3dfx Archive - Driver Recommendations Please

blitzfire

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Driver Recommendations Please
03.03.08 at 18:36:03

Hello everyone. I'm trying to decide which driver to use for my Voodoo card. My 6 year old rig consists of the following:

Athlon 900
512Meg RAM
Voodoo 3 2000
WinXP SP2

Games that I play on it: Quake (EZQuake), Quake 3 Arena (point release 1.32), Diablo 2, Frets On Fire and Warcraft 2.

I've read a lot of posts here about drivers, etc and it's come down to these 2 (which I've downloaded but not yet installed;waiting, no, counting on your feedback):

- AmigaSport 3.0
- SFFT Alpha 47

From what I've read the AmigaSport drivers is best for all around use and the SFFT Alpha 47 is more geared towards newer games with some issues with old games (and best for D3D games).

Based on the games that I play, what would you recommend?

Also I've downloaded WickedGL302.zip and MesaFX v06202. Which of these two would you recommend (again based on my play list)? Pros/Cons.

Also, should I uninstall the MS drivers first or just let the 3rd party drivers do their thing?

In the event that something goes screwy, the rollback feature should just put things back to its previous state, correct?

I've been away from the 'net and computers for awhile and just getting back into it again.

When I was playing Quake 3 using the MSXP supplied drivers for my V3 2K card I thought it was set (thought I had a openGL driver installed with XP), getting decent framerates but when I tried playing ezquake-gl it gave me an error msg. saying GLW_StartOpen()- could not load OpenGL Subsystem. So that made me think something was missing. Sure enough, the MSXP supplied drivers were just insufficient. That lead me on a quest to find good drivers for my Voodoo card. It took me awhile but I found the 3dfx archive and this forum. And I'm glad I did as there seems to be a lot of knowledgeable and experienced people on this forum regarding 3dfx products.

Sorry for the long post but I would appreciate any feedback you can provide.

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FalconFly

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Re: Driver Recommendations Please
Reply #1 - 05.03.08 at 23:07:30

Since noone has replied in some time, I'll try to give some advice...

Warcraft 2 is a 2D Game as far as I remember, so there's no special requirement for the Driver.
Diablo 2 I can't judge (didn't play it myself), so I deem Quake 3 being the most demanding Game on the Voodoo3.

Quake 3 is most demanding on a Voodoo3 due to Texture amount if set to max. Texture Detail, forcing some Texture swapping in most Levels. Due to the nature of that, there's no fix except for using Medium Texture Detail to achieve maximum Performance at optimum Quality.
Second, it is running OpenGL, where MesaFX should yield the highest performance. With the Athlon supporting 3dNow! , it should achieve some performance boost, although I deem it is not too significant (could be wrong though).

From your choices, AmigaSport should be the best one for your Games, as SFFT Alphas are indeed geared towards latest Direct3D Games that simply won't run or exhibit severe visual anomalies on older Drivers.
AmigaSport, on the contrary, has proven to be an excellent all-rounder for typical, less specialized Gaming needs.

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« Last Edit: 05.03.08 at 23:08:27 by FalconFly »

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ps47 God Member Offline Keeper of the 3Dfx Helppage Posts: 988 Slovakia,central Europe Gender:	Re: Driver Recommendations Please Reply #2 - 05.03.08 at 23:12:49 ummm.. http://www.falconfly.de/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1204579048
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Evan

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Re: Driver Recommendations Please
Reply #3 - 11.03.08 at 21:25:33

I am looking for a driver for a voodoo rush atc 2475 graphics card running win xp This was originally running on win 98 but I need an old pc for its lpt port to run a roland vinyl cutter grapics. The old Dell onboard G card died when I tried to run a monitor and a data projector at the same time and found the above card in another old pc which works but the display appears to work in safe mode only

Cheers
Evan

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ps47 God Member Offline Keeper of the 3Dfx Helppage Posts: 988 Slovakia,central Europe Gender:	Re: Driver Recommendations Please Reply #4 - 12.03.08 at 19:05:58 see here: http://www.falconfly.de/rush.htm two drivers are available,one is for for 2d only,the second one should also support opengl and glide.
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bucksavage

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Re: Driver Recommendations Please
Reply #5 - 14.03.08 at 08:05:32

FalconFly wrote on 05.03.08 at 23:07:30:

Since noone has replied in some time, I'll try to give some advice...

Warcraft 2 is a 2D Game as far as I remember, so there's no special requirement for the Driver.
Diablo 2 I can't judge (didn't play it myself), so I deem Quake 3 being the most demanding Game on the Voodoo3.

Quake 3 is most demanding on a Voodoo3 due to Texture amount if set to max. Texture Detail, forcing some Texture swapping in most Levels. Due to the nature of that, there's no fix except for using Medium Texture Detail to achieve maximum Performance at optimum Quality.
Second, it is running OpenGL, where MesaFX should yield the highest performance. With the Athlon supporting 3dNow! , it should achieve some performance boost, although I deem it is not too significant (could be wrong though).

From your choices, AmigaSport should be the best one for your Games, as SFFT Alphas are indeed geared towards latest Direct3D Games that simply won't run or exhibit severe visual anomalies on older Drivers.
AmigaSport, on the contrary, has proven to be an excellent all-rounder for typical, less specialized Gaming needs.

I can't say much about the other games, but...I did run Quake 3 Arena on my computer with my Voodoo 3 2000 16meg PCI card; ran well. Same goes for Diablo 2 LOD; it runs quite well under glide, although, I am running Win98se, not XP.

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« Last Edit: 14.03.08 at 08:14:39 by bucksavage »

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