Poor quality with LCD and old Voodoo 3?

[Shawn]

I have a KVM switch and I switch between 2 computers. One is my main rig with a Geforce 2 GTS 64MB and the display is beautiful on my Dell 1800FP. I have an older rig with a PCI Voodoo 3 2000 16MB. I had to use a pci video card because the agp video is onboard and it's worse than the voodoo 3. The problem is the display is somewhat blurry and there is lots of flickering and random split second imperfections/distortions in the picture. I'm running it at the LCD?s native resolution 1280x1024 @ 60Hz. I think this is the video card's max resolution though. I tried increasing the refresh rate to 75Hz but the flickering and such gets worse. Is this because I am putting a strain on this old video card for making it display a resolution so high or is it something else, like a bad card? Also can I damage anything this way? It's annoying but it's manageable. Would I be better off decreasing the resolution and having the LCD stretch the display?

 

[rbV5]

I think this is the video card's max resolution though

I used to use a V3 2000 PCI as my secondary card. I ran it at 1600x1200@85hz and it had excellent 2D...noticeably better than any of my Radeon cards up to that resolution. I suspect driver issues if it isn't related to the KVM switch.

 

[Shawn]

Hmm.... i think they are the latest drivers that 3dfx actually released. I dunno for sure though. I didn't want to try any of the drivers developed by 3rd parties. Anyone have any experience with those?

 

[Shawn]

.

 

[Shawn]

I tried one of the 3rd party drivers with no change.

 

[Eug]

Voodoo 3 has pretty good 2D quality. Not as good as my Radeon 9100, but certainly much better than many of the nVidia cards I've tried. Something is wrong with your setup (KVM?) or else your card is fubar'd.

 

[Shawn]

I don't think it's the KVM since it looks fine w/ my Geforce 2. Could it be that it's PCI?

 

[rbV5]

Could it be that it's PCI?

I doubt it, mine was PCI. Since I used it only to drive a secondary CRT (22" Mitisu), I didn't need Glide support so I used the native WinXP drivers. Believe me, 2D image quality was excellent. If yours isn't, something is definately wrong.

 

[Sunner]

I've used a V3 2K-PCI with a 19" running at 1280x960 for quite some time, 2D quality is excellent.

 

[boran]

if you're sending the analogue signal trough yer KVM and then to yer display it's quite a long distance to traval for an analogue signal, my screen already show one visible defect (the bottom row of pixels stays white) when I connect it trough DVI -> Dsub converter instead of the Dsub port on the card...

LCD's can be quite picky about their analogue signal, cous they have to transfer it back to digital. have u tried coupling the screen directly to the voodoo card (so no KVM) and see if that solves it ?

 

[vegetation]

I still have my Voodoo3 in an old rig that I use for web browsing, and the 2d is excellent.

 

[ripthesystem]

I would try as Boran said and just hook the V3 directly up to the LCD (without the KVM) and see what happens.

 

[Shawn]

Crap, it was my KVM. I don't get why though........ it looks fine w/ my Geforce 2. The KVM has it's own built in cables so it's not that. Damn, this sucks........ the KVM was $40.