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Video Card Choice

Weird - that page mentions Direct3D/D3D twice, but in the list of files only mentions DirectDraw. I suppose that means it can/does use it for 2D, though, which is... strange... It's not supposed to have 2D capacity, thus the graphics card chaining..
 
I've found a documented case of a guy chaining a V1 and V3 together on a Mac:
http://www.g-news.ch/articles/v3plusv1.html

This indicates to me that my initial theory is correct - if you chain Voodoo cards together they will work fine, and the Voodoo drivers dictate which card gets used based on Glide level (1, 2, 3).

The only problem here is that there could be overlap in supported Glide level, but this should be solved by making sure to put V1 drivers in the folders with games that require them.

The system I want to build won't need a V3, so I should be able to eventually have it set up like this:

Matrox for 2D->Voodoo 1->Voodoo 2->Second Voodoo 2 for SLI->Monitor

Just gotta get my hands on a Matrox, V1, and second V2. For the bare basics of the setup, to test my theory out, I'll just need a V1 and I can use non-SLI V2 and any 2D card for now.
 
Raven said:
I've found a documented case of a guy chaining a V1 and V3 together on a Mac:
http://www.g-news.ch/articles/v3plusv1.html

This indicates to me that my initial theory is correct - if you chain Voodoo cards together they will work fine, and the Voodoo drivers dictate which card gets used based on Glide level (1, 2, 3).

The only problem here is that there could be overlap in supported Glide level, but this should be solved by making sure to put V1 drivers in the folders with games that require them.

The system I want to build won't need a V3, so I should be able to eventually have it set up like this:

Matrox for 2D->Voodoo 1->Voodoo 2->Second Voodoo 2 for SLI->Monitor

Just gotta get my hands on a Matrox, V1, and second V2. For the bare basics of the setup, to test my theory out, I'll just need a V1 and I can use non-SLI V2 and any 2D card for now.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure you can link a V1 and V2 AND a 2D card together. Maybe you can, but I suppose they aren't made to be used in this way. Doesn't mean they can't be used in this manner though.
I reckon linking a V1 and V3 will make the V3 behave like any other 2D card when V1 3D is called.
Could you post back here if it works or not? Would make things interesting ;)
 
I will when I get my hands on a V1, but I need to do that first - all I have ATM is my Diamond Monster Voodoo II.
 
I think Voodoo3 deserves serious consideration as the most well-rounded card you can pick for PCI.
-great output quality
-super fast 2D GUI
-crisp, reliable and speedy Glide and no pass-thru causing blur
-great D3D and OpenGL too
-super dooper fast DOS with good compatibility
-always fanless

The most DOS game-compatible card is probably a S3 Virge or Trio64. The original Virge has some games written specifically for it too. It had its own API called S3D. It runs these fairly well.

I find Matrox stuff to be rather uninteresting at this point. 3D is quirky on even a G400 and it gets worse with older chips. G200 definitely has bugs. Mystique is quite ugly because of no bilinear filtering or alpha blending(?) (it looks like software rendering). For 2D, you'll find G400 and Voodoo3 to be equally fast. Signal quality is about equal too. Actually I have a Millennium G200 that gets noticeably blurry at 1280x960. People didn't notice this stuff back in the day because 17" monitors were the norm and you were usually doing 1024x768. In DOS, Matrox compatibility is not better than Voodoo3. They both have the occasional issue. Not sure which is better.

Number Nine's Imagine 128 cards were pretty speedy in their day. They were an OEM favorite for a couple of years. But they have very iffy DOS support. The older versions even rely on a very slow secondary VGA chip to do DOS.
 
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Here is the current snapshot of our 3DBENCH database. I look after the results and most results are from VOGON members:

In general for SVGA games that don't use 3D acceleration you want a fast CPU. PIII would be nice. Choice of video card isn't that important, there is software for cards that don't support VESA 2.0

For the slower machines the choice of video card is very important however. A poor choice can really slow down a 486!

3dbenchbenchmarkdatabas.png
 
Care to share where to download 3DBench 1.0c so I might use it in future comparisons of my own?
 
I use to have a Diamond Fire GL1000 Pro 8MB PCI card. That cost me over $800 back in 98. That kicked ass over the other cards. I went from a Matrox Mellenium to that one. Was running in my Digital P166 MMX.
 
I never really worried about video cards during the pci era. I only remember two (three if you count the voodoo1, but I don't), that I had. I had a trident card which I think was just the isa version on a pci board, and just before the agp era, I had a tseng et6000 with fast memory on it, 60-80ns or there abouts. There were also 120ns versions, but they were noticebly slower..... and I currently have a 120ns one in my spare parts. :)

I went through cpu upgrades much more often. GPU didn't do much for me back then until the voodoo came along.
 
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