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Ok, so I was reading around some old 3DFX sites recently, mainly looking for test results and capibilities of the old Voodoo 5 6000 board that never got into production (you know, that moster board that had four VSA-100 chips one it), adn came accross an interesting discussion on a Voodoo2 SLI setup running Doom3.
The original thread can be found here.

Now, not only did this guy get Doom3 working ona  Voodoo2 setup, but it was running at a playable framerate, and the graphical quality didn’t take much away from the game. That being, it looked better than it did when I first tried to run Doom3 on a AthlonXP 2600+, 512mb DDR266, GeForce FX5200, and ran smoother.

So this got me thinking. HOW much further in 3D graphics PROFORMANCE wise have we come?
Sure we can do fancy shader effects and such now, but at the basic level of the good old Z-Buffer and TMU’s and whatever else these old cards did before nVidia brang in the GPU, how much FASTER are these cards with all this tech? Or are they just pure grunt machines with no real speed?

So I’ve decided that I’m going to have to run some tests my self, since it seems no-one on the net is as crazy as I am in trying to compair 1997 tech (read Voodoo1/2) to 2008 tech (read my GeForce 8600GT), thats 11 years worth of hardware “improvements”.

Now, back in the old days, 3D tech was up and down, some cards supported some things, and where faster at one thing than another.
For example, if you wanted OpenGL, you got a 3DFX card, if you wanted DirectX, you got nVidia.
Also, if you wanted to see Unreal Tournament running in the sweetness that was Glide, you needed a 3DFX card.
Some cards also didn’t do 2D, some did both but did one woefull.

So I’ve got assembled a grand selection of graphics hardware from 1997 to 1999.

• 1x 3DFX Voodoo1 8mb
• 1x 3DFX Voodoo2 12mb
• 1x 3DFX Voodoo Banshee 16mb
• 1x Riva TNT2 M64 32mb (Riva = nVidia)
• 1x ATi Rage 128 32mb
• 1x nVidia GeFore MX 32mb (original version)

I wanted to get my hands on a Voodoo3 and a TNT1, but those things are so bloody hard to come by, and I can basicly forget trying to get a Voodoo5 anything, those things are almost imposible to find.
Actualy, I take that back, theres one on eBay right now that I might be bidding on (forget the Voodoo3 atm, 80pounds on eBay atm)

The basic test i’m going to run these cards through, as well as a GeForce 8600GT will be:

• 3D Mark 2001
• Quake2 2.14
• Quake3 1.32
• Expendable (yeh, remember this game?)
• Doom3 (with relevent patches to get the game running on older hardware)

So yeh, I think it will be interesting to see how it all fares, and hopefuly I’ll have a Voodoo5 5500 to test with them

Top row: nVidia GeForce MX, ATi Rage 128
Middle row: 3DFX Voodoo2 12mb, Rivia TNT2 M64
Bottom: 3DFX Voodoo1 8mb, Voodoo Banshee

Well, I’ve been playing an excessive amount of Quake4 online, and tried going back to Quake3.

It just feels weird, the maps seem way more verticle, and the game heaps slower, so Quake3 now = CPMA.

http://greentubelan.yi.org/forums/index.php?topic=200.0