Retro 3dfx Voodoo1 and Voodoo5 5500/6000 Builds

[Stugots]

Never was a fan of 3DFX cards, even back in the day. I had a TNT2 Ultra back then. Those were good times back then. The 3DFX Voodoo 5500/6000 vs. GeForce 256 SDR/DDR vs. ATI Rage Fury Maxx.

I do admire the 3DFX retro builds though. I think I have a pair of mis-matched Voodoo 2's in my basement

 

[Wat]

For what its worth, I went on a retro hardware resuscitation mission last week.
My main objective was to find out what was on a pair of Conner 420 Mb ide hard drives I have been toting around for the last 30 years. (I also have a lot of other stuff like 30 pin simms that I have absolutely no use for)
⁷
Anyhoo, to my suprise both of these drives spun up and were readable. ( the last time I has used them was probably 1998-99.)
Nothing worthwhile on them. A generic windows install and a blank data drive.

But, since I was doing the deed, I decided to try out my pci voodoo banshee and a pci Nvidia 5200.

Again, both worked . The banshee has a harder time operating as a generic vga device in windows 7 than the Nvidia car,d , but it worked.

Now, I need to get my MS Sidewinder Force feedback pro back to running condition( using the microcontroller hack)
Look out descent freespace 2, Im Gonna click arse

 

[revenant]

Voodoo2 card 3D printable armor: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/9128...-3d-printed-armor-could-be-for-you/index.html

 

[TheGardenTool]

Voodoo2 card 3D printable armor: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/9128...-3d-printed-armor-could-be-for-you/index.html

That's a very neat idea. Wonder what all it would take to get them working on my Canopus cards since they aren't a reference design.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

A new, different design would have to be made for the Canopus cards since they have a different layout and are shorter.

 

[GoodBoy]

So I got a Strange God, and just ran 3DMark2001 on it. It got 4931. It ran at 1024x768 32bit depth, 24bit Z-Buffering, compressed textures, double buffering, refresh rate 60Hz FSAA none. It's Windows XP with the Amigamerlin 3 R11 Patched drivers.

Is that expected score? How can I tell if all 4 chips are in use?

I'm new to 3dfx.
********** Edit ***********
Just ran 3DMark2000, had to run in compatibility mode for WIndows 98 to get it to work. Got 8817 3d marks on that.1024x768 16bit depth, 16bit Z-Buffering, Triple buffering, 16bit textures. Both tests I just left it at the default.

More test results:
Test system: WinXP SP3, ASUS M2N-LR, Phenom 9950 2.6Ghz quad core, 1Gb ram (a single stick), 1024x768.
3DMark is a DirectX only benchmark, so these are DirectX results.
Certain tests were skipped due to no hardware support. For 3DMark2000, the Bump Mapping (Environment) test was skipped due to no hardware support. For 3DMark2001, the skipped tests were Game 4:Nature, Environment Bump Mapping, DOT3 bump mapping, Pixel Shader, Advanced Pixel Shader). Not sure how that affects the score, but the scores are still comparable to other 3dfx cards.
The 66Mhz PCI slot is the intended use for this card. I ran each test several times.
66Mhz PCI-X slot: ______________________ 33Mhz standard PCI slot:
3DMark2000 default bench (no AA) 8817 ____ 3DMark2000 default bench (no AA) 7424 _______ Display and CPU Settings: AMIGAMERLIN 3.1-R11 (Patched) for Voodoo 5 6000, 1024 * 768, 16 bit color, 16 bit textures, 16-bit Z-Buffer, Triple Frame Buffer. Using AMD Athlon(tm) optimizations. (Antialiasing: None)
3DMark2001 default bench (no AA) 4931 ____ 3DMark2001 default bench (no AA) 3752 _______ Display and CPU Settings: AMIGAMERLIN 3.1-R11 (Patched) for Voodoo 5 6000, 1024 * 768, 32 bit color, compressed textures, 24-bit Z-Buffering, Double Buffering, Antialiasing: None, D3D Software T&L.

16% (3DMark2000) to 24% (3DMark2001) performance loss using 33Mhz PCI for a 4 VSA100 chip card when no Antialiasing was used. So definitely use a 66Mhz PCI slot, or get the card in AGP.

3DMark2000 crashed during an 8-sample AA bench, I think the drivers/hardware might only support 2 sample so retrying with 2-sample AA.
66Mhz PCI-X slot: ___________________________ 33Mhz standard PCI slot:
3DMark2000 default bench+2 sample AA 5653 ____ 3DMark2000 default bench+2 sample AA 5307 _______ Display and CPU Settings: AMIGAMERLIN 3.1-R11 (Patched) for Voodoo 5 6000, 1024 * 768, 16 bit color, 16 bit textures, 16-bit Z-Buffer, Triple Frame Buffer, 2 sample AA, Using AMD Athlon(tm) optimizations.
3DMark2001 default bench+2 sample AA 3418 ____ 3DMark2001 default bench+2 sample AA 2939 _______ Display and CPU Settings: AMIGAMERLIN 3.1-R11 (Patched) for Voodoo 5 6000, 1024 * 768, 32 bit color, compressed textures, 24-bit Z-Buffering, Double Buffering, 2 sample AA, D3D Software T&L.

31% to 36% performance hit in the 66Mhz slot, to 28% performance hit for AA in the 33Mhz slot! This is old school AA and I think the big performance hits were normal.

I have to change registry settings to enable AA since the 3dfx Tools do not work in Windows XP. I can't get them to work anyway. The tools DLL's all fail to register during the install. It's a Global Setting.

I will have to get GLQuake installed for some Glide benchmarks. Also plan to install Windows 98SE on another drive and run all of the same tests.

Edit: fixed math. plus, grr the forum is removing the spaces that make the above results more readable... so, underscores.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

Is that expected score? How can I tell if all 4 chips are in use?

You can go into the 3dfx advanced options in the driver and enable single chip mode. The card should drop in performance by around 75%.

So definitely use a 66Mhz PCI slot, or get the card in AGP.

66 MHz PCI and AGP will net you about the same performance. Almost all 3dfx AGP cards don't actually take advantage of the AGP bus, and basically use it as a 66 MHz PCI slot.

3DMark2000 crashed during an 8-sample AA bench, I think the drivers/hardware might only support 2 sample so retrying with 2-sample AA.

The Voodoo5 6000 was known to have problems in AA/AF modes. The PCI bus on the card that connects the four VSA-100 chips wasn't designed properly, which results in bus corruption and instability when AA/AF was used. IIRC, there was a rework that could be done to the card to improve or fix the issue, but I don't know about the cloned card. From the reviews of the card I've seen, it looks like the Strange God has some or all of the same issues of the original.

his is old school AA and I think the big performance hits were normal.

Depends on the game and the AA level. 2x FSAA didn't impact performance much, but 4x did. Running in 32 bit color causes a big hit on frame rates.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/580/19

I have to change registry settings to enable AA since the 3dfx Tools do not work in Windows XP. I can't get them to work anyway. The tools DLL's all fail to register during the install. It's a Global Setting.

That's because they're VxDs (Virtual Device Driver), which are drivers that make direct calls to the video hardware. Windows NT doesn't allow this, the last OS that supported VxDs was Windows 98 SE.

You can go back to Windows 9x and have better driver support, but you lose your multicore processor. Not really a big loss because games at the time had no concept of multithreading, let alone multi processing. I think Quake III Arena was the only exception for a very long time. I remember my dual PIII 550 system and how much better the game ran on it.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

If you can still find it, someone on the H years ago hacked one of the Voodoo cards to double its memory. Wish I could do it to my 3070.

I've upgraded Voodoo2 8 mb cards to 12 mb, not terribly difficult. It may be possible to upgrade the single sided 12 mb cards to 24 mb, but I'm not entirely sure. Finding those 1 MB memory chips would be difficult though.

It's possible to upgrade a Voodoo1 from 4 mb to 6 mb (either 2+4 mb or 4+2 mb config) or 8 mb (4+4 mb) by piggy backing the RAM ICs and routing some of the lines to pins on the FBI/TMU chips with bodge wires. I've never had the spare RAM chips to attempt this on my Voodoo 1. While the 6 mb upgrade, with 4 MB on the TMU is probably worthwhile, the "reverse" 6 MB (with the 4 MB on the FBI) and the 8 MB mod doesn't make much sense. It allows the card to run up to 800x600, vs its normal 640x480 limit. The FBI and TMU just doesn't have enough grunt to drive such a resolution at acceptable performance. The "reverse" 6 mb mod makes the least sense. You can do 800x600 still, but you only have 2 MB of texture memory, which forces the card to go out to system memory constantly lol.

I suppose if someone ever made a franken card Voodoo1 with two TMUs, the extra RAM would make sense. I think there may have been some arcade boards with Voodoo 1 spec multiple TMUs.