I'm wondering if Z-Culling and HSR (hidden surface removal) do actually work on 3dfx original drivers, do they? if so.. do they work at glide level, or at OpenGL implementation DLL level (wickedGL, Original ICD, MesaFX etc..)
Do they work only when using the original 3dfx ICD?

Any information is welcome!

I ask if these features are actually really implemented on the drivers, as they are not tweakable just using 3dfxtools..

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=1382

Found the article yesterday and read straight through it.
Great read, especially about the HSR :D

Also informative about it:

http://www.techspot.com/tweaks/hsr/hsr2.shtml

I tried HSR with Jedi Knight2:Jedi Outcast (quake3 engine) and the framerate really improved when lot of map geometry is beeing displayed. The problem is.. the sky looks horrible spoiling the game, so ill stay using wickedGL which works perfectly although occasionally i get frame rate drops (when lot of geometry on the view, i think the problem is my old cpu rather than my v5) downto 5 fps (rarely, but happens)

Also when using the ICD with HSR you cant enable FSAAx4 without getting the interface of the game so screwed i cant begin to play, also with the ICD either using FSAA/HSR or not, black screen and sound but no image on movies of the game..  :-/

To bad you've got a Pentium III 866mhz.
You get about 1000 points in 3DMark 2001se if I'm not mistaking.

That's about half of what I get (2550) on my P4 2,26GHz.

Dborca staited one time that HSR was a 'hoax'.
And know I am convinced it was just a marketing thing.

AFAIK, HSR was in early Beta stage, and worked only in OpenGL and the Quake3 Engine.

(massive performance boost was gained, but at the price of massive Rendering errors)

I've also heard numerous times, that the Game's Engine needed to support Driver-sided HSR, which (at that time) only ID's Quake3 Engine did.
So enabling it in 3dfx Tools (or via Tweak) normally should not yield any results when used outside OpenGL and the Quake 3 Engine.

There, only Guardband Clipping is available and fully functional to gain a few %.

Haven't played with it for a very long time now, but my personal experiences do match up with that.

So which games use the Q3 engine?

here's a few i know off:

Quake 3 (obvious)
Medal of Honor (all of em)
Soldier of Forture 2
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Star Wars Jedy Knight (2?)
Start Trek Voyager Elite
Heavy Metal FAKK
Call of Duty

CoD and RTCW are both modified Q3 engine that is callled RTCW engine  ;)

American McGee's Alice also uses the Quake 3 engine.

Although HSR is available in the 3dfx tools in Amigamerlin 3.0 drivers it does'nt seem to work at all, remember getting a nice fps increase in Quake 3 using Windows 98 and 1.04.01 though.

I tried HSR on every open gl game I had, the only game it worked semi-right with was Quake 3, if you choose non- aggresive tiling you should notice a nice fps increase without noticing visual problems, selecting the aggressive tiling options will give serious visual problems, seeing through floors, ceilings,walls etc.

@patience,

Have you tried the SFFT driver yet ?, its in my opinion the fastest/best directX driver I have ever used with my 5500, many games which required using 3D-Analyze now work perfectly without.

This person really seems to Know what to do with the code and I'm hoping he continues his work as I'm quite impressed indeed  ;D