3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 or 6000 performance

rabidz7

[H]ard|Gawd
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How does a 3dfx 5500 or a 6000 perform compared to, say, a GT 210? Would it handle modern games at maybe 640x480? I ask because the drivers on my 980s are giving me so much bullshit that I spend more time fixing drivers than playing games. The issues are mostly due to games not co-operating with the custom resolutions that my CRT requires. I've tried a 7970, and while that worked better, it still isn't 100% functional. I am actually using my PowerMac G5 instead of the system in my sig right now because at least that has stable drivers.
 
I have a 5500 and no....not in my oppinion. 3dfx 5500 handles Glide games really well, but who in the modern game business is using that API?
I believe the 5500 uses DX 6,0 that is nowhere to find
 
good luck in getting a 6000 for cheap lol :p not gonna happen unless you know someone that want's to scrap it for parts. Then I'm interested lol


You're gonna pay through your ass.

But as we said, the DX level makes it almost impossible to get modern games working. You're best bet is to search for modded driver but for me that chance is slim to none.

Half-Life worked ok for me with a lot of crashes.
 
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What resolutions are you trying to game at? A lot of games will not accept custom resolutions that are not standard aspect ratios like 4:3, 16:9 and 8:5. This is a problem with the games themselves, not necessarily the drivers or the hardware.
 
I dunno why my 2nd reply was deleted, but Voodoo cards don't support DX9 instructions, which is what 99% of modern 3D games rely on.
 
Which games are you looking to play? I don't think your going to get any "modern" (used loosely; last 7-8 years) to run without a lot of difficulty and incompatibility. The 5500 and 6000 were great for their time but are just collectors items at this point.
 
yeah modern would be 1998-1999 but the question still applies, would a modern driver for the 5500 run for , say, COD ?
At least 1 fps
 
Well as already mentioned, Voodoo 5 only had full feature support for DirectX 6 and partial support for DirectX 7. Nearly every game released in the last 10 years requires at least DirectX 8, if not DirectX 9. Even if you managed to get a DX 9 game running on a Voodoo 5 you're going to get extreme graphical glitches. And when I say "extreme" I mean completely missing polygons and vertices, no texturing, etc.
 
What resolutions are you trying to game at? A lot of games will not accept custom resolutions that are not standard aspect ratios like 4:3, 16:9 and 8:5. This is a problem with the games themselves, not necessarily the drivers or the hardware.

I am trying to play at 2560x1920i@120, 2048x1536i@144, 1600x1200i@180 and 1280x960i@240.
 
Hmm... those are all 4:3 resolutions. What exactly happens in a game you're having trouble with when you launch it? Is it the refresh rate that is giving you issues?
 
what games are you trying to play at these incredible resolutions and refreshratres.






edit I just made a round in Half-Life 2 lost coast wit solid 300 fps in UHD ... I donno if that's what you mean...and I know it's limited to 300



edit2 I just made a second run I realise the first one for was 1080....second was 280fps average
 
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Hmm... those are all 4:3 resolutions. What exactly happens in a game you're having trouble with when you launch it? Is it the refresh rate that is giving you issues?

Usually, the game won't even open. Sometimes, it opens but only supports some crap progressive resolution like 1600x1200@85Hz.
 
Well as already mentioned, Voodoo 5 only had full feature support for DirectX 6 and partial support for DirectX 7. Nearly every game released in the last 10 years requires at least DirectX 8, if not DirectX 9. Even if you managed to get a DX 9 game running on a Voodoo 5 you're going to get extreme graphical glitches. And when I say "extreme" I mean completely missing polygons and vertices, no texturing, etc.

I believe the SFFT drivers support at least DX9.
 
Have you tried manually editing config files for the games? Sometimes the game is programmed with default resolutions that it will fall back to, but the config file can override it. PC Gaming Wiki is a good source to find where the config files are for a lot of games and what to look for.

http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Home
 
I'm confused. What is the goal of this?

Genuinely curious, will you be benching a lot of different card generations against a lot of different generations of games? This is something I'd like to see
 
I'd be quite interested to see performance scaling from some of the seminal architectures from both NVidia / AMD(ATI) to today's pieces.

However, back on topic.

OP: Which CRT make/model is this?

Also, if the resolution is the problem here...what is this business about V5 5500/6000 performance relative to a GT 210?
 
The Voodoo 5500 or 6000 just don't have the horsepower for modern games. Hell, they just scraped by when they were first released 15 years ago in the face of ATI and NVidia putting the hurt on with rapid advances and fast releases.

5500 specs:
64 Megabytes of 166 MHz SDRAM (32MB * 2)
Core clock 166 MHz
128 bit bus, AGP 1X interface
4 texture units
fill rate of 667 MTexels/sec (for single textures - half that for dual textures)
Highest DX: 6.0

Compared to a cost-effective 750Ti:
2048 Megabytes of 5400 MHz GDDR5
Core clock: 1020 MHz
128bit bus, PCIe 3.0 interface
40 texture units
fill rate of 40,800 Mtexels/sec
Highest DX: 12

...and the 750Ti will struggle with the higher resolutions and refresh rates you listed with most modern games.
 
Your best bet, at all, would be games that might use OpenGL. World of Warcraft used to run on 3dfx cards via OpenGL. OpenGL is now depreciated within World of Warcraft but iirc you can still manually enable it via a config file or similar.

The only reason the 5500 and 6000 are so expensive used is that they are the fastest cards that can run glide, During their time, they were pretty mediocre cards for non-glide gaming. Personally, I use a pair of Voodoo2's in my 9x legacy gaming rig.
 
I think your resolution issues may have more to do with the individual games than the drivers. A lot of games have a bunch of hard-coded resolutions and that's all they support. Although most of them you can edit the config files manually to support practically any resolution you want. I normally hack older games to run in widescreen but you can do the opposite on newer games.
 
I don't remember those cards even running DX6 well. If it didn't have Glide it would run like crap.
 
I don't even think this is worth it, your not going to get new games to run on those cards.

You can't expect a card with 128MB memory to run any modern game at 30 fps let alone 120, or at those resolutions your looking to run.

I don't understand why you would want to run the games at 640x480 if your trying to run at 2560x1920.

If you can't edit the game config files your basically SOL.

Realistically I wouldn't expect new games to officially support any resolution that runs only on a CRT monitor.
 
Usually, the game won't even open. Sometimes, it opens but only supports some crap progressive resolution like 1600x1200@85Hz.

You are trolling right? Asking a dumb question, plus preferring interlaced over progressive ?

Hell an FX 5200 would play modern games better then a Voodoo 5 6000.
 
You are trolling right? Asking a dumb question, plus preferring interlaced over progressive ?

Hell an FX 5200 would play modern games better then a Voodoo 5 6000.

You guys are only now figuring this out? He has a history of posting pointless threads about worthless (but loved) old hardware that are only intended to tempt fish to bite. Seems he got quite a few bites in this pointless thread.

This guy is what the ignore list was made for :D
 
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The only reason the 5500 and 6000 are so expensive used is that they are the fastest cards that can run glide, During their time, they were pretty mediocre cards for non-glide gaming. Personally, I use a pair of Voodoo2's in my 9x legacy gaming rig.

That's not entirely true. :cool: Would've been the most powerful consumer model though! Any long-time [H]ers and 3DFx enthusiasts may remember a post that Steve or Kyle made sometime around the turn of the century [lol always wanted to say that when referring to my lifetime], which featured a pic almost identical to this one, as I remember it was on a marble counter top heh
quantum3D-8132-8-way-32MB-per-chip-1.jpg


It's a Quantum3D AAlchemy, for those not familiar with it, featuring not 4-way SLI, but 8-way SLI! It was effectively two V5 6Ks on a single PCI-board, and Q3D didn't stop there, either... One system could pack in 4 of those cards [in addition to a Sensor Post Processor card, which was a Voodoo3-powered card that basically acted as a Shader device], and on top of THAT they could be Gen-Locked aka Networked together with more cards in another system! Nevertheless, this was all meant for commercial stuff, like military tank and flight simulators, which is what the Sensor Post Processor card was advertised as being useful for since it could provide Night-Vision effect but not impact performance since the V3 chip handled it.

Rambling aside... I had already liked Q3D hardware, since the day they offered San Francisco: RUSH with their 3Dfx "Banshee" powered card, as I loved RUSH on N64 lol So by that point I had owned a couple other rarities like the SB100 or X24. That [H] post made me :eek: and from that point forward I vowed to own one, somehow.... And thanks to eBay, $200, and some luck, I managed to get my hands on 2 and the even more rare Sensor Post Processor which is the biggest plus given it provides DVI output :D

Unfortunately, I never found a powersupply [they need a special high amp one that provides a unique 2.9V rail], and my ambitions to create a buck-converter diminished. So they are just my pride and joy mantle pieces now, at least... if I had a mantle *shrug* lol

At the end of the day, even despite the group I was part of once upon a time managing to get the original 3Dfx source to keep the driver scene alive [mind you, this was back in like, 2003 or so], I still wouldn't expect an AAlchemy would even be capable of what even a lowly GT210 is. However, I bet the anti-aliasing would look better! :D
[/rambling]

I'm not sure how much luck you'll have running those resolutions [nevermind the tests you want to run], primarily because... do you have a screen with VGA input that is capable of those refresh rates [even if they are interlaced]? The last CRT I owned was a 22in Mitsubishi Trinitron [Diamondtron], and I think it could only pull off 2048x1600@120Hz which only then when I was using the VGA-BNC cables. *shrug*

I wish you luck in your endeavors though!
 
You guys are only now figuring this out? He has a history of posting pointless threads about worthless (but loved) old hardware that are only intended to tempt fish to bite. Seems he got quite a few bites in this pointless thread.

This guy is what the ignore list was made for :D

If there's 2 things I've found these days it's that: 1] People still love 3Dfx and the quality they offer/ed. 2] People can be incredibly 'silly' in , and however strange what they want to do may come across as... doesn't mean they are trolling. :p

Now that isn't to say the listed resolutions weren't an eyebrow raiser, and that it was raised further by the mention of interlaced, but there is at least one instance where that would be beneficial: the old 3D Glasses converters you could get. I still have mine kicking around somewhere, and it required two things: CRT and as high a refresh rate you could pull off [and the ability do so with the FPS to match].

So he very well may be a troll, but even then you'd be surprised where you may end up finding that nugget of info, when scouring the internet some day in the future for some random thing. It has happened to me where what I finally was after had been provided by a person, even when that info was off-topic to the thread's discussion lol
 
If there's 2 things I've found these days it's that: 1] People still love 3Dfx and the quality they offer/ed. 2] People can be incredibly 'silly' in , and however strange what they want to do may come across as... doesn't mean they are trolling. :p

Now that isn't to say the listed resolutions weren't an eyebrow raiser, and that it was raised further by the mention of interlaced, but there is at least one instance where that would be beneficial: the old 3D Glasses converters you could get. I still have mine kicking around somewhere, and it required two things: CRT and as high a refresh rate you could pull off [and the ability do so with the FPS to match].

So he very well may be a troll, but even then you'd be surprised where you may end up finding that nugget of info, when scouring the internet some day in the future for some random thing. It has happened to me where what I finally was after had been provided by a person, even when that info was off-topic to the thread's discussion lol

He is clearly trolling because he is asking about running games at 640x480.

How does a 3dfx 5500 or a 6000 perform compared to, say, a GT 210? Would it handle modern games at maybe 640x480?

Then he goes on to complain that his 980 wont run games on his CRT.

I am trying to play at 2560x1920i@120, 2048x1536i@144, 1600x1200i@180 and 1280x960i@240.

If your trying to play a game at 2560x1920i@120, why the hell would you want to run a game at 640x480?

I'm not going to argue the merits of CRT vs LCD, but can you honestly say that 1600x1200@85 is a crap resolution compared to 640x480?

it opens but only supports some crap progressive resolution like 1600x1200@85Hz.

Regardless, to stay on topic edit the games config files, and stop fooling around with CRT monitors its a dead technology, and stop expecting new games and hardware to support 4:3 resolutions.
 
I was searching some V5 infor and found this turd.
It represent quality of rabidz7 threads perfectly: random, stupid and downright ridiculous.

Nothing out of ordinary...
 
Wtf. Still? If you are serious, had the same issues too. This problem caused my business much strife in the 8800 days, it was a pain in the ass driving specialised projectors, with unusual resolutions, got so bad after trying all the usual fixes, that we went for a budget AMD card to see it was just drivers. That amd card is by being retired this month after years of service, to upgrade the whole PC.
But apparently, according to the masses, it's amd drivers that suck...
 
5500s are worth something now? I'll have to dig mine out of the hardware Smithsonian box in the closet.
 
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