How hard is living with a Voodoo 5?

[amdforever2]

I was going to buy one for the nostalgia factor or whatever and actually use it, but between it not working in Rise of Nations (and probably other games) and the lack of driver support, are these cards pretty much unusable?

What is one worth?

 

[Paulson]

Well considering I still use a voodoo 3 I don't think it'd be too hard to live with

 

[FoBoT]

any card that has XP drivers isn't totally useless, somebody will buy it from you for the right price

 

[Schadenfroh]

voodoo5 rocks, best FSAA image quality at 4/2x
driver support exists, the best are from a group of people called 3dhq, the latest is their 1.09 beta10, they come in all flavors. i lived with a voodoo5 up untill january. you can still live with it today. for games that run hwTL, you can use 3d analyze, you can get BF1942 working using it. as long as the cpu is fast, it will run. Most games will run on a voodoo5 if use the tools described, and as long as the cpu is very powerfull it will run decently.

i own 2, they rock.

 

[NikPreviousAcct]

My roommate has one, and it's not that bad. Really, it's not.

/me strokes my GF4 Ti4600

 

[Rallispec]

I love my voodoo5--- just be careful--- its not compatible with all Pentium 4 motherboards.... at least not some of the Asus ones that i know of.

 

[GoingUp]

i have a 9700 aiw

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: Rallispec
I love my voodoo5--- just be careful--- its not compatible with all Pentium 4 motherboards.... at least not some of the Asus ones that i know of.

correct, no 1.5 volt agp slots for you

 

[sandorski]

If you want to play newer games you're better off with something else, but it would be grat for older games. I retired my Voodoo5 5500 last fall mainly because it wouldn't play NOLF2, BF1942, or other games that require Hardware TnL. It played NFS HP2 reasonably well, UT2k3 poorly(depending on map), but it has good third party WinXP support, although if you want to play older games WinXP is a poor choice for an OS.

 

[squidman]

:evil: beat me Voodoo 5 6000! 4 chips, its like a friggin oven...only its fried...but sides that - the best vga of its time. Its still mighty kickass, i mean, how many producers use 4 processors, and an external power connector?

 

[Schadenfroh]

Originally posted by: squidman
:evil: beat me Voodoo 5 6000! 4 chips, its like a friggin oven...only its fried...but sides that - the best vga of its time. Its still mighty kickass, i mean, how many producers use 4 processors, and an external power connector?

these people

16 3dfx® VSA-100? graphics accelerators with up to 1 GB of dedicated graphics memory to deliver unmatched realtime 3D performance

 

[iwearnosox]

Originally posted by: Gobadgrs
i have a 9700 aiw

My condolences.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: iwearnosox

Originally posted by: Gobadgrs
i have a 9700 aiw

My condolences.

Go put your sox back on.

- M4H

 

[Jalidi]

Amigamerlin's drivers for WinXP, specifically 2.5 SE, seem to be the best ones out for a Voodoo5 user.

http://www.voodoofiles.com/9488

I think we can all agree that 3DFX's FSAA was probably the best ever implemented into hardware. I decided to chance on picking up one of them on ebay for installation into an arcade machine which has been running on a Voodoo3... it's a nice card, but unfortunately has two strikes against, one that it doesn't have FSAA in hardware, and two, that unofficial driver support for it is quite lacking compared to the more advanced Voodoo5.

I'm personally installing my Voodoo5-5500 for use in a Win98SE arcade machine (for that, I'm using the Amigamerlin 2.9 Win9x drivers) since I'm hoping to be able to make use of Glide for emulation, particularly N64 emulators which use the Glide64 plugin. I'm predicting that the FSAA 4x would be absolutely beautiful since there are so many awful jaggies in N64 games... since I'll be running it at 640x480, no higher, the video card will provide sufficient power for years to come. I'm also hoping for a visual quality improvement in GENS, ZSNES, and the emulator I use most, MAME.

The Voodoo5 isn't so great for modern-day games, but the amigamerlin drivers I've pointed out apparently enable Open_GL (forget D3D) thus allowing games like UT2k3, WC3 and GTA3 to actually run... RoN might be a little too new, though amigamerlin is going to be releasing another update very soon which should be a significant improvement. When that fails, try the WickedGL drivers, I've had some success with them. A word to the wise: don't install DX9, it's actually recommended that you use DX8.1b with the Voodoo drivers.