I still have my Monster3D disk with those interesting demos from the Voodoo1 days.

Anyone know if these can be run on a Voodoo5? They used Glide 1, which isn't even part of the installation on later cards.

I'm not sure if it actually allocated a third buffer or not, but it never worked as intended. I even tried the original drivers.

It will still lock to half the refresh rate if you fall below 100% with VSYNC ON, with or without TB enabled.

Which is a shame, because Quake 3 could really use it.

I wonder why nobody discussed this at the time it was current?

Ages ago I tried the OpenGL way to get S3TC on Voodoo5 with UT, but it had weird rainbow glitches and was slow, and also required a specific version of 3dfxogl.dll

The guy who developed the OpenGL renderer (not Loki) recently made a D3D8 version of the renderer and I'm here to report it works GREAT on my Voodoo5.

Get it from here:

http://cwdohnal.home.mindspring.com/utglr/

I'm running in 800x600x32 and the framerate is very good, not quite as good as Glide in 1024x768x16 but it actually looks better thanks to the 32bit colour and the high res textures. Interestingly, I have discovered that triple buffering gets disabled at 1024x768 - I believe this is the case with Glide/OpenGL also, which explains why the control panel setting never did anything for me. I think this is a driver or even hardware level limitation. Strange indeed.

Anyway, here are the best settings:

[D3D8Drv.D3D8RenderDevice]
ZRangeHack=True
NumAASamples=0
UseAA=False
RequestHighResolutionZ=True
UseSoftwareVertexProcessing=True
UsePureDevice=False
UseTripleBuffering=True
MaskedTextureHack=False
FrameRateLimit=0
SwapInterval=-1
UseVertexProgram=False
TexDXT1ToDXT3=False
DynamicTexIdRecycleLevel=100
CacheStaticMaps=False
UseTexPool=True
UseTexIdPool=True
UseSSE=True
BufferTileQuads=True
BufferClippedActorTris=True
SinglePassDetail=False
SinglePassFog=False
ColorizeDetailTextures=False
DetailClipping=False
UseDetailAlpha=False
DetailMax=0
RefreshRate=0
MaxTMUnits=0
NoFiltering=False
MaxAnisotropy=0
Use16BitTextures=False
UseS3TC=True
UseAlphaPalette=False
UseTrilinear=True
UsePrecache=False
UsePalette=False
UseMultiTexture=True
MaxLogTextureSize=8
MinLogTextureSize=0
MaxLogVOverU=8
MaxLogUOverV=8
OneXBlending=True
GammaCorrectScreenshots=False
GammaOffsetBlue=0.000000
GammaOffsetGreen=0.000000
GammaOffsetRed=0.000000
GammaOffset=0.000000
LODBias=0.000000
DetailTextures=True
DescFlags=0
Description=
HighDetailActors=True
Coronas=True
ShinySurfaces=True
VolumetricLighting=True

Can a Voodoo5 PCI co exist on a modern system under XP/2k with a modern AGP/PCIE card and be usable?

Has anyone had experience with quieting their Voodoo5 fans? Mine are a bit rattly which is distracting in the first place but since the fans don't go off in standby mode, it really kills the idea of a silent standby PC.

I cleaned all the dust off them with compressed air but they're still rattling. I've been thinking of squirting a bit of WD40 at the axle (or whatever you call it) but not sure if that's such a good idea.

Any ideas?

Will I be able to install the vs-w2k-1.04.00.exe drivers on WindowsXP? I can disable the internal driver quite easily (just rename the inf).

I take it though, that Glide or something crashes even once you can get them to install, is that correct? Is there a patched (not rebuilt) version of the official Glide version that would be able to work?

I am looking for the best way to, if possible, use the final 2k WHQL drivers on XP. Not interested in the Amigamerlin stuff (all respect to him). Keep in mind the only games I play are UT and Q3A.

Will a Glide3x.dll be released with this enabled by default (the one with the MesaFX only worked if you enabled it)? It would be neat to play some of those old Glide games which ran a steady 60 fps with "free" Temporal AA.

I always thought my Pentium III 933 MHz was a very good match for my Voodoo5, but it seems that I'm actually still quite CPU limited.

In UT2003 which I put on this old machine, I actually get identical scores in flyby (the supposedly non CPU heavy of the benchmarks) at 1024x768 and 800x600! So this means it's still CPU limited.

A large reason for this surely is that fact that V5 has to do all T&L in software. This obviously takes out a hefty chunk of your CPU especially in a game like UT2003, but it must also mean that the Voodoo5 would actaully scale better than the T&L cards of the time with faster processors than were available at release.

So for those of you who've hung onto your Voodoo5 cards to put into Pentium 4 and AthlonXP systems, what would you say is the CPU speed needed to absolutely max out the potential of these cards? 1.5 GHz? 2 GHz?

I'm curious! I have a feeling that UT2003 would run quite smoothly on a Voodoo5 and 2.0 GHz processor! And as for the Voodoo5 6000, that would probably run like butter! Sadly I cannot try it myself because my P4 board doesn't support AGP 3.3 volt.

I'm thinking of putting Windows2000 on my WindowsME machine, since I plan to network it with this one and I might go wireless. I have a Voodoo5 in that machine and I know that even with AmigaMerlin, the card is still not well supported under XP, so it will be 2k.

I really only use that PC for a few games like Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, ePSXe and N64 with their Glide plugins.

How is the performance/compatibility of the final Win2k 3dfx WHQL Voodoo5 drivers in OpenGL, Glide and Direct3D?

I tried Mip Map dithering on my Voodoo 5 AGES ago on one game, Ultima IX, and all I noticed was that mip maps had a ugly dithering between them which was probably more distracting than normal bilinear mip map levels. I turned it off never touched the option again.

Until today, when I was playing around with my old system. I turned it on and fired up Quake 3. Being used to the rather obvious mip mapping in Quake 3, especially with certain floor textures, I was AMAZED at how it looked with mip map dithering on. It looked damn close to trilinear! This was something I never thought the card could do. It didn't look anything like the actual "dithering" that I remember. There was a smooth gradiation between mip map levels.

Needless to say, I'm rather shocked at having missed out on that IQ improvement at the time. Of course now I use anisotropic on my new syste, it still looks crap by comparison, but it looks a lot better than bilinear.

Now the 3dfx help says this is achieved by blending between mip map levels. Isn't that basically what has been said about NVIDIA and it's cheating trilinear or "brilinear" filtering? Or is it yet another fake trilinear method?