My memory is foggy about these things but could it even do a now regular 1080P desktop display?
What about windows are those old drivers going to work? Would someone write new more current drivers? Would it just go with generic windows drivers assigned to it?
THE GOOD:
There are special drivers for PCI Voodoo’s that work well with the latest Windows 10 x64. 1080p desktop UI speed is fine. Study this
article.
I would say the V2 SLI is the better option though, because you can use your main GPU instead and only use Voodoo when you need it. So, you don’t have to lose video codecs and what not when working with video.
The main appeal are the Glide games released in the 90s, for example on a V5 you can run Tomb Raider 1 in pure DOS with 4x full screen anti aliasing. How cool is that? The AA was of good quality and well above of what ATI/Nvidia offered at the time. There are other Glide games that can’t be perfectly emulated using a Glide wrapper. There is a list, you can google if you want. So, there is some value in that.
Except the dos games, Windows 10 can run *some* of Win9x games rather well with patches. I played
Need for Speed II SE (1997) last weekend without any problems but I had to run a few compatibility patches to eliminate sound problems. But again, if you a fan of that particular game, you can run it almost perfectly in a Glide wrapper on ANY graphics card.
THE BAD:
Bear in mind, there is a maximum resolution with every Voodoo card. V5 can't do 3D graphics above 1600x1200 for example (it can technically do 2048x1536 in 2D, though). It may look awkward on a mainstream 16:9 panel, 4:3 and 16:10 is highly recommended. Also, if you run Win9x you must have monitor drivers or else you won't get your native resolution/Hz. Sure you can tweak it, but it's a pain nonetheless. Older monitors came with Win9x drivers, though. Did I mention that only the MAC revision feature DVI output connector, everything else used analog VGA (good quality on V3-V5 though).
My retro V5 box runs on Windows Millennium (for better compatibility with older dos games) on a
16:10 monitor, 1920x1200. It was such a pain to set up everything including network shares on it for the computers (Windows 7, 8.1 and 10) on my network, but it's totally doable. You can't really browse the web on Win9x anymore, so you need supporting machines in order to download patches, tweaks and what not you may need, onboard USB 1.1 is that slow and add-on PCI USB 2.0 cards are not very reliable with Win9x. Remote desktop is doable, but not a very enjoyable experience. So, network share is still the best.
AND THE UGLY:
The drivers again. They are NOT perfect. There may be glitches depending on graphical settings. Sometimes, you need to change to a different driver for a particular game. Also, you must have Windows 9x for game library. And Windows 9x was the least reliable OS I have ever used (Mobile Nokia Symbian can compete though). Yes, I even more preferred plain DOS, too bad it lacked multi tasking. So think twice, if you really need AND want that hassle of messing with older hardware and settings. That can be, at times a very time consuming and frustrating endeavor.
Stick to modern hardware/software and run stuff emulated if you can.