how do i get R8 G8 B8 A8 working on my voodoo3??

[cooliscool]

on my voodoo 3, i get messed up just really weird gfx using the R8 G8 B8 A8 texture modes,i get crap colors so i figured using that i would get better ones , i have 128mb ram, voodoo3 3000 16mb non oc, p3 833 mhz. any suggestions or will it not work?

[cooliscool]

oh and i use petes D3D plugin for gfx

[rio]

it is because v3 can't do a 32 bit color depth like pete said on his d3d readme.txt

[Biased turkey]

It looks like you are not using the most optimised plugin for your videoboard. Lewpy's Glide plugin is a must vor any Banshee, V3 or V5 videoboard.Glide is the native "graphic language" for 3Dfx boards.
Try it, you'll see the difference.
I hope this helps

I have a Diamond monster fusion 16 meg. it a multi purpose card that is compatible with banshee and voodoo 3 drivers. Petes plugin works perfect for me. All I had to do was turn off the banshee chipset it the config option.

Kna127, that is exactally what Biased turkey is saying. You had to turn off the Banshee Chipset, which is the voodoo part of the board, for it to work w/Petes plugins. On a Voodoo 3 3000 there is no way you can do this. It is a glide card, not an OGL or D3D card. Lewpy's plugin is made for Voodoo cards, it is a Glide Plugin. Pete's Plugins are made for Nvidia and other cards, they are D3D and OGL plugins. cooliscool, if you want the best performance from your Voodoo 3 card, best to use Lewpy's plugin.
sincerely,
sx/amiga

[dpence]

Kna127, that is exactally what Biased turkey is saying. You had to turn off the Banshee Chipset, which is the voodoo part of the board, for it to work w/Petes plugins


Ummm, actually I don't know what biased turkey is talking about..lol

The moster fusion is a Banshee only card...there are no dual banshee/voodoo 3 cards....

and as for the rgba 8888 textures, only voodoo 5 can use them... as Sx has said, use glide!!!, it's optimized for voodoo and gives better quality on voodoo cards than petes plugins (Except for petes being able to do multipass fast)

[fivefeet8]

Why 8888? Use 5555... In psx games, it looks the same.... Use lewpys pluggin like everyone here said.... Update to newest drivers.... You can also try to overclock your voodoo but that is at your own risk...

[Lewpy]

Okay, let's get some things straight

1) All 3dfx-based cards (Voodoo Graphics, Voodoo Rush, Voodoo², Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo³, Voodoo 4/5 [VSA-100]) support D3D, OpenGL, and Glide. That includes cards made by 3rd party manufacturers (Creative, Diamond, etc.)

2) All 3dfx-based cards (see list above!) can use the standard 3dfx reference drivers. The 3dfx reference drivers may not have all the extras of the 3rd party drivers, but they are normally less buggy (the drivers from Diamond certainly come to mind when I think of bugs!!!).

3) All combined 2D/3D 3dfx-based graphics cards (i.e. all except Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo² cards) support 32bit colour in 2D resolutions. This includes desktop colour depth.

4) 2D-only 3dfx-based graphics cards (Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo² cards) only support 16bit resolutions.

5) Only the Voodoo 4/5 cards (using the VSA-100 chipset) support 32bit colour rendering and 32bit colour textures in 3D modes of D3D, OpenGL, and Glide.

So, to address the problem/comments :-

cooliscool: Your Voodoo³ card can not support ARGB8888 (32bit) rendering, so it will not work. No wonder you get crappy graphics Stick to 16bit rendering modes (ARGB0565, for a Voodoo card).

rio: yup, correct answer

Biased turkey: what you say is true, although I always say that you should use the plugin that works best for you. I know my plugin doesn't work better than Pete's with certain games, and on certain people's systems (Pete and I tackle certain emulation problems in different ways), so you should always do your own comparison.

Kna127: The Diamond Monster 16Mb is a Voodoo Banshee card. It is no different than any other Voodoo Banshee card out there, afaik. I hope you aren't using the Diamond drivers!!!! But yes, you can use Voodoo³ drivers with the Voodoo Banshee, with a bit of hacking. I couldn't say whether this is a "Good Thing" (tm) to do, as I've never tried it myself. Although I am slightly confused about you "turning off the banshee chipset" option! The only one I can think of is in my plugin. Is that the one?

sxamiga: whoa, lay off the happy-pipe You don't have to disable anything for a 3dfx-based card to work in D3D or OpenGL. You just run the program, and it works. So a Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo ³ card with work fine with both my plugin and all of Pete's, as long as you select 16bit rendering modes in Pete's plugin (as noted in his readme).

dpence: Biased turkey made sense to me, it was the next couple that didn't make sense!! Apart from that, what you say is true, although [again] check all plugins for yourself and find which works best for your setup with your games .... my usual disclaimer

fivefeet8: 8888 does help, even with PSX games. It helps reduce the colour banding that gouraud-shading on the PSX can produce. On the PSX, they can selective enable dithering, but it doesn't beat higher colour depths. Also, with 8888, 24bit MDECs can be reproduced with no colour-loss, whereas in 1555/0565 modes some of the colour information is lost when the MDECs colours are reduced to 16bit.

Note: my plugin automatically uses 8888 rendering and 8888 textures on Voodoo cards that can support it (i.e. Voodoo4/5 [VSA-100]).

[Zephon]

4) 2D-only 3dfx-based graphics cards (Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo² cards) only support 16bit resolutions.

Lewpy, just a small error: voodoo and voodoo2 are 3D-only cards(I think you were in a hurry and didn't check).

Ya I was talking about the one in the plugin. I was looking at the manual for my card and it said voodoo3 drivers work just fine. It doesnt require any hacking Just download and install. You must remove your previous driver though. Im not trying to agrue just teling you what it said in the manual. Why would I even want my card to serve as a voodoo three. My card doesnt have as many grphx errors. The only problem is I cant run bleem!, and that bugs me especially after I purchased the program. It just crashes when I Turn on hardware. Can one of you please tell me in my post on the bleem message board. I better stop Im off topic

[Demigod]

Originally posted by Lewpy
Okay, let's get some things straight

1) All 3dfx-based cards (Voodoo Graphics, Voodoo Rush, Voodoo², Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo³, Voodoo 4/5 [VSA-100]) support D3D, OpenGL, and Glide. That includes cards made by 3rd party manufacturers (Creative, Diamond, etc.)

Hmm, I know 3Dfx cards support Glide and Direct3D, but I'm not too sure about OpenGL. Until the Voodoo 4/5, 3Dfx did not have a fully working OpenGL ICD. Therefore, a lot of professional OpenGL programs and games did not run (properly) on Voodoo 1/2/3/Banshee cards. They had to use mini-GL drivers for most OpenGL games. Still, Pete's OpenGL plugin seems to work fine with my friend's Voodoo 3 though.

[cairey]

The Voodoo3 was OpenGL compliant and supplied with a OpenGL ICD, the V2 later had one through later drivers.

[dpence]

ummm actually the same openGL ICD works with all voodoo cards that support fully glide3x...the ICD is simply a openGL wrapper to glide3x.

[Demigod]

Ah, i c..
Thank you for clearing that up guys
Yeah, 3Dfx was rather slow in implementing OpenGL into their cards. Then again they were slow to implement a lot of features. I guess their laziness was the primary factor to their demise.

[Fox5]

First off, use Lewpy's newest glide plugin. I've found it is a lot better than the older ones. Also, I have a voodoo 3 2000 PCI o/c and I can handle R8 G8 B8 A8 texture mode easily, so you shouldn't have a problem. BTW, I've never really liked petes d3d plugin, before lewpy got his plugin up to standards(or at least for the games I was playing, I liked textures in my game), I always used Pete's OpenGl. As long as you have the newest voodoo3 drivers(might be able to find them at x3dfx.com) the openGl mode should be better than d3d. However, I do find it strange that pete's d3d isn't working for you, it worked fine for me, though a bit slower than the opengl one.

BTW, I'm using the final beta voodoo5 drivers that were released by 3dfx, however 3dfx's last couple driver sets were universal like nvidia's.(everything recognizes it as a voodoo3)

And one more thing, one of the final drivers for the voodoo 3 before the voodoo 5 came out put a fully working OpenGL ICD in, however it wasn't up to par with their mini gl thingys until the last few drivers released by the company. Just download the nexest voodoo5 drivers and you should have no problem.(the newest v3 and v5 drivers are esentially the same, the v5 just has a couple more features to enhance graphics, most of which won't work but some will, and runs a bit faster...overall the v5 drivers are better, and like I said before, they are fully compatible with the v3....and possibly the v2)


Oh, and why you may call 3dfx lazy, they had a lot of features that other companies didn't(unfortunately, most of these were only supported in glide, though later on they did not include in glide....basically limiting the card to half its features no matter which API is used) and have you seen any other companies come out with an acculation buffer, despite having like 2 years to work on one? It is not as easy as it seems, and though nearly every feature on it can be replicated, the quality won't be as high. The primary factor in their demise was greed(the voodoo3 was originally supposed to be a $300 or $400 card with many advanced features that even current cards don't have, however 3dfx realized they would sell a lot more cards at the $100-$200 range and figured they could implement all those other features later when they are needed....unfortunately they did not anticipate rising silicon prices and lost money for like 6 months on every voodoo3 sold....also the company was very badly managed, which was its main problem....but it did have the funds to support itself for another 6 months while continuing to lose money.....also I hear the board of directors and (especially) the new CEO got quite a healthy sum of money to pocket by the sale)

3Dfx was not lazy its that their cards needed to be backed up by code. You may see this in emulators like ultrahle. 3dfx cards are not like cards made by ati. ATI cards do no need the code to back it up while 3dfx cards do this is why it took them so long to accomplish anything

[Demigod]

3Dfx fell short on features. All their products were one generation behind. They only implemented features when they were "in demand". The Voodoo 2 was a faster version of the Voodoo 1, the Voodoo 3 was nothing more than 2 Voodoo 2's in SLI mode, and the Voodoo 5 finally improved the technology and had 32bit rendering and large texture support but didn't have hardware T&L, which was available on the GeForce 256 and Savage 2000 which came out 6 months earlier. The individual VSA chips weren't that much faster than a Voodoo 3 and used an outdated design(they could have used a 0.18 micron design, which would have cut back on power and increased speed) and neither did they take advantage of DDR technology. They had an entire year to come up with the card, they could have done a lot more with it.

3Dfx came into the market with very good technology and their products were good, but nVidia was always one step ahead. 3Dfx relied too heavily on their current technology and their large fan base. And I don't see how prices have anything to do with it. The nVidia TNT2 were sold at about the same price and they were very successful, and nVidia invests a lot more into their R&D. 3Dfx also switched to becoming a card maker, from a chip maker starting with the Voodoo 3, maybe that had something to do with it.

[Zephon]

3dfx WAS the best gfx chipset company some years ago, and they were the only one who could actually make good video cards. But after some years other companies(nvidia) started to make good chipsets also, so 3dfx lost some space. Nvidia started implementing new features that made they video cards very respected, while 3dfx engineers were obstinate and did not want to add new features to the voodoo chipsets. The result: new games started using nvidia's new features and voodoo cards became old-fashioned.

3dfx tried to implement all this new features in their Voodoo5, it was really done. However, the release of Voodoo5 was delayed for one and a half year, so when it was out, they seemed old again. It was not 3dfx's fault, because when they projected voodoo5, the latest tecnology was used(0.25 was the latest), I just don't know why the release was delayed for so long.

[takwu]

Originally posted by Demigod79
The Voodoo 2 was a faster version of the Voodoo 1, the Voodoo 3 was nothing more than 2 Voodoo 2's in SLI mode ...

huh?
i thought voodoo2 was a completely new design from the voodoo1, wasnt it? :confused:
the slowest voodoo3 (2000) was compared to voodoo2 sli. the voodoo2 could have comparable performance, but only if the game took full advantage of the SLI setup. for most other games, v2sli didnt really hold up against the v3 2000. and if you compare to the faster models (3000 and 3500), i dont think it's even close.

However, I could be wrong. I'd like to say to everyone reading this (and perhaps other ppl's posts) to use their own discretion.

the one thing i agree with Demigod79 would be his last note. 3dfx's fate MIGHT have something to do with them selling their own cards. The manufacturers that sold millions (maybe) of voodoo1 and voodoo2 cards, like Diamond, Creative, etc. were suddenly left without much choice: to sell nVidia cards (at the time the only real competition for 3dfx). Think about how all their marketing power swifted.
That aside, look at other chip manufacturers that sold their own cards. I'm talking about ATI, and the now forgotten Matrox. Sure, ATI still held on, and eventually developed the competitive Radeon. But they were backed by their huge success in the OEM market. And Matrox, oh boy. They put up a good fight against the original Voodoo Graphics, and the less popular Voodoo Rush, with affordable cards that offered comparable performance. They looked promising for a little while there. But since the Voodoo2, they surely went down quickly. Why? Maybe because Diamond and Creative (and other manufacturers) were all competing against Matrox, not much different from how they later competed against 3dfx. See the pattern in history?