Hi guys!

Surfin` some days ago, i have founded these thinghs:

3Dfx Confirms Voodoo2 Rev319:36 | by ChrisSteve Schick of 3Dfx has confirmed the rumors and speculation about the upcoming Voodoo2 Rev 3 boards, which are toted to have the capability to house more memory per board, and utilize 125 MHZ SDRAM instead of the current 100 MHZ bus SDRAM on current Voodoo2's. Thanks Agn for the news bit. 3Dfx has developed a revision to the Voodoo2 Reference Board which makes better utilization of memory and therefore runs faster. The chipset remains unchanged. The board does not have any new features, just the optimization of memory. The revised board can run over 100 MHz and can offer an overall performance boost of around 15 percent. So far none of the companies making Voodoo2 boards have adopted our new design revision. Steve Schick3Dfx Interactive, Inc.

And....

Another...

SLI with Different V2 Brands/Sizes09:21 | by ChrisAfter swapping out various Voodoo2 based cards from various systems, I decided to try a little experiment, to get 2 different Voodoo2 cards from different manufacturers to work together in SLI (Scan Line Interleave) mode. 3Dfx has said time and time again that you need identical 3dfx cards from the same manufacturer to run SLI mode. Here is a quote from the Voodoo2 FAQ at 3Dfx. What are the requirements for Scan Line Interleaving (SLI)? Voodoo2 requires two open PCI cards; two identical Voodoo2 based cards from the same manufacturer, and Voodoo2 drivers. Scan Line Interleaving is limited to two cards. But I noticed when I swapped out one Voodoo2 8 MB board, and put in another 8 MB Voodoo2 from another manufacturer, Windows didn't prompt me for new drivers, it didn't even recognize that there was a new piece of hardware in the system, it thought it was the exact same board. This got me thinking, if Windows thinks that they are the same board, than I should be able to stick another board, and it will think it's the same too. I tried it, it works. Windows detected another "Voodoo2 3D Accelerator", and detected SLI mode in the 3dfx control panel of my Display Settings. I tested this by going into Quake II and trying to run 1024x768 on the 3dfx display driver, and it worked. Now just as another test, this morning I threw in a 12 MB Voodoo2, along with an 8 MB Voodoo2, to test this again, I thought there was no way this would work. Windows detected the board, but it seems to think that this is an 8 MB board, maybe because it's SLI'd with another 8 MB board. So, Windows seems to think that my 12/8 configuration is an 8/8 setup, but it still detects SLI mode, and let's me play at 1024x768. I have yet to try a 12/12 configuration with different manufacturers boards, which I am going to try later today, but I'm guessing it will work if an 8/8 configuration works. Now what did I have to do to accomplish this? Easy!, just use the 3Dfx reference Voodoo2 driver on both of the boards (which you can get here), overwrite your current drivers, and install the reference ones from 3dfx. I'm not certain if this will work on boards that aren't made on the 3dfx reference design, like the Canopus Pure 3D, and the Miro Highscore, but they *should* work. Please email me if you try this on different board configurations and have success or failure.



WOw

I`d like to buy a Voodoo2 running at 125 Mhz  but my V2 is at 90 MHz and 100 Mhz Memory, like all V2`s 

Quote:

This Voodoo2, if SLI'ed, would have beaten the sh!t out of the V3. D@mn, I can't remember what CPUs were available by the time V3 arrived. I doubt there was any CPU able to max a V3 out back in those days. But then again, I might be wrong (memory leaks  ).

I'm sure that the 125MHz boards weren't ever released in any form.  Shame really, but then the Voodoo2 was CPU limited at the time anyway!  As FalconFly says, you were lucky if you could afford a 300MHz+ system, and Voodoo2s weren't maxed out until systems well over twice that fast were released.

As for the mismatching cards in SLI.  Many combinations do just work.  And for those that don't there are special drivers to try for Windows 95/98 and ME users.

When you are putting the problem of using higher GPU clock, you must remember the old problem:
1) A faster GPU offers you better performance, as much as the fill-rate is of concern, and overall giving a better performance at high resolutions. However, in some games you could not run the Voodoo2 at 1024x768 resolution because you have only 12 MB of textures. Actually, the faster GPU would bring not too much of a performance increase.

2) The actual speed would not be greately improved because the GPU has to wait the same amount o time when he needs to get textures, or be issued commands. Thus, most of the time, a faster video memory, is a greater performance boost, rather than a GPU clock speed increase.

We all know that the V2-SLI combination was almost on par with the Voodoo3 -2000. This does not mean that if the V2-SLI's GPU's were clocked faster the performace increase would be so big. And also don't forget that the V2-SLI can have around 12 Mb for textures, while the Voodoo3 (not the 3500) can have upto 14 Mb for textures(video mode is using around 1Mbx2 double buffering reasons) on the video memory.

The last point is that we all should know by now that the V5-6000 performance was not fully unleashed, because there were faster memory chips required to use at maximum the 4 powerfull VSA-100 chips.

To figure this results for yourself, you have to overclock the card by changing only the GPU clock speed (some can change it at the same time with the memory clock and this is not relevant for the memory limiting), and see the speed increase in games. You will soon find out that it is not such a big increase.

Reffering to bandwidth: the value you mentioned is the theoretic maximum, or the peak value if ever achieved in reality. Don't forget that PCI is still PCI. You can't have too much bandwidth even if you use 2. Or at least you can't have twice the speed, but somewhere around 1.5, 1.8 the speed. 2 PCI card use 2 slots, 2 IRQ's, 2 ... At a moment, the PCI latency's becames a major setback in case of multiple PCI cards.

Overclocking solely depends on the videocard design. Most of the newer cards have independent clocks for GPU and memory (asyncronous), but older ones have a single clock that controls both the GPU and the memory, even if they run at different speeds.

The V2 is not having async clocks management, so overclocking only the  memory is almost impossible (unless you modify some circuitry on the board itself).

He the problem with the Voodoo2 is the PCI bus I know, so to solve this we should implement HSR into Glide.
HSR Hidden Surface Removel. But I don't know if  Dborca allready implemented it into Glide, because there was some release with HSR but I thought it was some other technique or or ment 'H' Version Second Release.
But they are Using HSR removal in Nvidia drivers etc.
And I could notice it with 3Dmark99 with game1 race the tunnel part, with my gf4 I get a performance increase at that part, with my voodoo2 I get a drop in performance. Conclusion HSR would be very useful!!!

Yes but Opengl converts it to GLIDE3x.
And yes I am thinking about it, but directx is also one of my interests to wrap it to glide.

Well, with such old Card running slightly more recent Games, the 125MHz sure would yield almost a linear acceleration.

(remember, most people run well above 1000Mhz systems, that put a normal 90MHz Voodoo2 absolutely on its limits)

The Voodoo2 IMHO will always have one big advantage over the Banshee : Single pass Multitexturing
...which yields a massive performance boost, as well as a great image quality compared to single-textured scenes