Voodoo Combo Users : Help Convince Me

[TiG]

After weighing up my 3d performance situation over the last few days, see thread further down, I was resigned to the depressing thought that I was just going to have to bite the bullet and buy a new agp video card. And put the ol' MAX out to pasture. Damn you progress!

Then I opened todays local paper and on the inside cover is a "Stock Clearance Sale" ad from the computer shop I used to tech at, before I got sick. After lots of illness, some fun tests and a liberal dose of severe migrane-like head pain, the final diagnosis is that I have a severe dust mite allergy. Which presents as chronic sinusitus. Therefore opening PC's = very bad for me. But enough of my interesting medical complaints...

Listed in the ad is a "Voodoo 64mb Graphics Card".
Questions for the Voodoo Faithful :
Is this likely to be a V5500 pci?
What sort of price should I be looking for (ballpark $US will do, $AUD preferred)?
How hard is it to get running alongside a g400?
What about drivers?
How good is the 3d image quality, AA etc?

Heck, I may just buy the thing for the novelty value. "The video card that time forgot!".

Thanks for any suggestions.

This just goes to prove if you wait long enough a solution presents itself. Especially if you are as indecisive and lazy as me.

[Kruzin]

Matrox does not make voodoo cards.
This is the Matrox hardware forum.

Moved to General Hardware/Software

[TiG]

Whoops! Thanks Kruzin. I should prolly concentrate on one thread at a time.

[TiG]

On reflection, I suppose what I really want to know is : Will this card work with Morrowind and Nwn? If so, will it be faster than the G400?

[Helevitia]

If it is money you are concerned about, go buy a Radeon 8500 for ~$100. Can't beat that.

Dave

[TiG]

Yes they are great value, but tracking one down in Australia is harder than you might think. Hercules 8500LE's are around a bit, but they don't seem to support dual monitor display.

Perhaps I'd best go do some more thorough research

[Marshmallowman]

http://gamedude.eastwind.com.au/video.html

Auriga 64MB retail 8500 275/275 3.6ns ram...etc
$285AU or $300 with shipping.

they are are a rebadged HIS excalibur card, they stick an auriga sticker on the normal HIS/Excalibur box

just got mine last week, they may still have some left

edit: the have full dual display, include a DVI to RGB dongle, and a svideo cable for the svideo connector.

and apparently, it was quite easy to flash the bios so it is ID'ed as a retail built by ATI card, but I don't think its worth the bother, as All you get extra with the retail catalyst driver is the krappy DVD player

edit again: corrected url

[TiG]

Ta for the update Marsh.
That sounds just the ticket, I hope there are still some left.

Good to know there is another Murcer out here in the wild west

[Marshmallowman]

unless your a banana bender and can pick it up, it can take up to 2 weeks before it arrives

[TiG]

Nope, midwest coast WA. Still 2 weeks isn't too bad.
Have you used it in a dual display setup much?

[Marshmallowman]

not yet, might play around with it tonight.

have spent a week playing around with games and tweaking everything, its all good now so I should start playing around with dual head to see if I can screw things up.

The thing I like about the 8500 is the colour saturation, not matrox quality, but it makes my old geforce look like somebody bleached the screen. DVD playback is excellent(theatre mode)

[TiG]

Ah yes. The post-honeymoon period.
"Well, it seems to work fine with everything. Bored now.
Better fool with some settings until it trips up."

The colours and dvd were the two things I was hoping for. I wonder when the 9000's will start appearing here tho? Maybe i'll hold off a bit.

[az]

c't said that all non-ATI ATI cards have issues with dual monitor usage. some just have a crappy second head, some have two heads that only display the same image (one of them even in a way that when you used the second one, the third one's brightness was halved!), most have interferences between both heads, if both are used. Only the original ATI ones didn't.

AZ

[103er-Fan]

Re: Voodoo Combo Users : Help Convince Me

As an old 3dfx zealot I can answeryour questions...

Originally posted by TiG
Listed in the ad is a "Voodoo 64mb Graphics Card".

Well, the very first Voodoo chip was called "Voodoo Graphics, but it couldn't handle more than 6mb RAM, so the only 64mb cards have been the Voodoo5 5500 AGP/PCI

Is this likely to be a V5500 pci?

It should be either a V5 5500 PCI or AGP, you should ask there. It can also be the Mac version of the PCI card, but this wouldn't be that difficult because I read that many people flashed their Mac card with PC BIOSes and it works well.

What sort of price should I be looking for (ballpark $US will do, $AUD preferred)?

The V5 5500 started at around 330$ at the very beginning, I think the latest retailer price was around 150$, and this is also many months ago. Considering that it is faster than a GF2 MX and faster than a Kyro 2, you should pay a slightly higher price for the Voodoo. So I think a Kyro 2 is around 80$ or something, you should considering the Voodoo for about 60-90$, most people are buying for about 70-75$.
Btw, performance difference between the PCI and AGP version is only about 1-2%.

How hard is it to get running alongside a g400?

Remind that this is not an add-on card! The last add-on cards 3dfx made was the Voodoo2s back in 1998, since the Voodoo Banshee, they only produced stand-alone cards.
I am not sure how far it is possible to run two main graphics card in one system...

What about drivers?

Well, 3dfx is unfortunatly gone, so there aren't any new official drivers, there aren't even official 3dfx Win XP drivers
But there are some people who are writing new drivers, I should especially mention the 3dhq team, they are currently writing new drivers, main features:
- DirectX 8 compatible(???)
- New OpenGL 1.2 ICD
- Aniso Filtering
- New Voodoo tools
- Fully Windows XP compatible

If you are running Win9x/ME or Win 2000, then you will be on the most save side, because for these systems are the best drivers available at the moment. Usually only newer DirectX 8.x games are causing real trouble, some examples:
- C&C: Renegade (many issues fixed with 3dhq drivers)
- Spider Man
- Americas Army
- UT 2003 (still not sure about this one, because these leaked demos might not contain Voodoo support! But it should work in the official version)

How good is the 3d image quality, AA etc?

The image qualtiy is of course not as good as Matrox', but it was better than the Radeon 8500 or the Kyro 2 I tested on my system. The FSAA is also very good, actually 3dfx had always the best anti-aliasing IMHO, but now other manufacturers like Matrox or ATI are catching slowly up with their newer cards.
The problem is that this FSAA is not the fastest, it works very well in older games (early 2001 and older) while in some newer games you will likely get performance problems with 4xFSAA, 1024x786 and 4xFSAA is almost impossible the most times. In this resoultion 2xFSAA should work ok though, but as I said, it highly depends on the game you are using, for example in Quake III running at 1024x768x32, max. details, 4xFSAA you won't get more than 20fps, 2xFSAA should be around 40fps when I am right. If you step back to 16bit, then you will notice nice performance boosts for FSAA, Quake III will get around 35-40fps with 4xFSAA and above 60/70fps with 2xFSAA.
Even ST: Bridge Commander works good with 1024x768x16 and 2xFSAA!

Also Glide is still a feature, especially when you are playing Unreal Engine based games like Unreal/Unreal Torunament, Deus Ex, Wheel of Time and so on you will get a nice performance with it! Unreal Tournament is very playable in 1024x768x16 with 2xFSAA and maximum details, I am not sure about 32bit, because I actually never bothered much about 32bit


As for the question if the Voodoo is faster than your G400.... it is!
The V5 5500 is more than 2 times faster then a V3 3000, which was about as fast as a G400. Also you will get usable FSAA, I think the only downside compared to the Matrox card will be the image quality, which is not as good as the G400 ones.
But on the other side the performance is HIGHLY CPU dependent. If you are only running at 600-750 MHz, I don't think the performance boost will be that great. The V5 5500 unleashes it's full power in CPUs above 1000 MHz, I heard that people changing from 1,2 GHz Athlons to XP 1600+ and still got better performance.

If you would like to spend the money, then you are getting a good card, which still handles the most games very well (it even works ok on Morrowind and GTA3!) and also features very good looking FSAA.
Only downside might be the drivers, I don't know how long it will be till the 3dhq final drivers will be released, but AFAIK it will be within the next 8 weeks or something like that.

But we shouldn't forget that this card is now slightly older than 2 years, I think you won't have that much trouble with it this year, but about the next year... I am not sure, I actually doubt that it will last longer than another 8 months performance wise in new games. I think UT2003 will be definatly playable without FSAA in 1024x768 and medium details, but next years games....

[Gurm]

The big problem I had with a V5-5500 was the video playback. It was abysmal. You get used to ATI's stellar video playback, or the G400's rock solid playback, and then when you switch it's just a huge disappointment. If you don't watch a lot of movies, this is a very solid card. If you DO watch a lot of movies, don't go there. It's not even as good as an nVidia card in that arena.

- Gurm