I have been comparing the Voodoo2 drivers using 3dmark99 max Pro
I have used the following drivers:
3.03.00
3.02.02
fastvoodoo 3.0
fastvoodoo 3.5
fastvoodoo 4.0 (setting it on 90mhz not on the 93mhz default)
They were all tested on the same system using Win98SE.
And the performance was THE SAME with every driver.
I am certain that I have removed every driver and installed them correctly.
My system used a athlon 2400+ on a mobo with a KT600 chipset. The system and the voodoo's were not overclocked. So the CPU was NOT the bottleneck but the Voodoo2 were.
I think it is very strange that nothing has changed in performance.
you shouldn't expect anything else - the performance is almost the same using all of the drivers.
the things that newer versions have:
- bug fixes
- better compatibility
- better quality (sometimes)
btw. All voodoo2 cards (except the one by Creative) run pretty stable at 98MHz. Everything above 100MHz will probably either fry your card or will crash your game a lot. I have mine running at 98MHz for a long time now in a closed case, with no additional cooling. 99MHz should be OK too, but I don't wanna push it. Extra 8MHz give you about 10 extra fps.
Well I have pretty large heatsinks on my voodoo2's and can run it stable @ 100mhz. The max I got was 115mhz!!!!!
Cooling is not the prob. But what I release with this comparison was that performance can be increased by using assembly code instead of everything being coded with C/C++. Just coding the most used functions in assembly can give a performance increase of 10%+.
Look at Nvidia drivers, they tweak it by coding some functions in assembly.