Hello all of you,

I'm planning to build a Windows 98 SE gaming machine from a Voodoo 4 4500 (or Voodoo 5 5500 perhaps) and a k6-2+ 550 MHz. It should be suitable for older games released until 2000/2001. But I wonder which driver for the voodoo would be best.

As far as I can judge, mainly four choices seem to be reasonable:

1.04.00            (original 3dfx)      - recommended by FalconFly
1.04.01 beta      (original 3dfx)
1.07.00            (x3dfx)            - recommended by FalconFly
1.07.02            (WhitetigerX7)

Here one can find some information about them (unfortunately in French):

http://www.hardware.fr/html/news/?date=21-02-2001#2994

http://www.touslesdrivers.com/index.php?v_page=21&v_code=2&v_p=2

According to those pages, the differences in speed seem to be small (at least for Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament), but 1.07.00 is said to offer better DirectX 8 compatibility (at least when using multi sampling, which probably means FSAA).

I recall that some time ago I read in some forum, 1.07.00 would offer better Guardband Clipping than 1.04.01 beta and another person reported occasional image distortions in several games with 1.07.00. But I can't say how credible these propositions are.

According to the readme file of WhitetigerX7's 1.07.02 driver, it has mainly the following advantages over 1.07.00:

- FSAA problems in Direct 3D fixed
- Glide high resolution bug (annoying horizontal stripes) fixed
- Guardband Clipping also for Direct 3D

That's all the information I have. Can anybody give me advice in that matter? Most important to me are:

- speed
- compatibility with older games of the 90s
- compatibility with DirectX 8

Thanks in advance

Roby

Hi ps47 (and all others of course),

thanks for your quick reply. Raziel64's Driver is an interesting idea.. I guess it would probably mean Glide (and so OpenGL, I suppose) being optimized for games until 2000 and D3D being mainly optimized für games between 2000 and 2004 (in Raziel64 Driver's readme file it is said "mainly compatibility with Dx8.x and Dx9.x games"). I wonder about it's compatibility with DX7 and DX6 games.

Also, I'm a little concerned about speed, since I read this:

http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1114&whichpage=2

(SuperFurryFurryThing wrote: "I tried this driver and found it very slow...")

By the way: I wonder why Raziel64's driver contains modified Glide drivers at all, as the latest Glide games were released in 2001. I mean: these games should however be compatible to the latest original Glide drivers, since no others were available at that time. Questions over questions...

I often read the advice to use the latest original 3dfx drivers (1.04.0x) for games of the day. But comparing benchmark results, it appears that 1.04.01 and 1.07.00 are more similar to each other than each of them to 1.04.00. However, for some reason it seems that experience with the 1.07.0x drivers is rather scarce. Do you perhaps know anything speaking against them? At least 1.07.00 was made by a former 3dfx driver development team, so it could even be considered a genuine 3dfx driver, I guess.  ???

One more question comes to my mind, while I am writing this :

If I would install a DirectX 8 compatible driver like for instance 1.04.01, would there be a chance to run a DirectX 8.1 game (installation of DX8.1 taken for granted)? Are DX8 and DX8.1 comatible with each other or rather to be regarded as different DirectX versions?

Thanks a lot

Roby

Hi ps47,

thanks for the info. I did a little "research" on the web in the meantime and it seems that 1.04.0x actually only provides limited dx8 support. On the other hand, FalconFly writes (http://www.falconfly.de/vsa100.htm): "...the last official 3dfx DirectX Beta Core, and while being Beta, it is known to offer good DirectX8 compatibility." So I guess it does work at least with some DX8 games.

That is why I am currently tending more to the original 3dfx drivers. DX8.0 has been released in November 2000 - and probably there weren't much DX8 games until mid-2001, I guess. Since most games released afterwards will hardly be playable with a k6-2+ 550 anyway, a DX8-problem will probably not appear too frequently. But I'll keep Raziel64's driver in the back of my mind.

But, however, the 1.07.0x and 1.08.0x drivers seem to offer some improvements over 1.04.0x (following the french weblinks above), in particular in conjunction with FSAA and DX8. DOES ANYBODY HERE HAVE EXPERIENCE WITH ONE OF THESE DRIVERS??

In addition I found something quite interesting about the FSAA-typical blurring effect - and the 1.08.04 x3dfx-community drivers. Watch this thread:

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?s=5b5a073ea664adeec27242824c21b24e&t=15...

It starts with post #19, written by colourless (the programmer of GlideXP):

"Also, from experimentation, much of the blurring with FSAA and Voodoo5 was actually caused by incorrect sample positions. The samples were shifted half a pixel to the bottom-right of the screen. Manually shifting the samples half a pixel back up to the top left cleans up a lot of the blurring."

The most interesting part is the following conversation between colourless and Fafner. In post #30 Fafner says: "The x3dfx-community drivers (1.08.04) have a toggle for this in the 3dfx tools: FSAA Jitter Control. [...] But maybe the x3dfx-community lads have changed the default from 0.5 to 0.0 already."

I nearly assume both are right: In a different forum I read someone saying that he had tried many different drivers with his Voodoo 4 4500, because he found the 2xFSAA-blurring annoying. And he said the blurring effect mainly disappeared with the 1.08.04 driver! If this is true, there would perhaps be no more need for a LOD bias adjustment with 1.08.04.

Roby

from my experience,there is always a compatibility tradeoff if you want to use custom glides.some older games simply hate them.but on second thought,you can use any glides you want,just throw the one you like to the games folder and the game will use it instead of the default one in system folder..havent tried the improved stuff like s3tc myself,so I cant really tell in this case..but those were mainly tweaks for q3 engine,if memory serves.

t-buffer effects are virtually useless (apart from FSAA),as no games really support them.fun thing to have,yes,but thats about it.

Thanks for the info. Mmmmh, I'm going to stay with 3dfx's stock glide set, I think. At least for the beginning. But I find the corrections made towards sharpness/blurriness appealing about Koolsmoky's set.

Did you ever try the 1.07.0x and 1.08.0x drivers? It is hard to find first hand information about them. Theoretically, they should offer some improvements and 1.07.00 could probably even be considered a genuine 3dfx driver... Anyone here, who has tried these? Or anyone with knowledge of the registry entries needed to reduce the FSAA blurring?

Cheers

Roby

Do the latest SFFT drivers require faster processors to reap their benefits?


On older systems are the original 3dfx drivers preferred?

Hi,

Quote:

that sounds very promising! Thanks a lot.

In the meantime I discovered a website offering Icemans 1.07.01 Beta:

http://members.tripod.com/nightstormer/voodoo_drivers.htm

Quotation: "I love these drivers, and have used them exclusively on my V5 5500 since they came out. Noticeably faster OpenGL and D3D performance over the 1.04 WHQL drivers on my rig, and I've yet to have compatibility problems. And they are VERY stable."

This version is really hard to find. I could not find it anywhere else on the internet. It is close to the "original" 1.07.00 drivers, but contains some bugfixes. Nothing else changed and that sounds reasonable to me. I guess, this will probably be the first set I will try. Perhaps this might even be an interesting addition to FalconFly's archive.

Roby

Hi,

that's interesting. Amazing, how differently people were judging those (early) 3rd party driver sets, but it sounds convincing, as you explain it.

Just because I am curious: Did at least some of the 3rd party programmers actually have the source code of the stock 3dfx drivers - or how else could anybody work on the driver cores itselves?

Do you remember, how the Reid x3dfx 1.07.00 drivers were rated back then? You highlight them as recommended in your driver table (for Win9x). And you state "...based on the last official 3dfx DirectX Beta Core". As this is not being said about 1.08.04b, I suppose it does already have an overworked DirectX core. Is that correct? Thanks.

Roby