Video Card?

Well, if I don't see a new video card in the next few days, I'll likely go out and buy one myself. But I'm not sure what to look for. I thought I'd ask you guys! Since I seem to be the only one around here without a 3D Accelerator Card...

Which should I look for? What shouldn't I look for? I'm thinking along the lines of a Voodoo3 16MB PCI. Also, there are AGP Voodoo3 cards out there. They seem to be more expensive. Are they better? I have a free AGP slot. If not, there's always room for a PCI.

So.. Are these Voodoo3 cards generally the best for ZanZan, ZDoomGL, Legacy, etc? And then there's Unreal to play with, as well as Hexen 2, and maybe Diablo 2. Thoughts?

Nope, your not the only one without a 3D accelerator card.

I've got a voodoo3 3000 PCI in this machine at the moment to test it- its my brothers and it crashes his computer a lot. I havent really tested it, just a few hours of Counterstrike LAN :D, but it crashed now and then and with the WickedGL drivers loaded for speed, looked no better and ran no faster than my good ole Voodoo2. According to Kat's benchmarks, depending on your machine you should get diff. cards, but for my 450 the Savage 2000 would be the best. I'm going to look into that since its quite cheap too.

If you have an AGP slot, get an AGP card. Simple as that.

I have a v3 3000 AGP, and I've gotten all the 3D Doom ports to run.

For any game that uses the Unreal engine, the only realistic alternative is a 3dfx card. People are still whining about nasty performance on nVidia cards (and we're talking GeForce2's here).

Any game based on the Q2 engine should run great on a V3, too (with the possible exception of Diakatana), thanks to the wonderfully optimized miniGL. I have no idea about Diablo2, but I haven't heard any complaints about 3dfx cards with it.

However, any game using the Q3 engine isn't going to be all that swell on a V3... TNT2 cards would give you plenty better image quality on those games.

Oh, and if anyone tells you that the V3 looks nasty, they're wrong. That overhyped "22bit rendering" actually _does_ make a difference in games... It's 16bit is significantly better than a TNT2's 16bit quality. Of course, most people don't realize that you have to turn this feature on before you notice a difference...

It also kinda depends on your system. What's your CPU/MOBO/RAM?

Teppic said:

I've got a voodoo3 3000 PCI in this machine at the moment to test it- its my brothers and it crashes his computer a lot. I havent really tested it, just a few hours of Counterstrike LAN :D, but it crashed now and then and with the WickedGL drivers loaded for speed, looked no better and ran no faster than my good ole Voodoo2. According to Kat's benchmarks, depending on your machine you should get diff. cards, but for my 450 the Savage 2000 would be the best. I'm going to look into that since its quite cheap too.

S3 cards are cheap for a reason... S3 is closing it's doors pretty soon. They said they would make one more driver revision, but quite frankly I don't think that's enough to fix the horde of bugs in their drivers. If I were you, I'd stay clear of S3 cards...

The fact that a V3 didn't run better than a V2 might be because of the CPU... A slow cpu would cripple perfomance on that card. On my K6-2 350, all resolutions from 640x480 to 1280x1024 ran at like 45fps... The CPU was the limiting factor no matter what. On my Thunderbird 700, however, 1280x1024 runs almost exactely at the same speed (the video card is the limiting factor here), but lower resolutions like 1024x768 run way faster...

I have an ATI Rage 128, and I must say that I am very satisfied. I have never had any problems with any game (including all DOOM ports). The only problem is that the card's support for the Overlay technique (used by TV cards) isn't that great.

i have a voodoo3 myself but I like many others have problems running zdoomgl (and that means zanzan). I've heard TNT2's are pretty decent cards.

While the Voodoo's are nice cards and cheap, if you want something with REAL pwoer get a GeForce. Thoguh I've heard they have soem problems running UT, it an be fixed with a bit of tweaking.

though I suppose if you want something thats inexpensive and has a good bang fro the buck a Voodoo might be better =/

Get a TNT Riva 2. Nice card, since it is OpenGL and DirectX compatable...

lol, u call that power?????
my bro got a voodoo5 with a dual athlon1ghz each and it runs good
lol
and he can use ownly nt ports

Okay. Thanks for the help, everyone! I'm using a Celeron 433 processor with 160MB memory. So, AGP = better? That's interesting. The TNT2 card is another thought. It should go well with the Live card if I want to use this Lava Player thing. So yes, I'm looking for something inexpensive with some punch. Just something that will give me 3D Accellerating abilities. Although I fear of having to upgrade again for DOOM 3 in a few years. But yes, I'm looking for value.

kain said:

lol, u call that power?????
my bro got a voodoo5 with a dual athlon1ghz each and it runs good
lol
and he can use ownly nt ports

That's nice, since there aren't any multiple CPU Athlon motheboards...

AndrewB said:

Okay. Thanks for the help, everyone! I'm using a Celeron 433 processor with 160MB memory. So, AGP = better? That's interesting. The TNT2 card is another thought. It should go well with the Live card if I want to use this Lava Player thing. So yes, I'm looking for something inexpensive with some punch. Just something that will give me 3D Accellerating abilities. Although I fear of having to upgrade again for DOOM 3 in a few years. But yes, I'm looking for value.

If you're looking for value with good all-around speed, the best two choices are probably V3's or TNT2's. With a 433 a GeForce would be a waste of money... It would be waiting on your CPU the entire time.

V3: Great for Unreal engine, Quake1/2 engines, probably cheaper (?)
TNT2: Just plain bad for Unreal, way better OpenGL driver, 32bit color and more features

Both probably would work equally well for 3D Doom ports.

And dude, forget about Doom3. If you bought the absolute best system available today for like $30,000 it would still be in the low to mid range when Doom3 is released.

this wont help much if you have fast video card adn moniter but if you dont then go to softseek.com adn under tune up adn benchmarking utilities, download hztool its a cool freeware program that lats you set any resolution, framerate or color depth for your video card or moniter that snot provided in your cards drivers, i tried it on my old pentium 133 with a matrox mga millenium, adn quake looks and runs really fast now... i talk too much

David_A said:

If you're looking for value with good all-around speed, the best two choices are probably V3's or TNT2's. With a 433 a GeForce would be a waste of money... It would be waiting on your CPU the entire time.

V3: Great for Unreal engine, Quake1/2 engines, probably cheaper (?)
TNT2: Just plain bad for Unreal, way better OpenGL driver, 32bit color and more features

Both probably would work equally well for 3D Doom ports.

And dude, forget about Doom3. If you bought the absolute best system available today for like $30,000 it would still be in the low to mid range when Doom3 is released.

I have a TNT2 32MB Ultra card. It rocks, except that you can't use the GLQuake and GLHexen2 modules with it, and you can with V3. However, all the GLDoom ports, especially JDoom work great on the TNT2. Don't know about the V3. I DO know that V3 only outputs 16-bits and that looks rather dull next to a TNT2. They can render in 32-bits, but, it doesn't do much when the final output is dithered to 16.

You want my advice: don't even think about buying a 3D card for the next year or so. The 3D acceleration "industry" (for lack of a better word) is a complete mess. Half the cards support this, the other half support that, certain games on work with this or that, etc. I'm waiting for all the game and card manufacturers to get their crap organized before even thinking about purchasing a new card.

David_A said:

That's nice, since there aren't any multiple CPU Athlon motheboards...

Dont you just hate bullshitters?

Naberus said:

Nope, your not the only one without a 3D accelerator card.

if you're in the market to buy a video card now, get a geforce 2 MX. The released specs for d3 are geforce card, and the gf2mx sure is a bargain. I know, by the time it is actually released, it'll be runnin like shit, but what choices have you got? Wait for 2 years or buy now? I'd rather buy the budget, this gen video cards so performance isn't quite so bad

and btw, im not exactly rich: im 16yo, have no job and have an annual gross of about AU$600. it's just enough to keep me alive, but im still kickin

thanks in advance for your replies

What should i say ? I'm still using Voodoo 1 and ZdoomGL works like shit. GLQuAke is playable only in 512x384.... You should buy a TNT2 card, i think.

What should i say ? I'm still using Voodoo 1 and ZdoomGL works like shit. GLQuAke is playable only in 512x384.... You should buy a TNT2 card, i think.

Lüt said:

I have a TNT2 32MB Ultra card. It rocks, except that you can't use the GLQuake and GLHexen2 modules with it, and you can with V3. However, all the GLDoom ports, especially JDoom work great on the TNT2. Don't know about the V3. I DO know that V3 only outputs 16-bits and that looks rather dull next to a TNT2. They can render in 32-bits, but, it doesn't do much when the final output is dithered to 16.

You want my advice: don't even think about buying a 3D card for the next year or so. The 3D acceleration "industry" (for lack of a better word) is a complete mess. Half the cards support this, the other half support that, certain games on work with this or that, etc. I'm waiting for all the game and card manufacturers to get their crap organized before even thinking about purchasing a new card.

Yeah, the TNT2 card probably is better all around, although I want to argue with that image quality question...

3dfx overhyped the V3's "22bit renderng" a while back when people started praising the TNT1/2's image quality. I thought it was just regular PR crap too, until the drivers came out that allowed you to run the card in "high quality" mode. In fact, it does look remarkably better than it did before (with it turned off, the image quality is identical to the V2, which is not a good thing). I saw image comparisons with the TNT2 and V3 in 16bit color, and, quite frankly, the V3 was much better. Of course, the TNT2 in 32bit color is another story:)

And as I said, I can run all the 3D Doom ports fine... Legacy runs fine through the OpenGL ICD, when I used ZDoomGL for like a day it ran fine under the ICD, and JDoom runs good in D3D once you get the damn thing running (I had to email Jaako like 3 times before I got the thing started).

I don't know about holding off on buying a card though... I am, but that's because I have an adequate card and I don't have any money:) For someone without a 3D card, a cheap V3 or TNT2 would probably be a good buy.

Have p2 350, 128mb and tnt2 can play everything so far. Even 3dfx games like deusX or heavy metal fak2 without probs.
The pro of nvidia cards is they have one driver for all their cards which mean that they still provide updates for the tnt.
They are easy to overclock: 157/182(from 125/150) is the max I could get from my tnt2.

The "unified drivers" or whatever can also be a bad thing. The new Detonator3 drivers released a few days ago really boosted perfomance on GeForce1/2 cards, however, they also hurt the TNT2....

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1297&p=11

And how is FAKK2 a 3dfx game? It uses the Quake3 engine, which isn't exactly 3dfx friendly.