Hello there. What is, in your opinion, the best 2d card / CPU for Voodoo Graphics / Voodoo 2 / Voodoo 2 SLI? I don't necessary mean fastest etc., but for example most suitable according to your feelings ;) That's why I choose this section and not the "tech talk". If this thread is a duplicate, please forward me to the original one. OK, give me your shots :)

Personally I prefer Matrox cards to be paired with Voodoo2/SLI, in particular a Millenium G200 8MB if you have a AGP based board. But you can use PCI based cards too if you feel soo, like Mystiques or Millenium 1 or 2's. I think the only real downside is video mode support in DOS ?

Also in regards to the CPU, probably a Intel BX based motherboard with an Intel PIII 850 or around there, I may be wrong but I have heard there is a bottleneck if your using a lesser speed CPU up to about that point.

In my experience with my Voodoo Graphics card, the max I could run the card on was an Asus P3B-F (BX board).  I am using a PIII 800mhz CPU.  I am using an nVidia Dynamite TNT AGP card.  The setup works good.

if you use only the Voodoo for 3D take a Matrox like the Millennium or G100, maybe a Tseng ET6000 most say its perfect for dos
if you use the Voodoo only for glide and want a other card for D3D use a nVidia Riva TNT or TNT2

I currently use a Matrox G400 for my Voodoo2 SLI setup, but I plan to change it with something else - while everyone seems to be happy with matrox, I found that all my matrox cards have problems in 2d - various small artefacts in 2d (they are not hardware artefacts, they seem to be problems with drivers). I think I'll replace it with a Rage 128 Pro.

Maf wrote on 12.02.10 at 22:25:13:

Hello there. What is, in your opinion, the best 2d card / CPU for Voodoo Graphics / Voodoo 2 / Voodoo 2 SLI? I don't necessary mean fastest etc., but for example most suitable according to your feelings ;) That's why I choose this section and not the "tech talk". If this thread is a duplicate, please forward me to the original one. OK, give me your shots :)

ET-6000 was one of the fastest if not THE fastest DOS gaming boards (Think Duke Nukem 3d)

For Voodoo II pairing my choice was the i740- Great opengl support and great drivers from intel.

Hmm, yes - i740 is very nice, it has 3d quality slighty better than V1, 2d quality is also good. And if we're talking about Intel - I think that best CPU for a V2 rig is a Pentium II (I have one 350 PII for my V2 SLI, it's from the same "age" with V2, but a P III 500 slot 1 is also a nice CPU.

RaverX wrote on 13.02.10 at 14:27:51:

Hmm, yes - i740 is very nice, it has 3d quality slighty better than V1, 2d quality is also good. And if we're talking about Intel - I think that best CPU for a V2 rig is a Pentium II (I have one 350 PII for my V2 SLI, it's from the same "age" with V2, but a P III 500 slot 1 is also a nice CPU.

A Pentium II 350 is indeed of 'the same age' but performance-wise it's underpowered. With the Unreal timedemo at 1024x768 a Pentium III-S 1400 is 13FPS faster than a Pentium II 450 using a Voodoo II 8MB SLI set. A Pentium III or Athlon at 600MHz is probably going to give a noticeable performance increase over the Pentium II 350.

If you use a decent CPU (350MHz+) I don't think it really matters much how fast your 2D-card is. Of course it's cool to have the fastest one (ET6000 is going strong for DOS, indeed) but S3 and Matrox also have good cards. Matrox (G100, G200, G400, etc.) have excellent 2D-image quality compared to other cards of that time.

BTW is there any relation between Voodoos and 2d card in term of displaying 3d graphics? Are there any data transfers beside passing 2d graphics when in 2d mode? I used to know, that, when in 3d mode, the 2d card is switched off and everything happens thru the Voodoo. But, on the other hand, I noticed, that Voodoo's resolutions were determined by used 2d card and I could set 512x384 in GLquake, when used together with Cirrus Logic or Trident cards, but with S3 Virge / Trio it was available.