Richo wrote:
if you want a 3dfx card for a P3 a Voodoo 4 or 5 are more appropiate but expensive. A Geforce 3 or 4 or better suited for the job although a geforce 2 will do aswell.
Don't listen to Nvidia's propaganda claiming their TNT is actually faster, it isn't. They just convinced people Voodoo cards were slower and worse then their own cards, plenty about that is already said on this forum about that and is also listed on the internet in reviews.
No way. Depending on clock speed and platform, an appropriate card for a P3 machine is either a TNT2 / Voodoo 3 (for say a slot 1 machine running a 450-600MHz CPU) or a Geforce 2 PRO / GTS or a GF 3 Ti200 for a socket 370 machine running a 800-1000MHz chip. A gf4 Ti is wasted on a P3 unless you have a fast tualatin like say a 1400MHz rig. I experimented with my 1400MHz machine (Abit ST6 / 1.4GHz P3) and saw little improvement when upgrading the GF3 Ti200 to a GF4 Ti 4600 - all it did was add 5-10% better maximum framerate in some games at 1600x1200 but they were still laggy and minimum framerate got worse using the GF4 Ti.
There's no point in going with a very fast card on these older machines since the chipset's CPU to AGP bus can't feed data fast enough to the card for it to perform as well as it should. From my tests, only a socket 939 3800+ could top out a GF4 Ti 4600 (top-out = video card becomes a bottleneck). In sistethic tests my Asus GF4 Ti 4600 scored on 25-30% better on the 939 rig then it did on a socket A machine (3200+ / NF2) and in games there was a 5 to 15% improvement.
As for a Voodoo 5 - it actually loves fast CPUs. It's fast enough to fluently play lots of 1998-2000 games @ 1600x1200 on the 3200+ machine in my signature, but lags and displays some sort of tearing (at times) on the aforementioned Tualatin machine in some games.
The Voodoo 4 behaves like a slightly faster voodoo 3 with 32 bit color support - but you will only notice it's extra performance on faster machines. For example, on a 650MHz P3, both the Voodoo 3 3000 and my Voodoo 4 (Powercolor Evilking IV) perform almost the same. When installed on my 1333MHz Athlon rig, the V4 takes a 20-25% lead in some games, especially at high resolutions.
Very fast AGP cards actually perform worse on slow machines then older, slower video cards would, in part due to drivers not being optimised for the older platform, but mostly due to the older machines innability to keep the card properly fed with sufficient data, causing huge frame spikes, lag and framerate variations. I noticed this with the 6600GT AGP and 9800 PRO when installed on a 1100MHz Coppermine machine.
I'll open up a topic about what video card to put in what machine in the near future.