Will the also be a WinXP 64 driver for our 3dfx cards, I'm not sure if it will be possible, hence the technology hehe.

If there are some drivers for the new OS I'd like to know,

Greetz,

Ben Kenobi.

Well the hardware won't be the problem.
Someone has to rewrite/recompile the drivers to work with 64Bits Operating systems.

I think this is going to take al lot of time so chances are high we have to play around with the "old" 32Bits drivers  :P

I hope this doesn't mean something like...

3dfx is going to die!

???

:-/

:-X

:'(

I'm sorry but this REALLY is a non-issue- How many people are going to run a 3dfx card with XP64?

I'm willing to do it, on my Dual Opteron 244 system, that's why I asked :)

wrote on 29.06.05 at 16:24:08:

I'm sorry but this REALLY is a non-issue- How many people are going to run a 3dfx card with XP64?

If my next PC has PCI slots (and it will :P) I'm going to run a Voodoo II.
Since I have plans for a dual AMD Opteron it's likely I'm going to run 64Bits Windows when all the drivers are ready  :)

When I'm going to run a 64Bits OS I still want to use my Voodoo II's for UT or something. Of course I will make a multiboot system but it's easier to run the cards on 64bits OS since Unreal Tournament will run on it too.
(I Play UT with my Voodoo II's...)

thanx, Thandor for joining my idea's hehe, well I'm not alone on this one and I'm quite sure, there will be more, that would   want a WinXP 64 driver for thier cards, it's is alwyas possible to run 32bit app's on it so why not. :)

It would be wise to make a WinXP 64 driver for out Voodoo's, as they did for aal other Win32 OS'es.

I doubt glide is able to operate under 64-bit enviroment..

if there are drivers for it it may yet be possible, it it possible to run 16 bit apps in a32 bit enviroment, so why not 32bit apps in a 64Bit OS, if there is a possibillity to create 64 bit drivers for a Voodoo4 or 5  maybe a next life will be created for those cards, just think'n out loud here :)

we could still run Unreal on a 64Bit OS with WinXP 64 drivers for our voodoo's, then our cards can take advantage or our 64Bit CPU's hence thier scalabillity with faster CPU's.

why don't you ask amigamerlin if it is possible? i guess he is the one who can answer!

yeah good idea, I'll think I'll do that, I'll send him a PM today:)

Thanx for the IDea Chosen_One :)

P.S. I'll send you my Bios dump of my 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP Rev.A 2500 later on today ;)

May The Force Be With You...Always,

Ben Kenobi.

I think it would be far more interesting to develop dual-core drivers. You could for instance have one of the cores handle AGP Texturing (if that's possible) and HW T&L and let the other core do the general stuff.

Should improve performance significantly.

I'm afraid none of above would improve performance, since the VSA-100 core would still suffer from its internal Triangle Setup bottleneck.

That's the reason it wouldn't scale a bit, the available AthlonXP Platforms already completely maxxed out the Voodoo5's internal potential.

At present, one could increase CPU performance by a factor of 10, and observe (at best) a 5-10% increase in resulting end performance.

maybe, is till think it would be worth trying it out, if the OpteronDP244 is used in 64Bit mode it's 40% faster, that would mean that the rest of the system would be 40% faster also, so maybe still it would be worth while.

wrote on 30.06.05 at 15:28:41:

maybe, is till think it would be worth trying it out, if the OpteronDP244 is used in 64Bit mode it's 40% faster, that would mean that the rest of the system would be 40% faster also, so maybe still it would be worth while.

Sorry it doesn't work that way, the cards are the limiting factor.

Oh well I suppose i didn't relize it yet hehe. still it would nice to try out.

The Voodoo5 cards are still amazing the way they are really.

@Obi-Wan_Kenobi,

Once the voodoo 5 hits its limits of fillrate (667 Mpixels/s) and  video ram bandwidth of 5.3 GB/s
(128 bit x 2 x 166 MHz) it simply cannot go faster without overclocking the gpu and memory  ;)

well...performance is not the whole world! but if we have 64bit-support 3dfx will enter a new level! we can use a voodoo in the future! with a 64bit cpu....and a 64bit OS! that's the future! and i guess everybody want to install a v5 5500 pci in a 64bit-system....boot winxp x64 and have fun...

i guess everybody knows this quote: "In this place all think voodoo..."

so don't be pessimistic and think voodoo!!!

OHM! Voooooodoooooooo OHM! ;D

(meditates and begins to float!)...LOL! ;)

But seriously, a 64 bit CPU would be beneficial as Voodoo's rely on the CPU to do calculations - and since ALL CPU's will soon be 64 bit, someone will need to test it soon! 8)

yeah I was thinking in that kind of direction, look I don't have the brains to program but there are some idea's floating around, and when one idea get's in the way and I'm not so sure I will post it here hehehe

but Voodoo5500 you do have a point, the Voodoo5 5500 AGP does 5.4 GB per sec and 667 - 733 MP per sec, that's how 3dfx once said it, but indeen OC'ing isn't that helpfull either, okay the card has that as it's max, but I'm still quite confident that if the CPU can do 40% more of it's original output in 64Bit mode that Voodoo5 will move along with it, because otherwise the whole system won't get a 25% overall improvement.

Sorry I'm not so mathematical though . :-/

Regards,

Obi-Wan Kenobi

As I said, the CPU power is irrelevant at current levels already.

The Triangle Setup of the Card itself can only handle this much.
Even if all T&L was performed on a Quad Dual Core Opteron in 64bit, the performance would remain almost identical, since the Card can't go any faster than it already does.

I'm afraid there is no way to bypass this bottleneck, since this is hard-wired in Silicon, no workaround possible.

My own testing has shown me that on my amd cpu's the performance gains stop at around 1700 mhz in 640 X 480 resolution.

Running one of my pci models on an athlon 64 3400 @ 2400 mhz gives me almost identical scores unless I overclock the card   ;)

Speaking of overclocking, I have 2 pci models, one has Hyundai ram that runs @ 185 mhz very nicely, but my other has Toshiba and has run a GLExcess demo loop for 4 hrs straight with no problems @ 200 mhz stock cooling  ;D, so much for the theory that only the ones with Hyundai ram have some overclocking potential  ;)

sorry guys, but somethings are hard fgor me tyo relizes at some times, but I understand now, I suppose my brains wern't funtioning propperly hehe, and taht for a Jedi Master hehe. :o

But yeah i see the logics now, OC'ing would be the only way out to a higher speed, but even that has it's limmits.

Thanx everyone for the help, The Force Is With You all, I can Sense that ;)

Regards,

Obi-Wan Kenobi.

wrote on 01.07.05 at 01:39:56:

My own testing has shown me that on my amd cpu's the performance gains stop at around 1700 mhz in 640 X 480 resolution. Running one of my pci models on an athlon 64 3400 @ 2400 mhz gives me almost identical scores unless I overclock the card   ;)

I have observed similar behaviour with my cards.the performance hits its limit with a CPU around 1500-2000MHz.it simply wont go any faster after that,no matter how much CPU power do you feed it..

In order to produce a "64-bit" compatible 3dfx driver for the next Windows OS, there is not as much work involved as you would expect.

Due to underlying 32-bit support for existing software to operate on a 64-bit CPU, the whole software design does not need to be re-structured to such algorithms as multi-threading.

Instead, we only need to reconfigure the read header of the driver, so that it recognises the hardware through the new OS.

Re-designing Glide is another matter.  In order to adopt Glide into modern games that are aimed at the new 64-Bit OS' (but this will never happen), Glide would have to be re-structured to use 64-bit architecture.  However, this is really not worth the effort, and we would just have to rely on 32-bit support for our old games that already utilise the Glide API.