New Voodoo3 drivers

[Goi]

New voodoo3 drivers are now available(actually according to the date on 3dfx's website its been available for a few days). Anyone tried them out? What's it like? I still have the 1.0.5 and would like to know if anything's different

 

[Rellik]

I had issues with the 1.05 so i upgraded from 1.04. I got 300 3d Marks more. UT didn´t gain, but I will do a fresh install this weekend...

I like em....

 

[BFG10K]

Yesterday there was some stuff-up on 3dfx's page and the new drivers linked to the V4/V5 1.03 WHQL drivers. They seemed to have fixed it now.

I am downloading them now and I hope the Quake 3 performance is as good as the 1.05.01 beta drivers, which is what I have been using for several months now.

 

[BFG10K]

Well I just tried them. They drop 1 FPS from the beta drivers I was using in Quake 3. There seem to be some new options in the "advanced tools" for Z-buffer settings and for VSYNC (finally!). Other than that there are no real changes.

 

[scrubman]

yahoo!!!! new drivers that actually IMPROVED performance in Q3!

i went from 76fps to 82fps with no changes other than installing the new drivers and running the timedemo!!!!

3dfx is doing good at trying to keep me from making the jump to NVIDIA!! but idunno... i think that a GeForce2 with tv out for around $150 is gonna make me jump!! and they are just about there!

btw... my v3 3000 agp is at 166Mhz speed again since the new win98 install

 

[Goi]

scrubman, cool. I guess I'll try them out. Are they better than the WickedGL drivers? I'm currently using the latest WGL drivers for Q3 since they're slightly faster than the 3dfx 1.0.5 WHQL drivers for Q3.
BFG10K, if I remember correctly, you have a relatively low frequency Celeron system. You might be CPU limited, which explains the relative uselessness of the new drivers for you. Correct me if I remember wrongly about your system though.

 

[Goi]

Doh, I don't know what I've been smoking. I thought the WGL drivers were faster than the 3dfx drivers. I thought I did a benchmark comparing the 2 to find that out, but I just did another one just now and the WGL drivers are MUCH slower, Sheesh!
Anyway, here are my Q3 benchmark results(demo001). I benched thrice for each driver at a custom 800x600 configuration.

WGL 81.4 82.2 82.2
3dfx 1.0.5 WHQL 88.6 88.6 88.5
3dfx 1.0.6 WHQL 90.6 91.1 91.1

The new drivers are tangibly faster, but I don't think its significant, or even noticable, in gaming situations. Of course, the speed increase is very very welcome.

 

[BFG10K]

BFG10K, if I remember correctly, you have a relatively low frequency Celeron system. You might be CPU limited, which explains the relative uselessness of the new drivers for you. Correct me if I remember wrongly about your system though.

You do indeed remember correctly. But the driver readme says:

OpenGL Improvements for Quake 3 performance on Celeron, Pentium Pro, Pentium II's, and Pentium MMX and Non-MMX.

So I would expect my system to receive a boost. I tried turning off VSYNC and bumping up com_maxfps but it didn't change anything.

 

[Goi]

Hmmn, well you're outta luck then. Basically I think you're CPU limited, so an increase in video card speed via the new drivers won't really help you much.

Anyway, did anyone notice the new "Geometry Assist" option under 3dfx Advanced Features->Direct3D? Not that I play any D3D games, but does it really help the V3? I haven't tried 3DMark2000(the only D3D software I have) with that yet...

 

[BFG10K]

Hmmn, well you're outta luck then. Basically I think you're CPU limited, so an increase in video card speed via the new drivers won't really help you much.

The drivers don't increase the video card speed. If the drivers have been optimised for speed that means they use less CPU cycles and so will help anyone in CPU limited situations.

I really don't see the point of somebody with a 1 GHz CPU receiving a boost and somebody with a 500 MHz CPU not getting anything. After all going from 150 to 160 FPS is not really that big a deal but going from 50 to 60 FPS is a big deal.

Oh well, it really doesn't worry me that much. I won't have my Voodoo for much longer anyway.

 

[Remedy]

Of course ppl with a 1 gig athlon aren't going to see that much of boost because the cards currently are the bottleneck at 750mhz cpu's and up. Instead of getting rid of your voodoo why don't you try spending money on a new motherboard and cpu. A 750 duron for about 85 bucks and a some socket a boards are as low as 103 bucks before shipping. Basically your system is the bottleneck not the card.