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I just found a 3D Blaster Banshee in my local thrift for $1.00. It's AGP though... Can I SLI that with a VooDoo 2 PCI? Guessing no...
Also found some SD, DDR, and DDR2 for a quarter each. I might get out my 1ghz AMD chip + board and set up another 3dfx rig with all this, heh.
Now I have a VooDoo 2 PCI, VooDoo Banshee AGP, and VooDoo 3 2000 AGP.
Just saw something neat on eBay...
http://cgi.ebay.com/Voodoo-magazine-...item56379be0f3
A little pricy, but very neat. If that's the 120mb FF7 demo that was 3dfx enhanced, I hope that whoever buys it would upload it, because I can't find it.
No, you cant SLI the Banshee. You can only SLI a Voodoo 2 with a Voodoo 2.
Make sure your board will run well with older AGP cards. The Banshee runs at 1X AGP. You got one of the better Banshee cards there. The Creative one with Sgram was nice and performed pretty close to the Diamond Fusion I have. You should look into screwing on a small 40mm fan though. The Banshee runs pretty hot when its passively cooled.
finally got around to installing my voodoo 3500. ended up replaceing the thermal pad with thermal compound and strapped a 486 cooling fan to it with a length of wire since i didn't have any screws long enough. a bit ugly but it seems to work fine. have the 486 fan blowing down into a pci slot fan that blows the hot air out the back. have to say i hate that non standard DVI slot though that forces me to use that breakout box.
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3Dfx's fate was sealed in mid 1997 when SEGA decided to not use their chip in their then-upcoming superconsole.
Sega of America and 3Dfx were working on the Black Belt console while Sega of Japan was working with NEC & Videologic on the Katana console. The Katana was chosen to become Sega's next console, which of course was named Dreamcast.
3Dfx sued NEC and Sega, then Sega settled with 3Dfx a year or two later.
It was too late for 3Dfx as they began to lose ground to Nvidia with the TNT2 cards. By late 2000, after losing the Xbox contract with GigaPixel, the remains of 3Dfx was bought up by Nvidia.
Thats the stupidest comment Ive ever read regarding anything 3DFX related. That was a side deal that in no way would have equaled the revenue the company got as a computer graphics card provider. It would have just been a small piece of a very large pie financially, and it did nothing in the end to keep Power VR going in the Pc world.
What buried 3DFX was lengthy development cycles with nothing to fill the gaps, constant ignoring of the low end sectors, mismanagement of resources that caused vital crew to be taken off of projects like Rampage (thanks Greg), the merger with STB, ignoring the importance of hardware T&L early on, and being a overly lavish spender on company lunches and shit.
have an extra pc laying around again and 2 voodoo 2 cards so thinking of setting up an voodoo sli pc just for the hell of it. questions are.
1) my 2 voodoo 2's seem to be 2 diffrent manufacturers, ones a monster and the other has no label but it is a black card.
2) i know the voodoos are passthrough cards but do i have to use a dedicated 2d card with them or can i use anouther 2d/3d card like this spare viper v770 ultra i have laying here? will that create any conflicts or will the voodoos only kick in when i use a game that supports them?
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The Voodoo cards only enable when the GLIDE driver is used. Only GLIDE games will turn them on.
The passthrough is purely analog and will work with literally any other video card.
You will need the drivers from 3dfxzone.it for "mismatched SLI". (And of course you will also need an SLI cable, but apparently you can cobble one together from an old floppy cable.)
Heck no, sir! That might be true in DOS, but the Voodoo cards were also quite capable of Direct3D and OpenGL.
If you are playing Direct3D games, it can be tricky. There's a little doodad at http://www.falconfly.de/tools.htm called 3D Control Center that will let you switch between cards, but if the drivers for your Viper support a higher DirectX version than the 3DFXZone drivers, the Viper will always be used.2) i know the voodoos are passthrough cards but do i have to use a dedicated 2d card with them or can i use anouther 2d/3d card like this spare viper v770 ultra i have laying here? will that create any conflicts or will the voodoos only kick in when i use a game that supports them?
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." --Bertrand Russel (attributed)
Someone with a TNT2 Ultra would clearly want to use that for Direct3d instead of a Voodoo2. I had both back in the day, and always preferred the TNT2 for anything Direct3d. It was a coin flip for Quake 2. The TNT2 had 32bit color, so the game looked great, but it didn't have the rock solid FPS of the Voodoo2.
When you say "OpenGL" you really mean "Quake". The Voodoo and Voodoo2 cards had a miniGL port, specifically made for Quake/Quake2. It wasn't a full OpenGL implementation.
Well, a lot of things used the Quake/Quake2 engine.
Also, while it can't use the OpenGL ICD, if you copy 3dfxvgl.dll to an application's directory and rename it to opengl32.dll, that will work. There's also WickedGL, but that doesn't support everything either.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." --Bertrand Russel (attributed)
Depends on the game. Some earlier DirectX titles were not supported too hot by the earlier Nvidia drivers, and the problems (speed and grafx bugs) were never addressed completely, causing you to bounce back and forth between driver sets, etc. 3DFX driver support was really just a bit stronger and more well rounded up until the end of the company.
Plus you got the benefit of Glide and better performance in Open GL type titles like Quake 2 or SIN. That makes a big difference when you're looking to do a build that handles a certain Direct X time frame, from like 96-98, since you want to have a build that can cover as many bases as possible as best as possible, not just Direct 3D. TNT2 Ultra was also built for single-texturing, which presented its own set of fps/performance issues on some games.
I have a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI in my classic gaming rig. I've been quite satisfied with it for the most part. The only thing is I've noticed framerate drops in the original Half-Life if played with OpenGL or Direct3D. I seem to recall other issues, but its been awhile. Mainly I just chalk it up to Half-Life being the most resource-intensive game I own.
anyone know really how much more powerful the voodoo 5500 is then the voddoo 3500? i know the 5500 can do 32 bit color and a few fancy things but from what i looked at they have the same max res. same RAMDAC speed and the core/mem speed of the 5500 is acually slower, 166mhz to the 3500's 183 mhz. i know the 5500 has 2 gpus so does it make a huge diffrence in practice.
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