[NTLUG:Discuss] Local Shops & Voodoo 4/5 Compatibility

[Steve Baker]

cam at metronet.com wrote:

> Also, anyone have any issues with the newer Voodoo (4/5) cards?

Yes - they are antiquated heaps of junk compared to nVidia cards.
I recently bought an nVidia GeForce-2 card for $128.

* The quality (in terms of bits per pixel, texture resolutions, etc)
  is FAR better on nVidia GeForce compared to Voodoo 4/5.

* The per-polygon "Transform and Lighting" step is performed in hardware
  on the GeForce, giving a polygon throughput rate that's at leat 10x
  faster than a Voodoo and leaves your CPU with virtually no work to do
  to render 3D.

* nVidia have more sophisticated special effects like bump mapping and
  per-pixel lighting.

* The top of the range Voodoo-5 has a higher pixel fill rate than the
  GeForce-2 - but you can rarely make use of that because you can't stuff
  polygons into it quickly enough to max it out.

* The Voodoo-5 has this "T-buffer" thingy - which provides full-scene
  antialiasing (FSAA) and motion blur - however, the nVidia can also do
  FSAA (using a different mechanism) and as yet, I'm not aware of a single
  delivered application that makes use of the motion blur (although there
  have been some technical demonstrations of it).

* 3Dfx cards (under Linux) have OpenSourced drivers.  The nVidia boards
  have *excellent* driver support from nVidia - but these are not OpenSourced.
  There are OpenSourced drivers for nVidia from the "Utah GLX" project - but
  they are very poor in quality.  Hence, if you are one of these people
  who *MUST* have sources for everything at any personal cost - then you should
  stick with the Voodoo cards.  If not - use the closed-source nVidia driver
  and you'll be quite happy.

If you are planning to run modern games on Voodoo hardware, you'd better
have a seriously kick-ass CPU because you're going to need it.  A Voodoo-5
in a 1GHz Pentium III box at work ran our test 3D application 50 times SLOWER
than a GeForce-2 on a 266MHz AMD!

The final nail in the coffin is that 3Dfx have failed as a company - their
technical assets were picked up by nVidia - but the Voodoo's are dead.
Don't expect device driver fixes, tech support or anything like that.


-- 
Steve Baker   HomeEmail: <sjbaker1 at airmail.net>
              WorkEmail: <sjbaker at link.com>
              HomePage : http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
              Projects : http://plib.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxaqfh.sourceforge.net
                         http://tuxkart.sourceforge.net
                         http://prettypoly.sourceforge.net