ PC market out 😮
3DFX cards were absolutely only available as PCI, and the later combo cards (Voodoo 3, etc) as AGP, too.
Any system slow enough to not have PCI slots would have been heavily CPU bottlenecked by any game advanced enough to use 3D acceleration. Not to mention that ISA is a very, very slow 16-bit bus. It just makes no sense.
A 486 system has little use for Voodoo graphics, really. Even if you get a 486 PCI motherboard, you'll find that even though some games technically function you're probably going to be very disappointed with the performance. Even with the hot-shit top-of-the-line 5x86 CPU's many games are going to be borderline unplayable. This is mostly due to the comparatively weak FPU in 486-class systems as compared to Pentiums. Voodoo cards in 486 boards are a because-I-can party trick, not really a realistic setup.
It's not really true either that most DOS systems were ISA only. In the 1993-1996 era, most games were still DOS but most modern computers had either VLB or PCI. By the time the Voodoo came out, DOS gaming was dying (but not dead yet) and ISA-only systems were dinosaurs.
There was one single 3D accelerated card for the VLB bus (that is, designed for 486) but it had a GLiNT chip, not Voodoo. There are like 5 games that support it and the card is enormously expensive these days.