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Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine? (Read 800 times)
Roby
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Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
10.12.07 at 08:02:51
 
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
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« Last Edit: 10.12.07 at 16:17:40 by Roby »  
 
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ps47
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #1 - 10.12.07 at 23:15:42
 
if you need real DX8 support,go for raziels latest build.some games run even better that with SFFT under xp,and thats quite something 8)

see Raziel64 Evolution Driver Expert Edition V1.01.16 (Lite) here: http://www.falconfly.de/vsa100.htm
note that you may want to throw in the latest original glides for maximum compatibility with old games.

3dfx tools are a separate download,here: http://www.falconfly.de/tools.htm


stick with 1.04.01 beta or 1.04.00 if you dont need the advanced stuff..
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« Last Edit: 10.12.07 at 23:20:49 by ps47 »  
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #2 - 13.12.07 at 01:59:31
 
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... Cry

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 Shocked:

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
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #3 - 13.12.07 at 11:59:37
 
approximately 5% slower than the latest original 3dfx driver,according to 3dmark2001se (if memory serves).nothing is free I guess..but its the only way how to run games like age of mythology without graphics errors.

the d3d core is backwards compatible,so it will run dx7/6 games just like any other driver.

the 1.04.xx driver does not have a real dx8 core (readme says otherwise,but if you look at the d3d version,its 4.12.xxx,and that means dx7).

dx8.1 (and even dx9) games that does not require pixel shaders should run on the dx8 d3d core..some extra fixes may be required though (enter the matrix for example requires the intel sw tl patch)..take a look the game guide in my sig if you want to see how things look like.

too bad the texture compression doesnt work 100% ok (many newer games display corruption with TC on,and disabling it results in worse performance),but there is not much you can do about it,the only driver that has this fixed is SFFT..
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« Last Edit: 13.12.07 at 12:30:12 by ps47 »  
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #4 - 16.12.07 at 03:31:28
 
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
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« Last Edit: 17.12.07 at 12:56:10 by Roby »  
 
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #5 - 17.12.07 at 12:42:47
 
KoolSmoky seems to be talking about the same matter here (see [Dec.13.2002]):

http://www.falconfly.de/info/readme-glide2610-2604.htm

I don't quite understand the purpose of his Glide driver set, although he says: "It has been extended to support S3TC (DXTC) compressed textures, T-Buffer effects for all VSA based cards including Voodoo4, and optimizations for 3DNOW!, MMX, SSE, SSE2 are used."

To my knowledge, all T-Buffer effects except for FSAA would require games that support them, right? If so, it would be all about S3TC compressed textures and the cpu related optimizations.

I have no clue, whether this would be desirable for me. What are S3TC compressed textures and do such Glide games exist at all? I mean, why should anybody have programmed a Glide-game supporting this without appropriate Glide drivers available at that time?

And regarding those cpu optimizations, I wonder whether the 3DNow! optimization is really something new. I always thought that 3dfx was among the first to support it in their drivers. Confused.

Can anybody shed some light on this? Has anybody tried these Glide drivers? Thanks.

Roby
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #6 - 18.12.07 at 00:04:59
 
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.
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« Last Edit: 18.12.07 at 00:06:12 by ps47 »  
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #7 - 18.12.07 at 01:31:31
 
As far as I remember, the updated Glide cores indeed brought some performance for several Games (e.g. Unreal Tournament or GLquake).

I'm not sure, however, whether these used 3dNow! or SSE on the Athlon I used at that time.

In the early days, the AMD enhanced 3dNow! Glide Drivers were and remained the fastest existing (Quake II era). I believe they may still yield the fastest results for any Glide Games which use the same limited feature set or less, which is their strenght but also weakness (unsuitable / lack of compatibility for more modern Glide titles). The hand-coded AMD K6-2 optimization was among the best ever available for 3dNow!...
I used those in GLquake and Sin with nice performance improvements over the stock Glide Drivers.

The additional features implemented in the recent Glide Updates I never tested/needed, except the basic Visual Quality settings (which worked fine as always).

But as ps47 said, give them a quick test (easy to do) and run comparison benchmarks of the Games you use.
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« Last Edit: 18.12.07 at 01:36:54 by FalconFly »  
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #8 - 21.12.07 at 00:53:42
 
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
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« Last Edit: 21.12.07 at 01:27:13 by Roby »  
 
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #9 - 21.12.07 at 02:13:28
 
For Win98, I used the latest x-3dfx Drivers.

They had a multitude of surplus Options, many of which (for my understanding) had no visible or measurable effect.

Overall, however, I reckognized the Driver as both the fastest and most feature-rich (tweaks that actually did work) set for Win9x.

For Visual Quality, I remember the last OmegaDrive set having an edge, albeit at the cost of some performance.

It's many years ago, but that's how I remember using them on my Voodoo3-3500 and later Voodoo5 5500.

PS.
FSAA shouldn't "blur" the image. But (depending on resolution), the smoothing effect of FSAA might occur as such.
In that case, modifying LOD Bias usually helped. I used a value of -0.5 , in some Games -0.75 for maximum Image Quality. Especially in conjunction with FSAA, the LOD Bias often dubbed as a "poor man's Anisotropic Filter".
The resulting Image quality (with 22bit POST Filter enabled) usually was far superior to any other Video Card, got alot of jealous glimps at my screen from GeForce 2/3 or ATI Radeon owners during LAN-parties back in these days Wink

All these settings should be available in the respective 3dfx Control panel (if the Driver was correctly installed). Otherwise, the VoodooControl Utility worked just as fine.
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« Last Edit: 21.12.07 at 02:19:15 by FalconFly »  
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #10 - 21.12.07 at 07:58:15
 
Do the latest SFFT drivers require faster processors to reap their benefits?


On older systems are the original 3dfx drivers preferred?
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #11 - 21.12.07 at 15:46:37
 
SFFT itself does not require a faster processor,but newer games usually do Grin
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #12 - 24.12.07 at 02:10:27
 
Hi,

Quote:
For Win98, I used the latest x-3dfx Drivers. [...] Overall, however, I reckognized the Driver as both the fastest and most feature-rich (tweaks that actually did work) set for Win9x.

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

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« Last Edit: 24.12.07 at 02:14:16 by Roby »  
 
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #13 - 29.12.07 at 16:35:27
 
I had IceMan's Drivers in the Archive in the past, but from all I experienced, they belonged to the group of early "trial & error" Driver remixes.

At that time, the idea was groundbreaking, making every of these Sets valuable to some extend (they worked for some, although nobody ever knew how or why)

These early days of 3rd party Drivers were mostly carried by the hope that 'any' of these Drivers could make certain games work - which 'some' did - again, only for 'some' Users.

I don't say they didn't work, but they quickly became obsolete when actual work on the Drivers began and functional tweaks were uncovered (based on research & testing, rather than trial & error).

Most of these Drivers simply mixed existing stock 3dfx Driver cores and contained actual changes only to the Driver Packages' .inf File (if any).
Today, that makes them rather uninteresting, as rewritten Driver Cores have long taken the lead in reliably and reproducably allowing newer Games to work by design.
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« Last Edit: 29.12.07 at 16:39:35 by FalconFly »  
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Re: Which Driver for K6-2+/ Voodoo 4/5 machine?
Reply #14 - 30.12.07 at 15:00:50
 
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
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