GF2 GTS or Voodoo 3? (older rig)

Susquehannock

Susquehannock

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Jul 26, 2005
Messages
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Need some advice on a Voodoo card as I know little to nothing about them. An older HP system that I picked up for
free had one installed.

Been thinking of reconfiguring my Win98 dedicated gaming rig. Has been running an ASUS GF2 GTS
for quite some time. Been a great card.

Do you think there would be any improvement running a 3DFX Voodoo 3 (n2544)? If so can someone please
point me toward some drivers?

Thanks
____________________________________
Win98 gaming rig specs ::

Mobo - Abit KR7A-RAID
CPU - AMD AthlonXP T-bred B
RAM - 512MB DDR pc2100
PSU - Fortron 400w
HDD - IBM 40gb 7200rpm
 
no..
geforce2gts or ultra give you similar or way better performance then voodoo5 5500 already
do you think the voodoo3 have any chance???
the voodoo3 is more like vs geforce256SDR

by the way... if you want... go get a 9700pro...
someone is selling thsoe FIC 9700 pro brand new in ebay
good price.. around 39.99 us dollars
 
so this is your old game rig???
mine is a p3-s 1.4 ( just upgraded it)
with asus p3b-f ( 440BX chipset)
8500LE 128mb ( have a quadro4 900 next to me no i dea if i should use it.. .. also ordered the 9700 pro that i mentioned before..
 
From looking about it seems the gts beats the voodoo 5, let alone the voodoo 3. The gts features hardware transform and lighting and 32 whole bits of amazing color, two features the voodoo 3 lacked. (Although if your cpu is faster than this generation the transform and lighting gap may be closed)
 
Boy was I off. Hey, told you I didn't know much about Voodoo cards.

Seems this is the Voodoo 3 2000. It was my assumption the "2000" was the release year, which would
put it about the same period as the GF2, but obviously I was mistaken.

Thanks :D
 
voodoo1
voodoo2 8/12mb later it was called voodoo2 1000
banshee 16mb ( suck)
voodoo3 2000 ( slowest voodoo3)
voodoo3 3000
voodoo3 3500 ( this is the fastest voodoo3)
voodoo4 4500
voodoo5 5000 /5500
voodoo6 6000 ( never come to the retail market

3dfx died..
 
The voodoo 6 may never have come to the retail market, but it doesn't mean they don't exist. I was talking to a nVidia rep and he said that there where a bunch of shrink wrapped ones floating around nVidia.
 
there were some in Ebay... those voodoo5 6000
but they are still around geforce2ultra 's performance
it was too late... too weak
 
Nvidia pre-Geforce3 always hurt my eyes, whereas the 2D quality on all 3dfx products that had 2D were pleasant to look at. In 3D performance though, the Geforce2 would totally dominate the Voodoo.
 
geforce 's driver??? ofcause... they all in nvidia.com
but for tnt-geforce2ultra ( but not the geforce2mx)
you have to use the 70 series driver..
geforce2mx +.. can use 90 series driver
 
Stick with the GeForce2 GTS. The Voodoo3 is inferior, and in my experiences, tends to suck a good bit of power from the motherboard. There were even a few Super 7 and Slot I motherboards that specifically stated, not to use the Voodoo3 with them.

From what I've seen, even NVIDIA's old TNT2 Ultra was a better performer.

The only way I'd ever use a Voodoo3 card, is if there were some software that specifically called for Glide.
 
yea i'd go with the geforce 2, great card for the time.

so i'm guessing this is a legacy gaming machine? good choice if so. i love old games myself, so a couple tips if you need them:

1. get a decent glide wrapper. it takes the old 3dfx glide 3d api and translates it into standard OpenGL code that any card can run. translation loss is minimal. some older games will run better with 3dfx glide and this is a great workaround. 3dfx glide was (as near as i can remember/understand) 3dfx's own api which was really modified OpenGL designed specifically for 3dfx cards like that voodoo3. please correct me if i;m wrong here guys, its been a few years.

2. if you want to play any old games based on the first unreal tournamet engine, DO NOT get an ATi card! it works, but there are some problems with texture clipping where you can see through parts of textures that you're not supposed to. lighting isn't quite right either. this may not be on all ATi card, but i have witnessed it first hand on my radon 9000 pro, a freind's radeon 9600 XT and another friend's 9550 pro. all completely different system configurations. i had my 9000 pro shortly after it came out and the early catalyst drivers didn't do this. it came up in later revisions and ATi refuses to acknowledge it. my solution was again the glide wrapper. i now have no trouble on my SLI 7900 GTO's....go figure.

3. if you're interested in running games in DOS, its actually very possible and works very well with win98 if you're willing to take the time to set it all up. i believe the best configuration is to either have a working awe64 sound blaster (or earlier) and use the true dos drivers or have just about any sound blaster live! and dig up the old emulation driver which gives you SB16 support rather nicely. after that, create a boot disk that loads up the mouse driver, cd driver and sound drive (or emulation driver for live cards). i did this a few years ago and might still have mine around somewhere. PM me if you want.
 
Voodoo3 absolutely rocked for CS beta7 - 1.5 which supported Glide. My buddy could do 99 fps and with MUCH MUCH higher texture quality to my squirrely Leadtek geforce2 GTS. The lan places I used to game at all had Voodoo 3's and were awesome! Someone mentioned the crappy 2d quality of the early Geforces, that ain't no joke! I actually thought I was going blind for those 2 years I had that card.
 
why play cs on that machine when he can play it on a newer rig just fine?

win98 machines generally speaking, are for games that have a tough time running in XP... aka some lucascarts games i have, FF7 for PC etc etc.

Geforce 2 should suit you just fine and as others have said so far, You can easily do DOS games without a problem if you take the time to set it up.

I miss playing Tie fighter =( I let someone borrow it in the dorms a long time ago and they never gave it back.
 
gf2 gts and voodoo 2 sli FTW

If it's a legacy system you probably can do away with voodoo 3 much better than a GTS. All those glide games run best on voodoo cards. You can run anything with a modern video card that geforce 2 can run anyway.
 
furyagain said:
no..
geforce2gts or ultra give you similar or way better performance then voodoo5 5500 already
do you think the voodoo3 have any chance???
the voodoo3 is more like vs geforce256SDR

by the way... if you want... go get a 9700pro...
someone is selling thsoe FIC 9700 pro brand new in ebay
good price.. around 39.99 us dollars
Click to expand...

wow that's pretty generous. I would have said tnt/tnt2 and no more than that. iirc, tnt2 ultra beats v3
 
I miss playing Tie fighter =( I let someone borrow it in the dorms a long time ago and they never gave it back.[/QUOTE]

lol i think i still have tie fighter somewhere around here:p that game pwned lol
 
ziddey said:
wow that's pretty generous. I would have said tnt/tnt2 and no more than that. iirc, tnt2 ultra beats v3
Click to expand...

as far as i can remember, no TNT 2 ever beat a voodoo3. the big argument was that although the TNT 2 series were slower, they supported 32bit colour where as the V3's did not. they could only support 16-bit. that i remember well as it was the only thing that really pissed me off about my old V3 2000
 
THRESHIN said:
as far as i can remember, no TNT 2 ever beat a voodoo3. the big argument was that although the TNT 2 series were slower, they supported 32bit colour where as the V3's did not. they could only support 16-bit. that i remember well as it was the only thing that really pissed me off about my old V3 2000
Click to expand...


It was only 16 bit in 3d mode. The screwed up thing about the whole arguement was that in 32 bit color, the TNT2 Ultra had no where near the bandwidth to play a game at 1024x768 in 32bit color, so you played in 16 bit color anyways. And guess what, the V3 in 16 bit color looked better then the TNT2 in 16 bit color, and to top it off, it was faster.
 
Geforce2 GTS slaughters the Voodoo3 in 3D performance. Nuff said. There's really no argument about it. Geforce2 GTS even beats the Voodoo5 5500 in just about every benchmark pretty solidly.

But one thing the Voodoo series were always good at was 2D quality, which Nvidia finally got around to improving with the Geforce3 series. If you plan on just playing 3D games, you're not going to notice the difference cept for vastly improved 3D performance by going the Geforce2 route. But if you plan on surfing the web on this machine here and there or looking at the screen when not gaming, you're really going to notice the difference. All Nvidia cards pre-Geforce 3 really hurt my eyes honestly.

Now, comparing the Voodoo3 vs the TNT2, the Voodoo3 wins in just about everything cept against the TNT2 Ultra. The TNT2 touted 32bit color, which it can do, but it never really had the bandwith to do so. The Voodoo3 had much better 16bit quality because it rendered everything internally in high precision 32bit mode, then dithered down. Even still, 3dfx's 16bit quality doesn't touch standard 32bit quality, but it was noticeable.

One thing we're all forgetting though, the Geforce2 can do anti-aliasing, while the Voodoo3 can't. If you plan on playing old games that don't tax the video system all that much, anti-aliasing is a wonderful bonus. I just got done playing System Shock 2 with 8xS anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabling and it looked great. Granted, I'm also using a 6800GT. But even 2x AA is a nice improvement over nothing.
 
This depends on where you stand on your experience of the older games. The geforce is going to look better and run faster then the voodoo3. It also is going to have better driver support.

However... if your aim is recreating the experience, then perhaps the voodoo3 could be better... because on voodoo cards are how a lot of us played the games back then. I had a voodoo3 only for a short period, but I did play a lot of games on the voodoo2 platform and I remember the voodoo way of rendering very well... even though it wasn't exactly the best quality, that 16bit high-gamma grainy look would probably give me a bit of nostalgia.

I am not sure I would like having to deal with the driver problems that plague the voodoo cards on XP though. Even back then they were not very advanced... could any of the voodoo series ever even do 3D in a window? I guess you could run windows 98, but it is no longer patched... so I would not feel good about connecting that thing to the net... and a lot of old games still have thriving multiplayer communities.
 
Yashu said:
This depends on where you stand on your experience of the older games. The geforce is going to look better and run faster then the voodoo3. It also is going to have better driver support.

However... if your aim is recreating the experience, then perhaps the voodoo3 could be better... because on voodoo cards are how a lot of us played the games back then. I had a voodoo3 only for a short period, but I did play a lot of games on the voodoo2 platform and I remember the voodoo way of rendering very well... even though it wasn't exactly the best quality, that 16bit high-gamma grainy look would probably give me a bit of nostalgia.

I am not sure I would like having to deal with the driver problems that plague the voodoo cards on XP though. Even back then they were not very advanced... could any of the voodoo series ever even do 3D in a window? I guess you could run windows 98, but it is no longer patched... so I would not feel good about connecting that thing to the net... and a lot of old games still have thriving multiplayer communities.
Click to expand...
I remember my v3 2000 pci back then. The thing was absolutely wonderful with the 3dfx driver for q2. The thing looked pretty gross and extra red, but I loved it. It was the only thing that made q2 bright. The standard ogl with say nvda caused it to be way too dark everywhere.

And even in q3 with the voodoo, it was surprisingly impressive. The 3dfx driver for that must have been incredibly fine tuned and tweaked, seeing hwo the v3 was already quite past its time with q3
 
Great perspectives on older cards. Seems most of you got into PC gaming a couple years before I did.

Just reformatted the Win98 rig. Took me a while to find the Detonator drivers. Amazing how fast this
system boots up once you eliminate the splash screen.

Took some time & installed my old favorite arcade style shooter games. Most of which I had not seen since 2001.
SB16 .... DOS .... no problems. Even switched up the default Windows sounds with some classic WAV files.
A couple friends stopped by & said it felt like an arcade here. :D

lasarage1.jpg

laser1.jpg

Zoom1.jpg
 
THRESHIN said:
2. if you want to play any old games based on the first unreal tournamet engine, DO NOT get an ATi card! it works, but there are some problems with texture clipping where you can see through parts of textures that you're not supposed to. lighting isn't quite right either. this may not be on all ATi card, but i have witnessed it first hand on my radon 9000 pro, a freind's radeon 9600 XT and another friend's 9550 pro. all completely different system configurations. i had my 9000 pro shortly after it came out and the early catalyst drivers didn't do this. it came up in later revisions and ATi refuses to acknowledge it. my solution was again the glide wrapper. i now have no trouble on my SLI 7900 GTO's....go figure.
Click to expand...

I owned one of the original Radeon 64MB DDR cards (competitor to Geforce 1), and the 9800pro, and installed a Radeon 7500 and Radeon 9000 in other computers. Played Unreal Tournament Editor's Choice on all of them. Worked perfect. Never had any issues, even with downloaded maps. With the original Radeon 64mb DDR card, this was pre-Catalyst era, and the drivers were not so great, but the card still played every game I had.
 
glad to hear that DOS is no trouble:) it can be a bit of a whore to set up the first time through. even if you know how to do it, i get very lazy. don't like to anymore.

the only real advantage to the V3 here is that there will be glide support which could be useful to some older games....

and finally to Macker - i didn't think that all systems would have this problem. however, i'm curious. do you remember what drivers you were using on those ATi cards? i distinctly remember that this problem surfaced around catalyst 2.3. before then i also had no trouble. i also remember an old version of rage3d tweaker had a setting specific for fixing this, but i could never find it again...
 
I've been using Radeon's since Radeon 64 vivo. Never had problems with drivers. Also the colors seemed to saturate better than Geforce at the time.
 
Man this thread is bringing back old memories....Voodoo 2 sli, Geforce 256, GF2 GTS, 9700pro....Damn I may shed a tear.
 
Ranari said:
The Voodoo3 had much better 16bit quality because it rendered everything internally in high precision 32bit mode, then dithered down.
Click to expand...

Correction:

The Voodoo3 had much better 16bit quality because it rendered everything internally in high precision 24bit mode, then dithered down.
 
i have alot of thsoe old card now..
voodoo1
voodoo2 12mb ( have two ... but different brand)
tnt1 16mb
tnt2 ultra 16 mb
geforce256 DDR 32mb
geforce2 ultra 32mb
quadro 2 pro 32mb ( it is like a geforce2ultra.. but for cad)
geforce3
8500LE 128mb
guadro4 900 XGL ( which is basily a geforce4 ti4600.. . it does run games pretty good
9700 pro on order now.. ( just picked up a new FIC 9700 pro from ebay.. waiting it to arrive


just built a old system with p3-s 1.4ghz
with 896mb memory
currently with the quadro4 900 xgl
and it runs. most of the old games. from 1999-2003 or even 2004 fine
just installed tribes :vengeance. it run pretty good at high setting at 1024*768
was really having fun on it
quake1,2,3, halflife2 , CS:source, unreal tournament 2004, halo
halflife 1 , CS, tribes:vengeance , planetside.., mafia,.....
all these run pretty smooth.. on this Pentium 3!!!!
 
It amazes me how many people still think the GeForce2 even compares to the Voodoo3. The
ONLY thing the GeForce could do better was benchmarks which were desgined to show off its chipset anyway.

The Voodoo3 beat it hands down in real world performance.
 
I have a retro gamer too, it's basically a refurbed eMachine.

Intel Celeron 1Ghz 128KB Cache
384MB PC100 SDRAM
Voodoo 3 2000 16MB
Intel 810i Chipset Motherboard
20GB Seagate Hard Drive
Samsung CD-ROM

I play Unreal Gold and Quake II on it and the like, runs beautifully...

Here are some SNs I took:
http://leon2ky.com/leon/voodoo3/
 
i was going to build a retro gamer, but i'm finding that a bit of playing with DOSbox and searching up forums i can get just about anything working just fine on my current build. i even have an old copy of wing commander 3 (mint too;) that i got working under xp. took forever, but some french guy built a patch for it to work under xp with sound and all. glad i did a little french in highschool.
 
Darth Millennial said:
It amazes me how many people still think the GeForce2 even compares to the Voodoo3. The
ONLY thing the GeForce could do better was benchmarks which were desgined to show off its chipset anyway.

The Voodoo3 beat it hands down in real world performance.
Click to expand...

:confused: :rolleyes:
 
ah man, I remember when I got my tnt2 Ultra my friends all said "32 mb of VIDEO RAM??? That's insane!" They weren't really that hardware savvy though, obviously.
 
Darth Millennial said:
It amazes me how many people still think the GeForce2 even compares to the Voodoo3. The
ONLY thing the GeForce could do better was benchmarks which were desgined to show off its chipset anyway.

The Voodoo3 beat it hands down in real world performance.
Click to expand...


you kiding right???
voodoo3 is not even as fast as a geforce 256 SDR( yes SDR)
the geforce256 DDR and geforce2GTS or ultra. beat voodoo3 hands down

old benchmark in quake3 from anandtech.com with a athlon 750
640*480- 1024*768
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=1231&p=10

1280*1024 - 1600*1200

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=1231&p=11
 
Darth Millennial said:
It amazes me how many people still think the GeForce2 even compares to the Voodoo3. The
ONLY thing the GeForce could do better was benchmarks which were desgined to show off its chipset anyway.

The Voodoo3 beat it hands down in real world performance.
Click to expand...

Are you smoking crack? The GF2 was hella faster then the Voodoo 3. In EVERYTHING!
 
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