Falconfly has lots of info and drivers.

Link: http://www.falconfly.de/

Edit: nvm, you already linked to that page!!

It's a very good site.

retro games 100 wrote:

Questions

1) Can anyone recommend any other good software/utils for the Voodoo3 card? Thanks a lot.

A question from me instead of the answer:
Do you even need any more utils/software when you already have vcontrol?

Seriously, vcontrol has every possible modifiable parameter for every voodoo out there. It only lacks dual-chip overclock for Voodoo 5 (it overclocks only a single chip, instead of both!) but you asked about V3 not V5 😜

V3 software... well - you can try the tech demos from falconfly 😀 Demos are quite picky about drivers though - not everything will work 'on the fly', and most will not work with latest drivers.

Nice little series you've got going here.

On the software side, the 3DHQ drivers are probably worth a mention. Everybody kinda has their own favorites amongst the Voodoo drivers, so there's quite a bit of 'YMMV' involved depending on the particular system configuration and what games you're playing, but the 3DHQ ones seem to work quite well on my V5, and I like their control panel thingy. The SFFT Alpha drivers look interesting too... probably be worth playing around with, though I'd expect they have some issues that limit their value for general everyday use.

Other random observation: your V3 2000 uses the same RAM as my V3 3000.

There he is!, I am also just fiddling around with this exact same card in a retro DOS system. To bad there are only a few DOS games that can make good use of its Glide functionality:
Revised list of Voodoo games for DOS
Of the installed games only Tomb Raider is now is showing off Glide. Maybe later I will try GTA, Carmageddon and Shadow Warrior.

But even without Glide it is a nice card for DOS, seems just as VESA compatible as the TNT2's and Geforce 2,3,4's. It is kinda fun to have it working, back in the 90's I never owned any voodoo card.

I tend to just use the last non-beta 3dfx drivers because I usually intend to play games of that age anyway and have a belief that games and drivers of similar age mesh well.

lately I've been pondering a V3 DOS quirk regarding flickering distortion. I've seen this with a few games such as Zephyr and Dark Forces. surely other people have run into this issue. I have not tried the Voodoo VESA fix TSR yet as a remedy.

just have a S3 card on hand for DOS quirks, I say. 😁

retro games 100 wrote:

1) Can anyone recommend any other good software/utils for the Voodoo3 card? Thanks a lot.

Old Trashbarg already mentioned SFFT. Those are the only 3dfx drivers still in development. Last version was released less than a month ago. I haven't really tried them, but have read many positive feedbacks from other users. They are supposed to greatly improve D3D compatibility with some games.

Probably you already know MesaFX; if not, you should give it a try. It is a standalone OpenGL driver that works with every 3dfx card ever made (though I noticed some missing textures when using it with a Voodoo1), featuring improved vertex processing, lots of added extensions, and much better support for modern OpenGL games (Doom III running on 3dfx cards, remember? Not really useful, but nice to see as a technical curiosity).

I don't think that miniGL 1.49 is the best version for Voodoo3; I remember that the general recommendations about miniGL releases were: 1.46 for Voodoo1/2, 1.47 for Banshee, 1.48 for Voodoo3 and 1.49 for Voodoo4/5. But from my personal experience, I would always recommend miniGL 1.46 because it was the latest one with ALT+TAB support, a very cool feature back then to leave games in background instead of closing them.

Last but not least, Metabyte made some software tools that I personally consider little pieces of art. WickedGL was a faster and better miniGL driver that could sometimes replace the full OpenGL implementation from 3dfx, but used Glide2x.dll instead of Glide3x.dll for rasterization. This allowed the usage of other Metabyte tools, like a special Voodoo2 driver that enabled a 1024 resolution with a single Voodoo2 card (!). And Wicked3D eyeScream, a stereoscopic (not anaglyph) 3D driver that enabled real 3D on 3dfx cards and CRT monitors more than 10 years ago, way before Nvidia released 3D Vision.

elfuego wrote:

A question from me instead of the answer:
Do you even need any more utils/software when you already have vcontrol?

You're right. I was double-checking, just to make sure! 😉 😀 Also, as always people, thanks very much for the excellent info!

swaaye wrote:

lately I've been pondering a V3 DOS quirk regarding flickering distortion. I've seen this with a few games such as Zephyr and Dark Forces. surely other people have run into this issue. I have not tried the Voodoo VESA fix TSR yet as a remedy.
just have a S3 card on hand for DOS quirks, I say. 😁

I will try Dark Forces on the voodoo 3 and see what happens. Also I will flash the Bios on the thing.
Well I don't have any S3 card again, but all games I care about work fine with the Nvidia Vesa implementation. Also AFAIK 2MB S3 cards will not even allow me to run windows in 1024x768x24BPP.
...I was thinking, is DosBox Glide support overrated considering there are only 32 games that can make use of it (list I posted earlier)?

going off-topic here 😉.

yup NV has superb VESA too. youcan even get around a few of their quirks by using the 3dfx VESA fix TSR, curiously enough. There is a palette corruption issue that is fixed in Terra Nova this way.

Regarding my S3 comment, I only meant for DOS use. it's not much of a inconvenience to swap video cards in DOS. Indeed using an old S3 PCI card in Windows is not desireable on faster machines.

swaaye wrote:

lately I've been pondering a V3 DOS quirk regarding flickering distortion. I've seen this with a few games such as Zephyr and Dark Forces. surely other people have run into this issue. I have not tried the Voodoo VESA fix TSR yet as a remedy.

I tried dark forces on the V3, but could not really notice any flickering distortion...

Also I tried GTA, the 3dfx dos version. It seemed to malfunction at first, but you just have to blindly press F11, down and enter, to select a video mode that is actually supported by the V3. After that the game shows. It looks better then the plain dos version.

The problems may be related to write combining and as such not appear with all motherboards because BIOSs vary... I seem to remember FastVid tweaking causing the probs on a PPro with V3. Some 440BX boards automatically enable those features.

Yes, last week I stopped auto-loading fastvid with the voodoo 3, as it caused some games to appear garbled beyond recognition. Even with minimal settings (Ski or Die comes to mind).

I wonder if this is true, about MS-DOS 7.x, as I only use 7.x in the last 10 years:

[GVFM MANUAL] USING FASTVID TO IMPROVE GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE ============================================= The 'downloads' page o […]
Show full quote

[GVFM MANUAL]
USING FASTVID TO IMPROVE GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE
=============================================
The 'downloads' page of my webiste also has a download link to a very useful utility called FastVid, written by John Hinkley. FastVid can improve graphics throughput by as much as 10 times on some machines, so I strongly recommend its use on any Pentium Pro or higher machine running any stand-alone DOS except for MS-DOS 7.x (MS-DOS 7.x already does what FastVid does, so it's not needed with this O/S).

Well actually it shows to be false considering these observations:
Most demanding DOS game, resource wise?

Next I wondered whether loading a Dos game from Windows 9x enables faster fps. I think I noticed a thing like that...

batracio wrote:

Old Trashbarg already mentioned SFFT. Those are the only 3dfx drivers still in development. Last version was released less than […]
Show full quote

retro games 100 wrote:

1) Can anyone recommend any other good software/utils for the Voodoo3 card? Thanks a lot.

Old Trashbarg already mentioned SFFT. Those are the only 3dfx drivers still in development. Last version was released less than a month ago. I haven't really tried them, but have read many positive feedbacks from other users. They are supposed to greatly improve D3D compatibility with some games.

Probably you already know MesaFX; if not, you should give it a try. It is a standalone OpenGL driver that works with every 3dfx card ever made (though I noticed some missing textures when using it with a Voodoo1), featuring improved vertex processing, lots of added extensions, and much better support for modern OpenGL games (Doom III running on 3dfx cards, remember? Not really useful, but nice to see as a technical curiosity).

I don't think that miniGL 1.49 is the best version for Voodoo3; I remember that the general recommendations about miniGL releases were: 1.46 for Voodoo1/2, 1.47 for Banshee, 1.48 for Voodoo3 and 1.49 for Voodoo4/5. But from my personal experience, I would always recommend miniGL 1.46 because it was the latest one with ALT+TAB support, a very cool feature back then to leave games in background instead of closing them.

Last but not least, Metabyte made some software tools that I personally consider little pieces of art. WickedGL was a faster and better miniGL driver that could sometimes replace the full OpenGL implementation from 3dfx, but used Glide2x.dll instead of Glide3x.dll for rasterization. This allowed the usage of other Metabyte tools, like a special Voodoo2 driver that enabled a 1024 resolution with a single Voodoo2 card (!). And Wicked3D eyeScream, a stereoscopic (not anaglyph) 3D driver that enabled real 3D on 3dfx cards and CRT monitors more than 10 years ago, way before Nvidia released 3D Vision.

Do the SFFT drivers support Win9x? I thought they were 2k/XP.

gerwin wrote:

I wonder if this is true, about MS-DOS 7.x, as I only use 7.x in the last 10 years:

It could be referring to that stupid "real" counterfeit MSDOS 7 distribution (the one that is "under the GPL", effectively smearing the license with loads of violations) and doesn't have much actual MSDOS in it

I don't remember real MS-DOS 7 doing any fastvid stuff under win9x. Fastvid's role wasn't redundant.

sliderider wrote:

Do the SFFT drivers support Win9x? I thought they were 2k/XP.

Sorry, you're right. They're 2K/XP only. I forgot that retro games was using Windows 9x, though he just asked for other software/utils for the Voodoo3, in general. For Win9x, I have mainly used AmigaMerlin latest release.

batracio wrote:

Last but not least, Metabyte made some software tools that I personally consider little pieces of art. WickedGL was a faster and better miniGL driver that could sometimes replace the full OpenGL implementation from 3dfx, but used Glide2x.dll instead of Glide3x.dll for rasterization. This allowed the usage of other Metabyte tools, like a special Voodoo2 driver that enabled a 1024 resolution with a single Voodoo2 card (!). And Wicked3D eyeScream, a stereoscopic (not anaglyph) 3D driver that enabled real 3D on 3dfx cards and CRT monitors more than 10 years ago, way before Nvidia released 3D Vision.

Well, this certainly seems interesting. But either its not quite true, or I don't know how to 'make it work'. In fact, I have metabyte Wicked3D eyescream glasses and I was testing them a lot both with V3 and V5. The only game I found, where the stereoscopy (wonderfully!) worked with Glide was NFS 2:SE. All other games were working explicitly in D3D mode w/ glasses. I had no luck running "Wicked3D" in OpenGL/Glide mode, but only in DirectX (which plainly put, sucks), and if I had to choose whether I want to play a game in stereo+D3D or in Glide, I would ALWAYS choose glide.

BTW, Wicked3D driver works not only on 3dfx, but on all other 3D accelerators of that time as well (also on S3 in fact!) if the driver information is correct.

elfuego wrote:

Well, this certainly seems interesting. But either its not quite true, or I don't know how to 'make it work'. In fact, I have metabyte Wicked3D eyescream glasses and I was testing them a lot both with V3 and V5. The only game I found, where the stereoscopy (wonderfully!) worked with Glide was NFS 2:SE. All other games were working explicitly in D3D mode w/ glasses. I had no luck running "Wicked3D" in OpenGL/Glide mode, but only in DirectX (which plainly put, sucks), and if I had to choose whether I want to play a game in stereo+D3D or in Glide, I would ALWAYS choose glide.

BTW, Wicked3D driver works not only on 3dfx, but on all other 3D accelerators of that time as well (also on S3 in fact!) if the driver information is correct.

You calling me a liar???!!! 🤣 I swear I did play GLQuake, Tomb Raider-something and maybe other games in stereoscopic 3D with shutter glasses. I found Tomb Raider games confusing because they use flat bitmaps for background in open areas, so that background is assigned a wrong depth and can be seen "floating" somewhere around the 3D scene. Closed areas without 2D surfaces, sprites, etc, should be displayed fine.

GLQuake was impressive in stereoscopic 3D, by the way. But I can't really confirm that I only needed Wicked3D eyeScream driver. I may have used the special Metabyte Voodoo2 driver with resolution override, because it also supported the stereo 3D effect, or so I think. It came with a Glide2x wrapper that enabled those features at loading, and then used a standard 3dfx Glide2x.dll for actual rendering. I know for sure it worked on Voodoo2.

It may be possible to try that Glide2x wrapper with other 3dfx Glide2x.dll and get it working on other Voodoo cards, or even with a Glide-to-GL/D3D wrapper and use it on any 3D card. I don't think I ever tried this at home.

By the way, you're right about Wicked3D eyeScream not enabling the stereoscopic 3D effect in OpenGL with non-3dfx cards; eyeScream 2000 version supported Direct3D games only. You need eyeScream Pro version to get full OpenGL support. But I could never found that Pro version, just a demo that only works in Quake III.

Hey - Im not calling anyone a liar! 😀 I did state that I may be too dumb to configure it properly. 😜 I dont know much about V2 + Wicked3D, I'm just stating the facts about V3/V5 + Wicked3D. It works mostly in D3D mode (not in OGL). I'm using v5.02 driver since the version 3.xx which comes on the CD doesnt support V5. Maybe it does work in OGL (glide) mode with a V2. If so, I have to dig out my V2 and try it out, since I hate playing NFS 3/4 in D3D mode (looks like crap).

Oh and I didnt play GLquake - I only tested UT'99 and it didnt work properly with Glide+glasses (officially it did work, but I saw no difference). Honestly, if you can play UT '99 and Quake 3 with high details+FSAA, why would you play GLquake anyway 😜

By the way, you are also right about one thing: resolution override. I was somehow able to run NFS 2: SE in 1280x1024 and 1024x768, even if the game was 'thinking' it runs in 640x480! But, thats only NFS 2. Other games didnt do the hardware justice 🙁