I worked at 3dfx and was in the team for the development for the Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5. As we saw it at the time, the main competitor for the V5 was the GeForce 2. At the time the GeForce 2 was able to outperform the Voodoo 5 in most games, especially in OpenGL, so our task was to highlight the V5’s image quality over speed. In the retail channel and for demonstrations, the sales pitch was that ‘speed doesn’t matter at 60FPS and above since image quality is what is most important’. The GeForce 2 could run many then-popular games such as Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Quake 3 faster than the Voodoo 5 in most cases, and the antialiasing feature on the V5 was going to be its signature advantage rather than speed. Nvidia introduced an antialiasing feature into the GeForce 256 driver, which was a software solution and unusable, however the GeForce 2 was powerful enough to handle it at lower resolutions. Of course Glide was where the 3dfx cards had no competition, however Glide as an API was beginning to fall out of popularity thanks to DirectX and drivers for the V5 were hurriedly released with better DirectX support.
@@PixelPipes Yes the VSA-100 product would definitely have been much better off if it arrived a year sooner than it did. The biggest problem with the VSA-100 cards was their reliance on Glide to run optimally. Glide in itself is a very similar, yet slightly more simplified API to OpenGL 1.1, which made it fairly easy and quick to develop for, however it also lacked some features in the OpenGL API to make it more streamlined and focused primarily on speed. And that’s where things began to go wrong for the VSA-100 from the start. DirectX being a key component to Windows meant that most developers were going to feel obligated to support it, even though Direct3D in its early forms was slow and extraneous to program for. The VSA-100 was at a decided disadvantage in OpenGL and far underperforming in Direct3D. So all this means is that 3dfx was in a bind when the industry was going to quickly adopt Direct3D and hold on to OpenGL. The Rampage product was going to be the big move toward full native support for Direct3D and OpenGL without any mini driver-wrappers. I played Quake 3 using Rampage boards and we had it running very fast but reliability issues and graphic rendering problems were never able to be resolved before the end came. One last thing - the Voodoo 5 6000 was going sold with an aluminum case - not a PC case, but just a cool looking case to protect the card and power supply. It would have made for a cool unboxing :)
@@ScreamAndFly Amazing tidbit on the Rampage! Current efforts to write drivers from scratch for what prototypes remain is slow going at best without documentation, but it's still a fascinating project. The V5 6000 is such an interesting and strange product. I don't think it would have turned the tide for 3dfx but it would have been something the fans would appreciate. Hence people spending $6k or more on working examples today. This video actually does the V5 a disservice somewhat in the D3D tests. I found out FRAPS was hurting performance for the V5 specifically, and so I did a follow-up video (pinned comment) with corrected results. Honestly I think the D3D performance was actually pretty impressive, especially given what you said about non-native support.
@@PixelPipes Well the VSA-100 did support D3D, however that support was limited. The VSA-100 did not have hardware transform and lighting and therefore would not be compatible with DirectX 7. D3D was a bit of a mess for developers in general back then, but the GeForce cards had hardware T&L and that was going to be an ever-winding advantage gap, especially as DirectX was itself improving. As cool as the V5 6000 was, it would have been a retail disaster. Back then, a $600 video card was considered very, very expensive, and yet the V5 6000 would not have even supported DirectX 7. The GeForce 3 was around the corner and very few games were being introduced with Glide support by then. It just didn’t make any sense and that project definitely made inroads into the Rampage development. The V5 6K had the ‘wow factor’ from a ‘bigger is better’ point of view, but as a mainstream consumer product it was just all wrong. The GeForce 3 was a more capable product and at the time of introduction the GF3 Ti200 hit retail being under $200. On top of that, the V5 6K would obviously not fit into some smaller cases, and that rear plastic support bracket would be required to support the card since it was so long and heavy. It’s definitely really cool looking though. My opinion is that 3dfx should not have acquired STB. They overestimated demand and there was just no reason to when Nvidia was clearly doing better as an OEM chip supplier. That move still confounds me.
@@ScreamAndFly Definitely agreed on all points, especially in regards to STB. Thanks again for your insight! I'm always THRILLED when members of the development team comment on my videos!
*PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING!* Due to the presence of FRAPS, some of the results in this video (5 tests total) were found to be inaccurate! Please proceed to this update video for further details: => ua-cam.com/video/3BQrViBCYXw/v-deo.html In summary, the updated results for affected tests are as follows: 3DMark99: -V5 5500 11675 pts -MAXX 13627 pts 3DMark2000 -V5 5500 5812 pts -MAXX 4908 pts 3DMark2001SE -V5 5500 2957 pts -MAXX 2451 pts Unreal Tournament -V5 5500 89.4 fps -MAXX 62 fps Expendable -V5 5500 82.3 fps -MAXX 97.3 fps For the sake of preserving the older results, and for retaining the results unaffected by the issue that are still accurate, I've decided to leave this video up. This video still contains a lot of good information outside the benchmark results, and will hopefully still be entertaining for many.
note: for older ati cards, you need to mix files from verious driver versions to get best results for ogl and d3d and even just video decoding... say this as somebody who use to upload driver packs over dialup after testing what files worked best when combine, the MAXX is even more sensitive to these issues... sli itself.
and, these at least in my exp where not that hard to get it working in most systems... most... though it did work best in SIS based boards... (alot of cards did in my exp... some cases ALOT better)
hate to say it, but, im using dual 1070 cards, and, some rare titles, i get over 100% scaling.... its quite noticeable in some titles... on an OLD AS FUCK X58 x5675@4.4 with 48gb ddr3 tri-chan... :)
the quake 3 issue is the ogl driver used, you can replace the file with one from a different driver version or just drop the dll you want to test into the folder with the games .exe, it can help alot, thats true in general for the fury/radeon/etc cards of the era, wasnt till the 9500/9600 that mixing and matching files became mostly only to address specific issues with specific drivers... mostly with specific games.. never really had to do that on nvidia cards in my exp... the ati, was much more for people who didnt mind alot of tinkering to get the best results.
oh, renaming the games exe to match a supported game on the same engine, normally helps for games on the MAXX, its not as bad a card as people liked to claim, the fury cards/chips worked amazingly well even the MAXX if you can deal with its quirks to get around them, the maxx is a fun thing to tinker with for period hardware, i regret not keeping the few i had from trade ins/given to me as people upgraded.. i sold them upgrading people.. imho...if i just want to game on 98... i just load up virtual box... was shocked how well it worked for a few older titles that are a major chore to run on win10, like starsiege.....just wish it had emulation for opensgl, and glide, as well as s3tc(it emulates an s3 card by default) period stuff can be fun... but its also, alot of work, i never really had major issues with maxx cards, they did work best in sis based boards,but ali/uli, via, and others had chipsets and boards that worked really well with them as well, i have seen issues getting some boards to work with random cards or brand of cards, no matter the chipset, mostly OEM system boards.. but a few higher end popular boards of that era had some bios related issues preventing, what seem like random cards from working... even 3dfx.. very... frustrating era sometimes, thankfully,those boards tend to work fine with the most poplar cards of their day....even if they weird out on random cards that should work... and refuse to even detect them, or refuse to post with them installed.. at least today..its pretty rare to find a board that wont post with the vast majority of videocards and other hardware installed...some can even post to usb-c videocards....
Awesome, thanks so much Pixel Pipes. I have been waiting eagerly for your next vid since your comeback. This is a great comparison, I have always wanted to own both cards (get to play with them) and this was incredibly enjoyable surprise for me. Thanks so much again, your comeback is strong and does not disappoint.
The quality of the content and production value of this video are outstanding. It was very informative and well made. I definitely want to see more of this.
Great video. Makes me a bit happier that I never really tried to find a Fury MAXX a couple of years ago when I was in the market for one. Instead I opted for a Athlon XP 2800+ and paired it with a Voodoo5 5500 alongside a PowerVR PCX1 as a secondary card just for the heck of it. Was a great system while I had it, but in the end I played to little on that machine to really justify keeping it around. Have to agree though that the Dual Chip support on the Voodoo5 was flawless, I never had to fall back to the 1 Chip mode the driver has just in case. And the Anti Aliasing on the V5 is incredible as well, best looking solution that I have ever seen, even NfS 2 SE looked razor sharp despite running in a fairly low resolution.
I was that one person! Lol. I had purchased the Rage Fury MAXX, and ended up giving in when the Geforce 256 SDRAM model came out, and just bought it. Man, what a difference. I remember some games working so well, and then others only used one of the chips. It was a constantly exciting cycle of driver releases, hope deflated, drivers release, hope deflated, lol. Hey, can you do a video on the Kyro II? I loved that card. I remember in Serious Sam it got better frame rates than my Geforce 2 Ultra! Until of course nVidia and ATI released drivers that performed the same trick in software! Haha
Picket up a 3Dfx Voodoo 5500 (AGP) today among other AGP and PCI cards, 9 in total, and for just 10€ :O. The Voodoo needs one of its caps replaced (missing) (top right one on the left) otherwise looks good, and was working years ago before being put on a shelf.
I wish 3dfx had not hired an idiot as a CEO who wasted 140 million buying STB only for every OEM company to stop giving them money and going straight to Nvidia.... I still remember the anandtech review of the Voodoo 4 4500 and watching the chart of the Geforce and Radeon completely destroying all the 3dfx cards, I knew it was all over and just a few months later 3dfx got bought out by Nvidia. I wish they had at least release the Spectre(rampage) GPU with the T&L and DDR memory, maybe that could have saved them.
I didn't even consider an alternative when I bought my 5500. I'd been a 3Dfx user since the original card and I stuck with them until they stopped making cards. I used it for OpenGL acceleration in 3DSmax. I sold it to a graphic designer at Codemasters. Looking at the market prices for it now, wish I'd kept it.
Late 90s was a magical time for PC gaming. I always wanted a Voodoo but ended up moving with Nvidia from the original Riva TNT onwards. All these cards came out just as I left school and was working, allowing to spend on new tech. Awesome times. Love this channel. Keep up the great content mate! Thanks for the memories 😉
I'm glad I picked up a Mac V5 5500 PCI around the Geforce 3 era for around £75. Yeah its potentially a bit slower than my old AGP version (that I had given to a mate when I got the GF3) but it meant I could use it along side my newer AGP cards and even early PCIe cards with a Win9X dual boot for old DOS and Glide games. Its still part of my retro PC setup along with my old Radeon 9800 pro, and having a DVI port, unlike my old AGP version, I get to use a DVI to HDMI adapter so can use it on modern monitors or even the TV with no effort. Still one of my all time favourite cards
Great review and video. Back in the day, I worked on the Rage Fury Maxx. We did have to do some clever tricks to get two gfx chips working on one AGP bus. I’ll ask the 3D driver architect next time I talk to him about benchmark “enhancements”.
Any chance for finding in his archive something like datasheets, specs sheets, programming manuals, etc? Collecting them for public use and its incredible hard to find any info about cards.....
@@Nevyn42 Any graphics chips, or northbridge with integrated graphic.... Its like pokemons - you've gotta get them all... Basically anything not included here.... vgamuseum.info/images/doc/
Well, on voodoo² SLI, the "SLI" thing can be visible because there is no warranty that the RGB colors match between the two cards (personal experience).
It's interesting to see how well Voodoo implemented multi-chip graphics back then. ATI/AMD's Crossfire and nVidia's SLI often times had micro-stuttering and game support issues; Even on their multi-chip cards that used internal Crossfire/SLI.
The key to this, was the combination of hard- and driver-level support for the feature, making 3dfx's SLI completely transparent to any games running on the Voodoo cards. From a game's perspective, a 3dfx SLI setup is a single graphics card with a single GPU, and all the minutiae, like loading textures and geometry to both graphics cards/GPUs at the same time, are handled by Glide internally.
At the Brain Drain retro LAN in south of Sweden this January one person had a Rage Fury Maxx, but had to swap it out because of really bad frametime stutter and game compatability issues. I actually have both of these cards in my collection, but I'm never use them because they are both so far behind their contemporaries and impractical. Not sure what to do with them, any suggestions?
@@PixelPipes You should join us, come meet Victor Bart, Next year hopefully Dosgamert, and other UA-cam celebrities. We have people fly in from all over the world.
I have the Rage card with the CD and Manual. I'm doing a Windows 98SE build and will try it, though it isn't what I was going to use. I'm actually planning on using an older 16MB Voodoo Banshee.
There is a major difference tho. One is the best card for pre "pixel shader era" gaming and other is useless junk that you can display in your showcase to say "I have it".
@@Lady_Zenith Compared to the cards that came after, the voodoo 5 useless, so may as well spend the money on a card that will actually deliver for less :D It's mostly a show piece too, there is better things that you can put in that AGP/PCI slot.
5500 is the favorite retro card I own. DOS to Windows XP support is great with resolutions up to full HD. For era appropriate games, there is no substitute. ATI card was marketed more towards productivity users and graphics designers at the time. And they didn't really have a multi-core framework, while 3DFX was designed to be infinitely scalable. They had up to 4 cores on a Voodoo 6000, but technically they could've doubled the chips to any amount. 3DFX bragged about it at an expo. That's what allowed them to keep raising performance, without innovating towards the end. Throwing more chips at a problem, getting higher framerates, but with outdated shader models.
I've only subscribed to this channel recently, but I needed to say I really enjoy the way you present performance graphs. You talk about what the outcome and experience is, rather than the numbers themselves. Many tech channels reviewing new cards either just throw up graphs and don't even talk directly talk about them, or just read out the numbers in a boring and pointless exercise.
I think testing glide WOULD be apples to apples, in another way at least. That is, you take advantage of the best performance you can get from each card same as you would in practice as a consumer, which would be glide for the V5, when available.
If you add temperature and power consumption testing, it would be great. Especially since PSUs were not much of a concern back then, just wondering how many amps these pulled. Very Entertaining video as always! Thanks.
I'm surprised SLI and Crossfire doesn't have a mode where it renders every other line. That would at least give a shot at evening the workload between the GPUs and I would imagine prevent micro-stuttering since you can't have a situation where one GPU somehow had a significantly short frame time than the other.
Checking in my underground vault I have two Voodoo 5500 and one ATI Rage 128 not a pro but still . These great cards were part of my kids growing up years playing games gaming was a big part of those years and finding cards for all the kids computers was a task in itself
I had to comment on this one - I really did want to know the difference between the two. In early 2000, I was wanting to move up from my Savage 4 and both the Rage Fury MAXX and Voodoo 5 5500 were on my considerations list. I came very, very close to buying a Rage Fury MAXX, but held out for the Radeon - which was pretty good value. I do have a Voodoo 5500 in a system today and it's a nice card, but I am glad I went with the Radeon. Of course there was one interim card that I tried before the Radeon and I recently got a couple of them again - The PowerVR Kyro. I gave it a tryout yesterday and re-learned why I sent it back. Will you ever cover the Kyro and Kyro II do you think?
I was indeed trying to decide between theses two .... In my craziest dream ! I had a Voodoo 1 at that time and struggling to play Quake 2 and Quake 3 also I think :S (Really struggling here)
The Voodoo1 was artificially limited by its tiny frame buffer and texture memory, 4 MB split in half with 2 MB for each. There were rare 6 and 8 MB versions which offered better performance since more data could be stored on the card without having to go out to main memory, which really crippled performance. The 8 MB version offered the best performance and allowed higher resolution modes. You can actually mod a Voodoo1 to have up to 8 MB of RAM, the trouble is finding it. It uses a really fast EDO memory, which is unobtanium, unless you have a dead Voodoo2 card you can sacrifice memory chips from.
@@blairlohnes8103 used to own Pentium MMX 200, 64MB ram, Diamond Monster Voodoo 1 4mb + ATI match64. As far as I remember Quake 2 was running smooth, but Quake 3 was somewhat playable too, running at 15-20fps...
The Voodoo5 5500 had a few more tricks up its sleeve thanks to the 3dfx community. Some creative and talented hardware hackers with help from some ex-3dfx engineers have figured out how to replace the memory chips on the card to get a 128 or even 256 MB V5 5500 card, which gave significant performance improvements. Going from 64 to 128 MB yielded around 13% more performance, and to 256 MB helped retain performance in later titles which used a lot of texture memory, or large textures. Another hack is someone in Europe bought several trays of final VSA-100 silicon which was rated at 200 MHz. These chips can be put on 5500 or 6000 cards with fast RAM to really wake them up. Though such mods are only for those with deep pockets, the last I checked, a RAM upgrade and the better VSA-100 chips ran around $500. The service may not be available anymore, as there were only a finite number of VSA-100 chips available, and I can't find the listing the guy had, so he may have stopped.
I haven't seen the performance uplift from increasing memory size that you speak of in the tests I've seen, but the replacement VSA-100 chips DEFINITELY increase the clockspeed headroom. Seeing how much modding has been going on with these latter 3Dfx cards really is a testament to how passionate the community is!
Man hardware improved quickly in those days. The year after the Voodoo5 saw the release of the Radeon 8500 with double the pixel and quadruple the texture capability of the MAXX
Well, voodoo 5 was released much too late. It was delayed quite a lot. But sure, things moved fast back then. Voodoo 2 to radeon 9700 pro was 5-6 years; pentium 233 mmx to 2 GHz athlon 64 was also around 5 years.
I have both, with boxes. Also I have both V5500 in PCI and AGP flavours. I also a Voodoo 1, a voodoo 2 and another pair of Voodoo 2 in SLi configuration.
I own both cards voodoo 5 and rage max we are building a couple retro rigs will try them soon. I have kept almost all my hardware over the last 20 years.
i miss the days of 3dFX.. my voodoo 3 3000 was a freaking beast. took my computer that could NOT run even quake 2, and turned it into a machine that could even run quake 3 without issue and was able to run the early doom 3 alpha from E3 without problem
I am one of those people!. Always wondering the back of my head since hearing about the Fury Maxx a couple years ago, though it is more morbid curiosity since the Fury Maxx was such an odd overlooked duck.
I remember hearing there was a huge controversy over how the ati card ran on 3DMark99. Apparently ATI did some jiggery to fool 3DMark99 into thinking it was running faster.
the voodoo 5 is hands down my favorite voodoo card together with the voodoo 2, excellent performance and it just works with a lot of games i can run, i can also use a ultra hle to run some nintendo 64 games on my voodoo-equiped pc, that's very fascinating
God I remember those times.. tuning your rig to get the best performance out of it was such fun. I had the fortunate situation to work at a PC retailer and was allowed within reason to always trade in my slightly used harware for the newer stuff, so i went through a LOT of different graphic cards, CPUs, boards and RAM. There were times when I switched to a 100Mhz faster Athlon XP after 2 Weeks. The Choice for GPU was always hard though.. so much to look for. What games am I playing, how is the driver Situation, how is the speed vs. Graphics Quality, etc. I was Playing UT competetively back then (and a bit of Q3) so there raw speed was king. But at other times you just wanted to relax and so image quality was important. Thats why I became such a Nvidia Fanboy. Other then their first Riva TNT Drivers, and some issues with the TNT2 as far as I can remember, starting with Geforce 256 all those problems were gone. That card rocked the market so hard ... The detonator Drivers still are unbeatable in my opinion. Stood and fell with support from the rest of the Industry, I guess.
OMG OMG I'm the one person!! Well, some of it was admittedly ignorance but I'll explain. The Rage Fury MAXX was the first 3D accelerator I ever purchased back in 2000, and while I had experience working with older 2nd-hand PC hardware, 3D graphics hardware was a brand new field for me. I do remember, though, seriously considering both cards as they were both being offered on TigerDirect at the time of my purchase. I really liked the dual-GPU feature of both cards, and compared them further on basic numbers like price and RAM quantity. I do remember the ATI offering being somewhat less expensive but honestly I think the deciding factor was brand recognition. ATI had been around the longest of the "big three", and I'd seen their cards in many OLD PC's I'd played with so this was really the only brand out of the bunch that felt familiar to me. So I purchased my Rage Fury MAXX and honestly, I loved it. To be fair though I had nothing to compare it with. Mine is identical to the "new older one" you purchased, in appearance and clock speeds. This was the first time I'd seen my games rendered with hardware acceleration and it was all magical to me! I guess I got lucky in that I didn't encounter any games the card wouldn't work with, although I do remember, back in 2000, having to manually install an AGP GART driver like you mentioned. I also never encountered the massive juttering you showed in Quake 3. If anyone's curious I used the card with an Asus AZ11 socket A motherboard back in 2000 and an Asus P2B-D Slot 1 board in 2019. The card served me well until I wanted to upgrade to WinXP and learned that there were no drivers so I then switched to a boring GeForce4 MX 440 and the MAXX went back into its box. It wasn't until 2019 when I pulled it back out for my Retro PC nostalgia project that I even learned that it wasn't rendering some of my games with both chips. Sadly during its storage, it developed a tendency to produce graphical artifacts when the 2nd chip was enabled so games like Need For Speed 3 that utilized AFR would exhibit the artifacts but NFS 5 would not. Still, it brought me hundreds of hours of happiness and it still produces a very unique visual appearance that I remembered especially in NFS 5. I guess I could best describe it as looking like some sort of temporal AA in that there's a very slight per-frame per-pixel color variation, almost a snowy shimmering effect but very slight. That rendering appearance became emotionally tied to the magical experience of using my first 3D hardware, and I've never seen another card reproduce it since. Honestly I really wish my MAXX was still fully functional because I'd love to use it as originally intended in my main Retro PC... and it just so happens that my secondary Retro PC now runs the Voodoo5 5500 that was my second choice all those years ago. Anyway, thank you for this video! I was so excited to see it pop up!
Finally this happened. I was waiting for that from release of GF FX 5800U vs Radeon 9700 pro. Just wanted to see benchmarks) Better to choose GF DDR, or GF2 from green side, and Radeon from red, as gaming card for 2000 gaming PC.
If I remember a review in a magazine back then correctly it was very even wwith the first geforce but with better image quality, although it lacked some when it came to 32bit. Beena few years and google did not help much :)
I had a Voodoo 5500 pci 64mb. My pc didnt have AGP... It was a Sears model of the Compaq Presario 5005sr with a P3 933 coppermine and upgraded to 384mb of pc133sd ram. It also came with WindowsME... bleh.. I had problems with this card not rendering some effects correctly if i remember right. Ended up selling it and getting a Geforce MX420. Lower performance if i remember right but, rendered the games i played correctly. I remember though having some good times getting drunk, cranking up some good metal music and playing quake 2. :D
EDIT oh! I just remembered. So i had the voodoo and the mx420 when trying to play Knights of the Old Republic. I dont remember how it preformed but... My Compaq had a Intel 810 onboard GPU i think. Kotor would not load on that gpu but when switching Gpu's one night it actually booted the game with the Intel 810. It... was bad... but i managed to load a save and run around.. well i think thats what was happening. It looked like a slide show of a N64 game...
Thank you for an interesting review! From what I can remember the PCI version of the Voodoo 5500 had almost exactly the same performance as the AGP version. Are you sure there's a big penalty? (Could be from running more modern hardware in the rest of the system though).
Sometimes I regret getting the Geforce 2 GTS over the Voodoo 5, I didn't at the time, but I do now. I wish I could get my hands on a Voodoo 5 to make a great 98 system.
11:35 At the time the Voodoo5 came out, that was considered a _good_ framerate, not merely "somewhat playable". Beyond that, 800x600 was not a low resolution. 640x480 was the standard resolution. 800x600 was higher, and 1024x768 the equivalent of 2560x1600 today (or would be, if monitor makers hadn't taken a wrong turn and made everything 16:9 5-10 years ago). 1280x1024 (or 960, if you wanted the pure aspect ratio conversion) was the equivalent of 4K today. I bought a Voodoo5 5500 to replace my twin Voodoo2 setup, because I wanted better GLide performance. I would have stuck with the card far longer than I did, but it had a hardware failure, and I was forced to enter the world of ATI and nVidia. Until 3dfx was gobbled up by nVidia (the only fruit of that acquisition seems to have been the "SLI" moniker), I was looking forward to the four-GPU Voodoo5 6000 card.
Exactly. Somewhat playable I would argue was around 10 fps, that was the reality for many which had an obsolete graphics accelerator, which was just 2+ years for non-Voodoo cards, at least on decent graphics setting. Many people without a card and an older CPU had to endure slide shows at 3-5 fps. 16:10 is the ultimate monitor aspect ratio. 16:9 and wider is just stupid in the computer monitor space. That's why I still stick to Macbooks even though they're stupid in other hardware aspects.
Because it's a voodoo card... I gotta say having one made you feel like a proper gamer.. maybe just killer marketing... Although I had the pci voodoo3 2000 or 3000 can't remember.. glide was the saviour to voodoo 👍
I'm surprised you didn't comment that the Voodoo has theoretically impossible scaling in Quake III, it's about %15 faster than it should be for dual chip. I wonder if 3DFx did some driver shenanigans too.
@@PixelPipes Lol i only noticed it because of my age old 3DFx dislike 🤣 You see I backed not 1 but 2 wrong horses back then, 1st I bought an PowerVR based M3D because an an NEC employee I got a great discount on it as we actually fabbed them here in Scotland for a time. After that was a bust I fell out with add in accelerators and went for the 1st genuine all in one, a Rendition Verite 1000 based Creative 3D Blaster, this was actually a great card other than poor DOS support which was still a key component back then. If it had good DOS support i think this could have been a real success & Rendition could have become an nVidia or ATI, alas it was not to be and I wish i had kept that card as it was a milestone product & is like hens teeth now.
Geforce4 TI 4200. You can snag them for under $40 on the bay, if you're patient. The GF6 beats it but has a lot of compatibility issues with 98 drivers. The GF4 TI 4200/4400/4600 will smoke any of the MX cards. The GF5 or FX cards that are affordable aren't worth the packaging they come in.
I owned a Voodoo 5 5500 when I was 15 or so. I saved up and bought it, it was a nice upgrade from my Voodoo 3 2000. When I took my PC into the shop to get it fixed the tech said he broke the V5 and replaced it with a Geforce 4 MX. He said he had to keep the V5 since he was giving me a GeForce. Being a kid I didn't know better. I'm not even sure if he really broke it. It makes me mad to this day.
I am *really* glad you did the UT Glide test with 32bit forced, but I disagree that comparing both cards in D3D was fair. D3D was basically a native protocol for ATI as they had no other renderer, bar opengl which they sucked at. So fair comparisons in this generation is each cards best performing protocol vs each other, in this regard D3D vs Glide.
The way I see it: if you had a Voodoo5 back in the day, you would use Glide whenever possible. But notice most of the games and benches I tested didn't have a Glide mode. Glide was starting to go out of favor over "standardization", and if you only had D3D as an option, then performance in that API was still relevant and important.
@@PixelPipes - still, it is not fair. It's like forcing one car not to use 6th gear in a top speed test just because the opponent car has a 5 speed gearbox for the sake of 'apples to apples'. We're testing how well a card can perform in a particular game so it is fair to let 3dfx use its fastest API because why would anyone switch to D3D on a Voodoo5 in a real life scenario having an option of using Glide? Kudos for throwing in the third bar to the chart though 👍🏾
I remember when I was into Quake III Arena when it was new. The Voodoo5 was an awesome card, and one I wanted but never did own. 3DFX cards just worked, no one that had one ever had any complaints about them. I didn't start getting flawless reliability with my graphics cards until I owned a GeForce2 GTS. I have owned both AMD and nVidia cards since.. Miss 3DFX!!
I've still got my Voodoo5 boxed and in the loft. It was an easy card to live with but it didn't stay in my PC for long as it lacked hardware TnL which was becoming a must have at the time. I think it was one of the first cards to deliver usable AA in games, which seriously impressed me (simpler days)!
AA was important in those low(er) resolution days. Today I douldn't care less about AA. Don't understand why so many have gone all in on it today and go on about it like it's the end of the (gaming) world.
@@snetmotnosrorb3946 i'd argue the opposite. AA was less important back then, because CRT monitors had a naturally much softer image, and screensizes were much smaller to boot. a 15" crt still looks plenty good at 640x480
So it looks like the ATI card was let down by its drivers (a tradition still kept alive by AMD) mostly because of the techniques used to enable the two chips to work together. If ATI was able to use a similar technique as used by the Voodoo team I could see the Rage Fury being way more competitive.
I, too, was one of those guys who really wanted to compare these two. The task seemed quite easy to me as I had a Voodoo5 of my own and my best friend had a Rage Fury MAXX (although when they were acting as daily drivers we haven't met yet). Unfortunately one day he brought a box of his retired computer hardware to work, probably to free up some space at home... and one day when we weren't there someone simply recycled the whole lot. Can you imagine? Ah, the rage, the fury! 🤬 Anyways, great video. Sub count goes +1 👍🏾
The 26pin connector ? As far as I know it is the same connector which is around since the 90s and often labeled as VGA Feature Connector or VESA Feature Connector etc. so it is for things like Frame Grabber, MPEG decoding cards etc.
i have a rage fury maxx but mine is on drugs, works but textures shimmer and colors are off, it passes the build in driver tests, anything i can try to fix it ?
Interested to know what API you were using for the game tests. Voodoo cards were notoriously terrible at DirectX and you would run them with OpenGL with most things and Glide either directly or with a wrapper wherever you could. As you saw with the test on UT it really can make a huge difference to the 3dfx cards.
The problem with 3dfx was most of the cards they made were actually stopgap products, the higher ups kept diverting resources away from the rampage project so they could release other products. From what i recall basically everything after voodoo 2 was just put together so they had something to sell while rampage was being worked on.
I have build and still upgrading my deam PC that i never had when i was kid ! Voodoo 5 5500 on AMD 2200+ , 512Ram OCZ Plat , Aureal Vortex 2 , CRT IIyama 19" , Roland MA12 speakers and Sound Canvas ! IDE hdd are so bad that i changed 3rd one ! now im waiting the SSD Pata 64gb !
"we are running at a very low 800x600 resolution" ... ugh back in 2001 that was the resolution I was running everything at and 1024x768 seemed to be high-res reserved for top videocards and expensive high refresh rate monitors
Nice one! Unfortunately I have only one of them. So I can't make any comparison. Do you have tested the Rage Fury Maxx with different Mainboard chipset?
I had a couple Maxx cards go through my hands including back in 2000 when it was new. Sure it had some shortcomings but I thought it was a good card overall and compared well with the voodoo5 and gf1… which had their shortcomings as well. Still a little sore 20 some years later though due to its lack of support for other OS’s than 9x. Bummer cause I always liked 2k better.
There is an old Emachine we haven't used in years I'm gonna upgrade into a beast Windows 98 gaming PC. Opened it up and found a Voodoo 2 inside. Didn't know that was inside.
In a way, I still lust for a voodoo 5 because of nostalgia with the first home pc having an agp voodoo 3. However, nowadays a working one goes for rtx 2070 money, which is just a hard **No** for me. Not to mention my attempts to set up an uber windows 98(se) build proved to be a bust, because via chipset drivers are guaranteed to literally kill the install within seconds for me. And I'm sitting on an athlon xp 3200+ that would need an nforce 2 board, or to get an intel chipset and pentium 4 775, with an AGP slot. Either way is going to be unfairly expensive for the end goal at this time.
I worked at 3dfx and was in the team for the development for the Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5. As we saw it at the time, the main competitor for the V5 was the GeForce 2. At the time the GeForce 2 was able to outperform the Voodoo 5 in most games, especially in OpenGL, so our task was to highlight the V5’s image quality over speed. In the retail channel and for demonstrations, the sales pitch was that ‘speed doesn’t matter at 60FPS and above since image quality is what is most important’. The GeForce 2 could run many then-popular games such as Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Quake 3 faster than the Voodoo 5 in most cases, and the antialiasing feature on the V5 was going to be its signature advantage rather than speed. Nvidia introduced an antialiasing feature into the GeForce 256 driver, which was a software solution and unusable, however the GeForce 2 was powerful enough to handle it at lower resolutions. Of course Glide was where the 3dfx cards had no competition, however Glide as an API was beginning to fall out of popularity thanks to DirectX and drivers for the V5 were hurriedly released with better DirectX support.
Thanks for your insight! Very interesting! I definitely got the impression the V5 would have done a lot better had it released the previous year.
@@PixelPipes Yes the VSA-100 product would definitely have been much better off if it arrived a year sooner than it did. The biggest problem with the VSA-100 cards was their reliance on Glide to run optimally. Glide in itself is a very similar, yet slightly more simplified API to OpenGL 1.1, which made it fairly easy and quick to develop for, however it also lacked some features in the OpenGL API to make it more streamlined and focused primarily on speed. And that’s where things began to go wrong for the VSA-100 from the start. DirectX being a key component to Windows meant that most developers were going to feel obligated to support it, even though Direct3D in its early forms was slow and extraneous to program for. The VSA-100 was at a decided disadvantage in OpenGL and far underperforming in Direct3D. So all this means is that 3dfx was in a bind when the industry was going to quickly adopt Direct3D and hold on to OpenGL. The Rampage product was going to be the big move toward full native support for Direct3D and OpenGL without any mini driver-wrappers. I played Quake 3 using Rampage boards and we had it running very fast but reliability issues and graphic rendering problems were never able to be resolved before the end came.
One last thing - the Voodoo 5 6000 was going sold with an aluminum case - not a PC case, but just a cool looking case to protect the card and power supply. It would have made for a cool unboxing :)
@@ScreamAndFly Amazing tidbit on the Rampage! Current efforts to write drivers from scratch for what prototypes remain is slow going at best without documentation, but it's still a fascinating project.
The V5 6000 is such an interesting and strange product. I don't think it would have turned the tide for 3dfx but it would have been something the fans would appreciate. Hence people spending $6k or more on working examples today.
This video actually does the V5 a disservice somewhat in the D3D tests. I found out FRAPS was hurting performance for the V5 specifically, and so I did a follow-up video (pinned comment) with corrected results. Honestly I think the D3D performance was actually pretty impressive, especially given what you said about non-native support.
@@PixelPipes Well the VSA-100 did support D3D, however that support was limited. The VSA-100 did not have hardware transform and lighting and therefore would not be compatible with DirectX 7. D3D was a bit of a mess for developers in general back then, but the GeForce cards had hardware T&L and that was going to be an ever-winding advantage gap, especially as DirectX was itself improving.
As cool as the V5 6000 was, it would have been a retail disaster. Back then, a $600 video card was considered very, very expensive, and yet the V5 6000 would not have even supported DirectX 7. The GeForce 3 was around the corner and very few games were being introduced with Glide support by then. It just didn’t make any sense and that project definitely made inroads into the Rampage development. The V5 6K had the ‘wow factor’ from a ‘bigger is better’ point of view, but as a mainstream consumer product it was just all wrong. The GeForce 3 was a more capable product and at the time of introduction the GF3 Ti200 hit retail being under $200.
On top of that, the V5 6K would obviously not fit into some smaller cases, and that rear plastic support bracket would be required to support the card since it was so long and heavy. It’s definitely really cool looking though.
My opinion is that 3dfx should not have acquired STB. They overestimated demand and there was just no reason to when Nvidia was clearly doing better as an OEM chip supplier. That move still confounds me.
@@ScreamAndFly Definitely agreed on all points, especially in regards to STB. Thanks again for your insight! I'm always THRILLED when members of the development team comment on my videos!
A PixelPipes video. Today is a good day.
Agreed
Love the humor and the conversational flow of this video. I also wasn’t expecting this result - Amazing job as always
💪
*PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING!*
Due to the presence of FRAPS, some of the results in this video (5 tests total) were found to be inaccurate! Please proceed to this update video for further details:
=> ua-cam.com/video/3BQrViBCYXw/v-deo.html
In summary, the updated results for affected tests are as follows:
3DMark99:
-V5 5500 11675 pts
-MAXX 13627 pts
3DMark2000
-V5 5500 5812 pts
-MAXX 4908 pts
3DMark2001SE
-V5 5500 2957 pts
-MAXX 2451 pts
Unreal Tournament
-V5 5500 89.4 fps
-MAXX 62 fps
Expendable
-V5 5500 82.3 fps
-MAXX 97.3 fps
For the sake of preserving the older results, and for retaining the results unaffected by the issue that are still accurate, I've decided to leave this video up. This video still contains a lot of good information outside the benchmark results, and will hopefully still be entertaining for many.
note: for older ati cards, you need to mix files from verious driver versions to get best results for ogl and d3d and even just video decoding... say this as somebody who use to upload driver packs over dialup after testing what files worked best when combine, the MAXX is even more sensitive to these issues... sli itself.
and, these at least in my exp where not that hard to get it working in most systems... most... though it did work best in SIS based boards... (alot of cards did in my exp... some cases ALOT better)
hate to say it, but, im using dual 1070 cards, and, some rare titles, i get over 100% scaling.... its quite noticeable in some titles... on an OLD AS FUCK X58 x5675@4.4 with 48gb ddr3 tri-chan... :)
the quake 3 issue is the ogl driver used, you can replace the file with one from a different driver version or just drop the dll you want to test into the folder with the games .exe, it can help alot, thats true in general for the fury/radeon/etc cards of the era, wasnt till the 9500/9600 that mixing and matching files became mostly only to address specific issues with specific drivers... mostly with specific games..
never really had to do that on nvidia cards in my exp... the ati, was much more for people who didnt mind alot of tinkering to get the best results.
oh, renaming the games exe to match a supported game on the same engine, normally helps for games on the MAXX, its not as bad a card as people liked to claim, the fury cards/chips worked amazingly well even the MAXX if you can deal with its quirks to get around them, the maxx is a fun thing to tinker with for period hardware, i regret not keeping the few i had from trade ins/given to me as people upgraded.. i sold them upgrading people..
imho...if i just want to game on 98... i just load up virtual box... was shocked how well it worked for a few older titles that are a major chore to run on win10, like starsiege.....just wish it had emulation for opensgl, and glide, as well as s3tc(it emulates an s3 card by default)
period stuff can be fun... but its also, alot of work, i never really had major issues with maxx cards, they did work best in sis based boards,but ali/uli, via, and others had chipsets and boards that worked really well with them as well, i have seen issues getting some boards to work with random cards or brand of cards, no matter the chipset, mostly OEM system boards.. but a few higher end popular boards of that era had some bios related issues preventing, what seem like random cards from working... even 3dfx.. very... frustrating era sometimes, thankfully,those boards tend to work fine with the most poplar cards of their day....even if they weird out on random cards that should work... and refuse to even detect them, or refuse to post with them installed..
at least today..its pretty rare to find a board that wont post with the vast majority of videocards and other hardware installed...some can even post to usb-c videocards....
Awesome, thanks so much Pixel Pipes. I have been waiting eagerly for your next vid since your comeback. This is a great comparison, I have always wanted to own both cards (get to play with them) and this was incredibly enjoyable surprise for me. Thanks so much again, your comeback is strong and does not disappoint.
The quality of the content and production value of this video are outstanding. It was very informative and well made. I definitely want to see more of this.
It is great to see you back! That 11 months of no vids had me worried the channel died. Keep up the good vids
I had that dream, that idea, that comparison... EPIC ! Really nice video, as always :D
Great video. Makes me a bit happier that I never really tried to find a Fury MAXX a couple of years ago when I was in the market for one. Instead I opted for a Athlon XP 2800+ and paired it with a Voodoo5 5500 alongside a PowerVR PCX1 as a secondary card just for the heck of it. Was a great system while I had it, but in the end I played to little on that machine to really justify keeping it around.
Have to agree though that the Dual Chip support on the Voodoo5 was flawless, I never had to fall back to the 1 Chip mode the driver has just in case. And the Anti Aliasing on the V5 is incredible as well, best looking solution that I have ever seen, even NfS 2 SE looked razor sharp despite running in a fairly low resolution.
I was that one person! Lol. I had purchased the Rage Fury MAXX, and ended up giving in when the Geforce 256 SDRAM model came out, and just bought it. Man, what a difference.
I remember some games working so well, and then others only used one of the chips. It was a constantly exciting cycle of driver releases, hope deflated, drivers release, hope deflated, lol.
Hey, can you do a video on the Kyro II? I loved that card. I remember in Serious Sam it got better frame rates than my Geforce 2 Ultra! Until of course nVidia and ATI released drivers that performed the same trick in software! Haha
Picket up a 3Dfx Voodoo 5500 (AGP) today among other AGP and PCI cards, 9 in total, and for just 10€ :O. The Voodoo needs one of its caps replaced (missing) (top right one on the left) otherwise looks good, and was working years ago before being put on a shelf.
I wish 3dfx had not hired an idiot as a CEO who wasted 140 million buying STB only for every OEM company to stop giving them money and going straight to Nvidia.... I still remember the anandtech review of the Voodoo 4 4500 and watching the chart of the Geforce and Radeon completely destroying all the 3dfx cards, I knew it was all over and just a few months later 3dfx got bought out by Nvidia. I wish they had at least release the Spectre(rampage) GPU with the T&L and DDR memory, maybe that could have saved them.
Back in 2001, I was torn between a Voodoo 4 and a Geforce 2 MX. I wanted the Voodoo 5, but I was a kid and it cost too much.
Hahaha! Cards back then were so big. These even have two coolers on them! How primitive and obsolete.........wait...
Except of the Rage Fury MAXX. Probably the smalled dual GPU card, made from single card chips, ever made.
I didn't even consider an alternative when I bought my 5500. I'd been a 3Dfx user since the original card and I stuck with them until they stopped making cards. I used it for OpenGL acceleration in 3DSmax. I sold it to a graphic designer at Codemasters. Looking at the market prices for it now, wish I'd kept it.
Late 90s was a magical time for PC gaming. I always wanted a Voodoo but ended up moving with Nvidia from the original Riva TNT onwards. All these cards came out just as I left school and was working, allowing to spend on new tech. Awesome times.
Love this channel. Keep up the great content mate! Thanks for the memories 😉
I'm glad I picked up a Mac V5 5500 PCI around the Geforce 3 era for around £75. Yeah its potentially a bit slower than my old AGP version (that I had given to a mate when I got the GF3) but it meant I could use it along side my newer AGP cards and even early PCIe cards with a Win9X dual boot for old DOS and Glide games. Its still part of my retro PC setup along with my old Radeon 9800 pro, and having a DVI port, unlike my old AGP version, I get to use a DVI to HDMI adapter so can use it on modern monitors or even the TV with no effort. Still one of my all time favourite cards
Great review and video. Back in the day, I worked on the Rage Fury Maxx. We did have to do some clever tricks to get two gfx chips working on one AGP bus. I’ll ask the 3D driver architect next time I talk to him about benchmark “enhancements”.
Any chance for finding in his archive something like datasheets, specs sheets, programming manuals, etc? Collecting them for public use and its incredible hard to find any info about cards.....
Glad you liked it! Your insight would be phenomenal 😳
vlaskcz For which products?
@@Nevyn42 Any graphics chips, or northbridge with integrated graphic....
Its like pokemons - you've gotta get them all...
Basically anything not included here....
vgamuseum.info/images/doc/
Well, on voodoo² SLI, the "SLI" thing can be visible because there is no warranty that the RGB colors match between the two cards (personal experience).
Era of 3dfx, ATI, Matroxx, and Rvia is the best Era of PC gaming.
It's interesting to see how well Voodoo implemented multi-chip graphics back then. ATI/AMD's Crossfire and nVidia's SLI often times had micro-stuttering and game support issues; Even on their multi-chip cards that used internal Crossfire/SLI.
The key to this, was the combination of hard- and driver-level support for the feature, making 3dfx's SLI completely transparent to any games running on the Voodoo cards. From a game's perspective, a 3dfx SLI setup is a single graphics card with a single GPU, and all the minutiae, like loading textures and geometry to both graphics cards/GPUs at the same time, are handled by Glide internally.
At the Brain Drain retro LAN in south of Sweden this January one person had a Rage Fury Maxx, but had to swap it out because of really bad frametime stutter and game compatability issues. I actually have both of these cards in my collection, but I'm never use them because they are both so far behind their contemporaries and impractical. Not sure what to do with them, any suggestions?
I'm actually super jealous of your awesome LAN party community in Sweden
@@PixelPipes You should join us, come meet Victor Bart, Next year hopefully Dosgamert, and other UA-cam celebrities. We have people fly in from all over the world.
As a 3Dfx nerd back then, I am extremely grateful for these videos! Thank you!
Great content. I upgraded from a v3 3000 to a gf2 gts & o/c'd it to the hilt with an 120mm fan devoted to it. I loved that card.
I have the Rage card with the CD and Manual. I'm doing a Windows 98SE build and will try it, though it isn't what I was going to use. I'm actually planning on using an older 16MB Voodoo Banshee.
"3dfx Voodoo collector tax", yep, nowadays AGP V5 5500 costs like three Fury MAXX and PCI version is even more expensive.
And the MAXX is still expensive.
There is a major difference tho. One is the best card for pre "pixel shader era" gaming and other is useless junk that you can display in your showcase to say "I have it".
@@Lady_Zenith Compared to the cards that came after, the voodoo 5 useless, so may as well spend the money on a card that will actually deliver for less :D
It's mostly a show piece too, there is better things that you can put in that AGP/PCI slot.
I found a RAGE FURY MAXX for a really good deal... I wish I had found a Voodoo 5. :P
I still have my voodoo 5 5500... It's mine!!! It's my precious.....
5500 is the favorite retro card I own. DOS to Windows XP support is great with resolutions up to full HD. For era appropriate games, there is no substitute. ATI card was marketed more towards productivity users and graphics designers at the time. And they didn't really have a multi-core framework, while 3DFX was designed to be infinitely scalable. They had up to 4 cores on a Voodoo 6000, but technically they could've doubled the chips to any amount. 3DFX bragged about it at an expo. That's what allowed them to keep raising performance, without innovating towards the end. Throwing more chips at a problem, getting higher framerates, but with outdated shader models.
I genuinely love it that you started posting videos again.
I didn't know the V5 could do Glide in 32 bit color.
I've only subscribed to this channel recently, but I needed to say I really enjoy the way you present performance graphs. You talk about what the outcome and experience is, rather than the numbers themselves. Many tech channels reviewing new cards either just throw up graphs and don't even talk directly talk about them, or just read out the numbers in a boring and pointless exercise.
I think testing glide WOULD be apples to apples, in another way at least.
That is, you take advantage of the best performance you can get from each card same as you would in practice as a consumer, which would be glide for the V5, when available.
If you add temperature and power consumption testing, it would be great. Especially since PSUs were not much of a concern back then, just wondering how many amps these pulled. Very Entertaining video as always! Thanks.
Woooww, I hadn't idea with the existence of the Quantum 3d! A video about this will be interesting.
it's good to see you again, man. Cheers from Argentina!
I'm surprised SLI and Crossfire doesn't have a mode where it renders every other line. That would at least give a shot at evening the workload between the GPUs and I would imagine prevent micro-stuttering since you can't have a situation where one GPU somehow had a significantly short frame time than the other.
Checking in my underground vault I have two Voodoo 5500 and one ATI Rage 128 not a pro but still . These great cards were part of my kids growing up years playing games gaming was a big part of those years and finding cards for all the kids computers was a task in itself
I had to comment on this one - I really did want to know the difference between the two. In early 2000, I was wanting to move up from my Savage 4 and both the Rage Fury MAXX and Voodoo 5 5500 were on my considerations list. I came very, very close to buying a Rage Fury MAXX, but held out for the Radeon - which was pretty good value. I do have a Voodoo 5500 in a system today and it's a nice card, but I am glad I went with the Radeon. Of course there was one interim card that I tried before the Radeon and I recently got a couple of them again - The PowerVR Kyro. I gave it a tryout yesterday and re-learned why I sent it back. Will you ever cover the Kyro and Kyro II do you think?
Thanks for sharing! And yeah Kyro's getting its dues, if I ever get my 98 system to cooperate again.
I was indeed trying to decide between theses two .... In my craziest dream ! I had a Voodoo 1 at that time and struggling to play Quake 2 and Quake 3 also I think :S (Really struggling here)
I just found an old Pentium 120, 64MB Ram and a 4MB Voodoo 1. It can barely run Quake 2, I couldn't even imagine trying to run Quake 3 on it. :/
The Voodoo1 was artificially limited by its tiny frame buffer and texture memory, 4 MB split in half with 2 MB for each. There were rare 6 and 8 MB versions which offered better performance since more data could be stored on the card without having to go out to main memory, which really crippled performance. The 8 MB version offered the best performance and allowed higher resolution modes. You can actually mod a Voodoo1 to have up to 8 MB of RAM, the trouble is finding it. It uses a really fast EDO memory, which is unobtanium, unless you have a dead Voodoo2 card you can sacrifice memory chips from.
@@blairlohnes8103 used to own Pentium MMX 200, 64MB ram, Diamond Monster Voodoo 1 4mb + ATI match64. As far as I remember Quake 2 was running smooth, but Quake 3 was somewhat playable too, running at 15-20fps...
I find the Voodoo5 interesting because barely anyone owned one... we had all moved on by the time it had released.
I had one...
Awesome matchup!
Great review again, can't get enough of them.
The Voodoo5 5500 had a few more tricks up its sleeve thanks to the 3dfx community. Some creative and talented hardware hackers with help from some ex-3dfx engineers have figured out how to replace the memory chips on the card to get a 128 or even 256 MB V5 5500 card, which gave significant performance improvements. Going from 64 to 128 MB yielded around 13% more performance, and to 256 MB helped retain performance in later titles which used a lot of texture memory, or large textures.
Another hack is someone in Europe bought several trays of final VSA-100 silicon which was rated at 200 MHz. These chips can be put on 5500 or 6000 cards with fast RAM to really wake them up. Though such mods are only for those with deep pockets, the last I checked, a RAM upgrade and the better VSA-100 chips ran around $500. The service may not be available anymore, as there were only a finite number of VSA-100 chips available, and I can't find the listing the guy had, so he may have stopped.
I haven't seen the performance uplift from increasing memory size that you speak of in the tests I've seen, but the replacement VSA-100 chips DEFINITELY increase the clockspeed headroom. Seeing how much modding has been going on with these latter 3Dfx cards really is a testament to how passionate the community is!
Man hardware improved quickly in those days.
The year after the Voodoo5 saw the release of the Radeon 8500 with double the pixel and quadruple the texture capability of the MAXX
Well, voodoo 5 was released much too late. It was delayed quite a lot. But sure, things moved fast back then. Voodoo 2 to radeon 9700 pro was 5-6 years; pentium 233 mmx to 2 GHz athlon 64 was also around 5 years.
Great video! Good to have you back! The waterfall in the background, Hunua Falls? Looks like it!
I have both, with boxes. Also I have both V5500 in PCI and AGP flavours. I also a Voodoo 1, a voodoo 2 and another pair of Voodoo 2 in SLi configuration.
I own both cards voodoo 5 and rage max we are building a couple retro rigs will try them soon. I have kept almost all my hardware over the last 20 years.
i miss the days of 3dFX.. my voodoo 3 3000 was a freaking beast. took my computer that could NOT run even quake 2, and turned it into a machine that could even run quake 3 without issue and was able to run the early doom 3 alpha from E3 without problem
Have you played around with SFFT drivers on the V5 under XP? I managed to eek out
No I never installed XP on this system. I tried some modded drivers in 98 but I wasn't very impressed.
And in 2 years the prices drastically changed.
Now they're unbelievable.
I am one of those people!. Always wondering the back of my head since hearing about the Fury Maxx a couple years ago, though it is more morbid curiosity since the Fury Maxx was such an odd overlooked duck.
I remember hearing there was a huge controversy over how the ati card ran on 3DMark99. Apparently ATI did some jiggery to fool 3DMark99 into thinking it was running faster.
Does anyone remember the quack3.exe fiasco?
the voodoo 5 is hands down my favorite voodoo card together with the voodoo 2, excellent performance and it just works with a lot of games i can run, i can also use a ultra hle to run some nintendo 64 games on my voodoo-equiped pc, that's very fascinating
piecaruso97 The Glide drivers for epsxe were great too!
God I remember those times.. tuning your rig to get the best performance out of it was such fun. I had the fortunate situation to work at a PC retailer and was allowed within reason to always trade in my slightly used harware for the newer stuff, so i went through a LOT of different graphic cards, CPUs, boards and RAM. There were times when I switched to a 100Mhz faster Athlon XP after 2 Weeks.
The Choice for GPU was always hard though.. so much to look for. What games am I playing, how is the driver Situation, how is the speed vs. Graphics Quality, etc. I was Playing UT competetively back then (and a bit of Q3) so there raw speed was king. But at other times you just wanted to relax and so image quality was important. Thats why I became such a Nvidia Fanboy. Other then their first Riva TNT Drivers, and some issues with the TNT2 as far as I can remember, starting with Geforce 256 all those problems were gone. That card rocked the market so hard ... The detonator Drivers still are unbeatable in my opinion. Stood and fell with support from the rest of the Industry, I guess.
OMG OMG I'm the one person!! Well, some of it was admittedly ignorance but I'll explain. The Rage Fury MAXX was the first 3D accelerator I ever purchased back in 2000, and while I had experience working with older 2nd-hand PC hardware, 3D graphics hardware was a brand new field for me. I do remember, though, seriously considering both cards as they were both being offered on TigerDirect at the time of my purchase. I really liked the dual-GPU feature of both cards, and compared them further on basic numbers like price and RAM quantity. I do remember the ATI offering being somewhat less expensive but honestly I think the deciding factor was brand recognition. ATI had been around the longest of the "big three", and I'd seen their cards in many OLD PC's I'd played with so this was really the only brand out of the bunch that felt familiar to me. So I purchased my Rage Fury MAXX and honestly, I loved it. To be fair though I had nothing to compare it with. Mine is identical to the "new older one" you purchased, in appearance and clock speeds. This was the first time I'd seen my games rendered with hardware acceleration and it was all magical to me! I guess I got lucky in that I didn't encounter any games the card wouldn't work with, although I do remember, back in 2000, having to manually install an AGP GART driver like you mentioned. I also never encountered the massive juttering you showed in Quake 3. If anyone's curious I used the card with an Asus AZ11 socket A motherboard back in 2000 and an Asus P2B-D Slot 1 board in 2019. The card served me well until I wanted to upgrade to WinXP and learned that there were no drivers so I then switched to a boring GeForce4 MX 440 and the MAXX went back into its box. It wasn't until 2019 when I pulled it back out for my Retro PC nostalgia project that I even learned that it wasn't rendering some of my games with both chips. Sadly during its storage, it developed a tendency to produce graphical artifacts when the 2nd chip was enabled so games like Need For Speed 3 that utilized AFR would exhibit the artifacts but NFS 5 would not. Still, it brought me hundreds of hours of happiness and it still produces a very unique visual appearance that I remembered especially in NFS 5. I guess I could best describe it as looking like some sort of temporal AA in that there's a very slight per-frame per-pixel color variation, almost a snowy shimmering effect but very slight. That rendering appearance became emotionally tied to the magical experience of using my first 3D hardware, and I've never seen another card reproduce it since. Honestly I really wish my MAXX was still fully functional because I'd love to use it as originally intended in my main Retro PC... and it just so happens that my secondary Retro PC now runs the Voodoo5 5500 that was my second choice all those years ago.
Anyway, thank you for this video! I was so excited to see it pop up!
Well there we have it! We found the person! Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed reading about your experience
Finally this happened. I was waiting for that from release of GF FX 5800U vs Radeon 9700 pro. Just wanted to see benchmarks) Better to choose GF DDR, or GF2 from green side, and Radeon from red, as gaming card for 2000 gaming PC.
Great video Nathan!
Those cards in the back ground :o Lovit, I also have 5950 ultra
Back in the day I had a Rage 128, then Radeon SDR followed by a Geforce 3.
Instant like before even the video starts!!!
Same here!
If I remember a review in a magazine back then correctly it was very even wwith the first geforce but with better image quality, although it lacked some when it came to 32bit. Beena few years and google did not help much :)
It's just so hard to find decent AGP 3.3V compatible boards these days. The same for Socket A Athlon coolers.
Having just had driver issues with a rage 128, I was looking to go back to 3dfx with a v5....obviously my next pc had nvidia
Very good show. Thanks
I have this 2 cards! Very nice history!
Awesome to see another great video from you!
Very good video Nathan, love the humor you added in there 😊👍
Thanks!
I had a Voodoo 5500 pci 64mb. My pc didnt have AGP... It was a Sears model of the Compaq Presario 5005sr with a P3 933 coppermine and upgraded to 384mb of pc133sd ram. It also came with WindowsME... bleh.. I had problems with this card not rendering some effects correctly if i remember right. Ended up selling it and getting a Geforce MX420. Lower performance if i remember right but, rendered the games i played correctly. I remember though having some good times getting drunk, cranking up some good metal music and playing quake 2. :D
EDIT oh! I just remembered. So i had the voodoo and the mx420 when trying to play Knights of the Old Republic. I dont remember how it preformed but... My Compaq had a Intel 810 onboard GPU i think. Kotor would not load on that gpu but when switching Gpu's one night it actually booted the game with the Intel 810. It... was bad... but i managed to load a save and run around.. well i think thats what was happening. It looked like a slide show of a N64 game...
Thank you for an interesting review!
From what I can remember the PCI version of the Voodoo 5500 had almost exactly the same performance as the AGP version. Are you sure there's a big penalty? (Could be from running more modern hardware in the rest of the system though).
The performance penalty won't show up unless you use an overpowered CPU. Back when they were new, the difference wouldn't have been apparent.
Sometimes I regret getting the Geforce 2 GTS over the Voodoo 5, I didn't at the time, but I do now. I wish I could get my hands on a Voodoo 5 to make a great 98 system.
Me too.
11:35 At the time the Voodoo5 came out, that was considered a _good_ framerate, not merely "somewhat playable". Beyond that, 800x600 was not a low resolution. 640x480 was the standard resolution. 800x600 was higher, and 1024x768 the equivalent of 2560x1600 today (or would be, if monitor makers hadn't taken a wrong turn and made everything 16:9 5-10 years ago). 1280x1024 (or 960, if you wanted the pure aspect ratio conversion) was the equivalent of 4K today.
I bought a Voodoo5 5500 to replace my twin Voodoo2 setup, because I wanted better GLide performance. I would have stuck with the card far longer than I did, but it had a hardware failure, and I was forced to enter the world of ATI and nVidia. Until 3dfx was gobbled up by nVidia (the only fruit of that acquisition seems to have been the "SLI" moniker), I was looking forward to the four-GPU Voodoo5 6000 card.
Exactly. Somewhat playable I would argue was around 10 fps, that was the reality for many which had an obsolete graphics accelerator, which was just 2+ years for non-Voodoo cards, at least on decent graphics setting. Many people without a card and an older CPU had to endure slide shows at 3-5 fps.
16:10 is the ultimate monitor aspect ratio. 16:9 and wider is just stupid in the computer monitor space. That's why I still stick to Macbooks even though they're stupid in other hardware aspects.
Because it's a voodoo card... I gotta say having one made you feel like a proper gamer.. maybe just killer marketing... Although I had the pci voodoo3 2000 or 3000 can't remember.. glide was the saviour to voodoo 👍
I'm surprised you didn't comment that the Voodoo has theoretically impossible scaling in Quake III, it's about %15 faster than it should be for dual chip. I wonder if 3DFx did some driver shenanigans too.
Ah yeah, not sure why I didn't notice that
@@PixelPipes Lol i only noticed it because of my age old 3DFx dislike 🤣 You see I backed not 1 but 2 wrong horses back then, 1st I bought an PowerVR based M3D because an an NEC employee I got a great discount on it as we actually fabbed them here in Scotland for a time. After that was a bust I fell out with add in accelerators and went for the 1st genuine all in one, a Rendition Verite 1000 based Creative 3D Blaster, this was actually a great card other than poor DOS support which was still a key component back then. If it had good DOS support i think this could have been a real success & Rendition could have become an nVidia or ATI, alas it was not to be and I wish i had kept that card as it was a milestone product & is like hens teeth now.
What would be the most reasonably priced video card for Win98 right now? That could be a good video.
GeForce 2MX /4MX for sure. Good performance and there are tons of them available on places like eBay for fair money.
Any GeForce really from 2 MX onwards.
6600 gt is win 98 compatible and kerb stomped every old OpenGL game I threw at it.
See if you can find a GeForce 2 Ti for a good price or a GF4 MX 440 64mb or 128mb will be a cheap alternative.
Geforce4 TI 4200. You can snag them for under $40 on the bay, if you're patient. The GF6 beats it but has a lot of compatibility issues with 98 drivers. The GF4 TI 4200/4400/4600 will smoke any of the MX cards. The GF5 or FX cards that are affordable aren't worth the packaging they come in.
I owned a Voodoo 5 5500 when I was 15 or so. I saved up and bought it, it was a nice upgrade from my Voodoo 3 2000. When I took my PC into the shop to get it fixed the tech said he broke the V5 and replaced it with a Geforce 4 MX. He said he had to keep the V5 since he was giving me a GeForce. Being a kid I didn't know better. I'm not even sure if he really broke it. It makes me mad to this day.
I am *really* glad you did the UT Glide test with 32bit forced, but I disagree that comparing both cards in D3D was fair. D3D was basically a native protocol for ATI as they had no other renderer, bar opengl which they sucked at. So fair comparisons in this generation is each cards best performing protocol vs each other, in this regard D3D vs Glide.
The way I see it: if you had a Voodoo5 back in the day, you would use Glide whenever possible. But notice most of the games and benches I tested didn't have a Glide mode. Glide was starting to go out of favor over "standardization", and if you only had D3D as an option, then performance in that API was still relevant and important.
@@PixelPipes - still, it is not fair. It's like forcing one car not to use 6th gear in a top speed test just because the opponent car has a 5 speed gearbox for the sake of 'apples to apples'. We're testing how well a card can perform in a particular game so it is fair to let 3dfx use its fastest API because why would anyone switch to D3D on a Voodoo5 in a real life scenario having an option of using Glide? Kudos for throwing in the third bar to the chart though 👍🏾
I remember when I was into Quake III Arena when it was new. The Voodoo5 was an awesome card, and one I wanted but never did own. 3DFX cards just worked, no one that had one ever had any complaints about them. I didn't start getting flawless reliability with my graphics cards until I owned a GeForce2 GTS. I have owned both AMD and nVidia cards since.. Miss 3DFX!!
I've still got my Voodoo5 boxed and in the loft. It was an easy card to live with but it didn't stay in my PC for long as it lacked hardware TnL which was becoming a must have at the time. I think it was one of the first cards to deliver usable AA in games, which seriously impressed me (simpler days)!
AA was important in those low(er) resolution days. Today I douldn't care less about AA. Don't understand why so many have gone all in on it today and go on about it like it's the end of the (gaming) world.
@@snetmotnosrorb3946 i'd argue the opposite. AA was less important back then, because CRT monitors had a naturally much softer image, and screensizes were much smaller to boot. a 15" crt still looks plenty good at 640x480
i would like to see a three way test between Voodoo 3 2000 (the most commonly available voodoo 3), radeon 7000 and geforce 2 mx.
It was a cool card and I got it for less money than I sold my V2SLI for.
So it looks like the ATI card was let down by its drivers (a tradition still kept alive by AMD) mostly because of the techniques used to enable the two chips to work together. If ATI was able to use a similar technique as used by the Voodoo team I could see the Rage Fury being way more competitive.
I, too, was one of those guys who really wanted to compare these two. The task seemed quite easy to me as I had a Voodoo5 of my own and my best friend had a Rage Fury MAXX (although when they were acting as daily drivers we haven't met yet). Unfortunately one day he brought a box of his retired computer hardware to work, probably to free up some space at home... and one day when we weren't there someone simply recycled the whole lot. Can you imagine? Ah, the rage, the fury! 🤬
Anyways, great video. Sub count goes +1 👍🏾
These early days was great...i could real off core clock mem clock an shader pipes like a savaunt back then
What are the pins for on the top edge of the 5500?
The 26pin connector ? As far as I know it is the same connector which is around since the 90s and often labeled as VGA Feature Connector or VESA Feature Connector etc. so it is for things like Frame Grabber, MPEG decoding cards etc.
i have a rage fury maxx but mine is on drugs, works but textures shimmer and colors are off, it passes the build in driver tests, anything i can try to fix it ?
try setting your motherboard AGP setting in the BIOS to 2x
Interested to know what API you were using for the game tests. Voodoo cards were notoriously terrible at DirectX and you would run them with OpenGL with most things and Glide either directly or with a wrapper wherever you could. As you saw with the test on UT it really can make a huge difference to the 3dfx cards.
The problem with 3dfx was most of the cards they made were actually stopgap products, the higher ups kept diverting resources away from the rampage project so they could release other products. From what i recall basically everything after voodoo 2 was just put together so they had something to sell while rampage was being worked on.
I have build and still upgrading my deam PC that i never had when i was kid ! Voodoo 5 5500 on AMD 2200+ , 512Ram OCZ Plat , Aureal Vortex 2 , CRT IIyama 19" , Roland MA12 speakers and Sound Canvas ! IDE hdd are so bad that i changed 3rd one ! now im waiting the SSD Pata 64gb !
"we are running at a very low 800x600 resolution" ... ugh back in 2001 that was the resolution I was running everything at and 1024x768 seemed to be high-res reserved for top videocards and expensive high refresh rate monitors
👍😊 Great work !!
I wonder how these would do in Return to Castle Wolfenstein.
If I didn't own a Rage Fury Maxx, I would think it might stand a chance.
Nice one! Unfortunately I have only one of them. So I can't make any comparison.
Do you have tested the Rage Fury Maxx with different Mainboard chipset?
You should have made a tripple head-to-head battle of out it by including Matrox. :P
I had a couple Maxx cards go through my hands including back in 2000 when it was new. Sure it had some shortcomings but I thought it was a good card overall and compared well with the voodoo5 and gf1… which had their shortcomings as well. Still a little sore 20 some years later though due to its lack of support for other OS’s than 9x. Bummer cause I always liked 2k better.
Yeah that rubbed a lot of owners the wrong way
Glad to see you back!
There is an old Emachine we haven't used in years I'm gonna upgrade into a beast Windows 98 gaming PC. Opened it up and found a Voodoo 2 inside. Didn't know that was inside.
In a way, I still lust for a voodoo 5 because of nostalgia with the first home pc having an agp voodoo 3. However, nowadays a working one goes for rtx 2070 money, which is just a hard **No** for me. Not to mention my attempts to set up an uber windows 98(se) build proved to be a bust, because via chipset drivers are guaranteed to literally kill the install within seconds for me. And I'm sitting on an athlon xp 3200+ that would need an nforce 2 board, or to get an intel chipset and pentium 4 775, with an AGP slot. Either way is going to be unfairly expensive for the end goal at this time.
Was it common back then to have dual cards!
great video! whats the music in the end?
Beautiful memories have came back, i used to had the Voodoo 3 3000 paired with a Pentium ii.
Yet another excellent video, its fascinating to look back on some of the first ever dual chip cards.
- John