Voodoo or not to Voodoo?

Shades2585

Shades2585

none
I was thinking of getting a Voodoo card to go back and play Prophecy and SO. Will this do any good for Standoff or UE or should I stay with my nvidia?
 
Nvideas should work fine, from what I've seen. There are conflicts with 32bit and Radeons, but that seems to be the only issue that I know about, personally.
 
Here's the lowdown.

3dfx went down the tube several years ago. Their top-of-the-line card was the Voodoo5, which was good at the time, but suffered a severe performance plateau because of its use of SDRAM.

You can buy an AGP 8x nvidia geforce 4 mx480 with DDR RAM for cheap enough and it will perform better than the Voodoo5 because of its increased memory bandwidth. You can even buy an FX5200 for les than $100.

I would recommend sticking with a video card not based on yesterday's technology.
 
Thanks Tempest. I realize it will work I was just wondering whether there were any 3dfx graphical advantages by using it like in Prophecy or SO. If it’s not written to utilize it then I won’t bother trying but if it does then I will.
 
True Nomad Terror, and I would agree with you if we were using today’s game engine technology but we talking about a game based on “yesterday” engine. I suspect that the Standoff and UE crew have pushed the Nvidia as far as they can and I already have a geforce4 128mb that I’m happy with I was just wondered weather Standoff of UE had any visual differences utilizing the Voodoo like Prophecy or SO do that’s all. If not I won’t bother trying it and I’ll just set up another computer with a Voodoo 5500 for Prophecy and SO by itself. That’s all.
 
The game uses an old graphical engine, but with pretty high-poly models. Especially on the Lionheart. The first rig I tried Standoff on was a Duron 700 with 256 MB DDR and a GeForce 4 MX440 with 64 MB DDR, and anytime the Lionheart was being rendered (in-game or in briefings), the game started to lag like crazy.

Without rendering optimizations present in newer engines, you would actually need more beef to see high poly models in older graphic engines.
 
Buy a GeForce 6800 and run a glide wrapper. It will get you all the pretty bells and whistles not present in direct3D WCP/SO/UE/SOff
 
I just recently heard about the glide wrapper but I’ve heard some are kind of fluky. What you suggest would be a good stable one for a ti4200 and should I try that as well with Standoff and UE?

Thanks for the help folks. I just want to get the best out of the game(s) that I can.
 
Standoff des not support Glide.

But if you want to try Glide, I recommand using true Voodoo hardware instead of a wrapper... you can get a Voodoo3 for 10$ on ebay, and it's enough to run WCP/SO/UE. I even got one free !

By the way, Unknown Enemy is gorgeous on a Voodoo3's Glide in 1027x768 ... :cool:
 
Please don't suggest a 5200. I had one of those, and it was a waste of money. For $40 more, you can get a 9600 XT. Unfortunately, it seems that ATI cards don't like WCSO, or the mods. If you're looking for a cheap card, go with the GF4 MX series, but don't spend much more than $50. If you want a card with some muscle, for cheap, look at the GeForce 6600 series.

Then again, if a 9800 Pro works reliably, go for that. ~$180 is a steal for a card that was, until recently, top of the line.
 
Some years ago I would have suggested to also get a voodoo card. However my (recent) experiences with glide wrappers have been much better then I had believed. For windows I use:
http://home.t-online.de/home/zsack/
which works decently for Diablo 2 and WCP. For DOS there is GLIDOS which costs $30 or so IIRC. Too much for me considering the only game I would need it for is Tomb Raider 1. It (the demo) also worked fine for me however.
 
cff said:
Some years ago I would have suggested to also get a voodoo card. However my (recent) experiences with glide wrappers have been much better then I had believed. For windows I use:
http://home.t-online.de/home/zsack/
which works decently for Diablo 2 and WCP. For DOS there is GLIDOS which costs $30 or so IIRC. Too much for me considering the only game I would need it for is Tomb Raider 1. It (the demo) also worked fine for me however.
Click to expand...
That's the best wrapper I've used so far. And it has some advanteges over a true Voodoo card^, imo:
- You can double the Resolution for older games that only support, for example 640x480 res. (That's what I do for WC Prophecy, SO, UE instead of high res patch or so ;) )
- Used on a newer card it is a bit faster than a Voodoo 4, I'd say, but slightly slower than a Voodoo 5 (could only test it against V5, but was only 10-20% slower if I remember correct.) So better than add in cards
-no need for extra pci-slot or two (SLI ;) ) - oh, and I made the experience that 2x V2 are too slow for Diablo II. So for that specific game you'd even need an extra pc or change the gfx card for gaming ^^

P.S.: Sure, it still has issues with a few games, but true Glide cards have them as well (I just say Pod, for example :( ), but it's getting better and better...
 
Unregistered said:
Please don't suggest a 5200. I had one of those, and it was a waste of money. For $40 more, you can get a 9600 XT. Unfortunately, it seems that ATI cards don't like WCSO, or the mods. If you're looking for a cheap card, go with the GF4 MX series, but don't spend much more than $50. If you want a card with some muscle, for cheap, look at the GeForce 6600 series.

Then again, if a 9800 Pro works reliably, go for that. ~$180 is a steal for a card that was, until recently, top of the line.
Click to expand...

GeForce FX5200 for $52. ATi Radon 9600XT for $149. Hardly $40 more.

Unfortunately not everyone has $150-$200 to spend on a video card.
 
The man is partly right, though. I got a 5200 a few months ago, and now I wish I had saved money for some more time and bought a mid-range ATI card instead.
 
The FX5200 is the DX9 equivalent to the MX420, which has been good enough for a lot of people I know.

I know people who are happy with FX5200s and people who are happy with MX420s
 
Well, I suppose you can say it does work fine, as long as you don't try to run any games with extra-fancy graphics. It sure works fine enough for Standoff. :p

(In all fairness, performance seems to vary a lot. It works fine in some pretty recent and good-looking games, but it has serious issues in other games which aren't even as detailed...)
 
nvidia cards tend to fare better in opengl-based applications, whereas ati cards tend to take the lead in d3d-based applications

A lot of games will let you change your rendering method. Sometimes it may be hidden like in Unreal Tournament (and I think in 2k3 and 2k4 also), but it may be there. Probably not Microsoft games though.
 
I haven't played any OpenGL games lately, though. The huge shifts in performance I get are from one D3D game to the other.
 
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