You mean before M$ and NoVideo collaborated to push DirectX and kill 3dfx and Glide ?. InHell might be anti-consumer and famous for how they kept better sales than original K7/Athlon with their horrid 423/478/ early 775 pentiums (Northwood, Prescott and so on) but what NoVideo did to 3dfx was way more anti-consumer and anti-progress - remember - NoVideo bought and completely erased what was left of 3dfx - just to get hold of the patents and bury Glide (which actually was way more efficient API than DirectX and was not tied to Windows). Same thing is happening with Vulkan now - only saving grace for it might be the next gen consoles.

@@volf3r505 3DFX went bankrupt, Nvidia picked up their assets on the cheap and didn't continue the limited non-scalable design the 3DFX cards were running on. That doesn't mean nvidia was evil. Glide was also not an open standard (until right before 3DFX went bankrupt), was tied to 3DFX's hardware, and was superseded by both OpenGL (of which Glide was originally based on) and DirectX. There was no point to Glide other than for 3DFX to have a proprietary offering to try to lock people into their brand.

@@volf3r505 Holy delusional memories warped by nostalgia glasses, Batman! 3dfx killed themselves with stupid decision after stupid decision (like deciding to become their sole physical card manufacturer for some idiotic reason!), and Glide being closed source & funded by a failing company had loads of problems keeping up with the latest GPU features and games.

@@Cooe. And since that time nVidia adapted it! 🙉

but still not really efficient ... double gpu bumped approx 40% instead of 100%

same here :)

Voodoo banshee is a voodoo2 with 2d gpu. One of the reason it have about the same power like aan voodoo2 8Mb . Not all 16Gb is use for the voodoo part.

​@@dyslectischeNot quite. It has a single TMU, rather than the two of the V2. Games with polygon multitexturing, the V2 would be faster than a Banshee. Those without would be faster on the Banshee.

How did you find the bad ram chip?

@@henrikwils9323I just removed the four chips on the back connected to the framebuffer, and already without those i could go up to 640x480 without issue. Then i added 4 "new chips" and it worked flawlessly at 800x600 again. As for knowing exactly which chip was bad, i've tested each one of those four chips on some S3 PCI videocard with sockets for EDO memory, and sure enough one of them was faulty and caused artifacts on that particular card.

@@totalrandomtechnolog Holy smokes!!! You just made my day! Thank you so much!

@@totalrandomtechnolog +1

@@totalrandomtechnolog this solution is priceless!

Thanks!

same here. 5 bucks? what a bargain!

Voodoo1 and Voodoo2 cards don't have BIOSes, they're purely memory mapped devices.

Even if they would have BIOS chips, it is sometimes easier from a manufacturing standpoint to produce a single multipurpose component for many applications, than to make one for each modification of the same card.

@@GGigabiteM Even still, I was surprised he didn't have to bridge solder pads to change the memory size. That was a very common way manufacturers could reuse boards without needing any additional logic at all.

@@roguenova6766 It's very common for videocards to have multiple bios versions specc'd for different memory manufacturers and timings.

@@rich1051414 S3 did the same.

Yes you should Christopher, nostalgia is king.

Same here, i suspect they arrived as a run-out of the Voodoo2 at the end of it's life, clearing out the last stocks at discounted prices.

I had suspected that as i have seen 12Mb cards with DRAMs installed on one side only so thy must be able to handle the extra dense chips.

@@DextersTechLab sounds like the second version of the STB V2 1000 when reading from this post: www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=72925

I still miss that old days when we run for flags, not frags:)

Tbh i think there are plenty of new-old-stock dram chips around.

He showed that the 8mb just didnt have enough ram for some things, didnt he?

@Apache Longbow Yeah, you could run SLI on the 8MB cards just as well. The frame buffer memory was the most important and interestingly enough frame buffer was the same on 8mb cards as it was on 12mb cards. As he mentioned in the video, the difference was you get more texture swapping on the 8mb cards. On a more modern system one way to perhaps work around or alleviate this somewhat, might be to create a ramdisk in system memory, copying all the game files there, and running the game from the ramdisk. You'd still get some slowdown, but it wouldn't be as bad as paging it from disk. One thing I wonder about is was there any compatible memory chips faster than 25ns? If I recall correctly, I believe you could overclock these cards just a bit. I wonder if faster memory allow more overclocking. Of course, to do that, youd have to replace all of the chips, which would be a good bit of work, and that's assuming the processing chips wouldn't be the limiting factor.

@@stefanl5183 It would be an interesting experiment to see if you can improve performance using a ramdisk. There are ways of creating one in Win9x and even DOS. But I am not sure the problem is really paging from disk -- that really would be slow. Couldn't the bottleneck just be copying from ram to the video card? I also wonder about the 25ns chips. The thing is 25ns is pretty fast for those days. The system ram in those older systems is something like 70ns, so probably you'd get more bang-for-the-buck by getting fast ram, say 60ns or less. Again, I suspect the bottleneck is between system ram and the video card. Then again you are also limited by the PCI bus speed. It would be interesting to overclock the PCI bus a bit just to see how much you can squeeze out of the machine. This would probably only be noticeable on newer games with bigger textures like Quake III instead of the Quake demo given in this video. Quake textures were smaller and would have required less swapping from ram, so the difference between 8 and 12mb didn't really matter.

Interesting thoughts, though i would point out that this machine had a fast CF card as the main drive which would do 60mb/sec so a ramdisk might not make much difference. It's since been upgraded to a SATA SSD via a parallel to serial converter. You can get 20ns drams, which does allow for a bigger overclock. I think these are the ones marked 120mhz?

sure, if you like cold solder joints. Better pre-heat with a hot air gun.

@@SeeJayPlayGames if done properly it doesn't leave cold joints. If you have that you went to fast. Pre heating is just not required, but fine if you want to. Drag soldering is fast and I have done it with larger chips in mainboard repair in a professional setting. Never missed a pin.

Thank you, having some kind of microscope helps a lot. You can always find old junk boards to practice removing and replacing components.

I would wager all the pcbs are the same but they use different density drams

Lol, love it. Thanks!

@@DextersTechLab you are welcome :v

I was about to say the same thing. He could have cut his time and effort drastically.

Even that is unnecessarily long. Solder paste + heat gun in this situation would take a total of 1-2 minutes. Your point remains valid though. Absolutely.

@@nexxusty he did say his equipment wasn't up to hot air flowing.

Maybe, but i find soldering with an iron quite calming and therapeutic!

I worked at a 3DFx card maker and Mau could hot air an entire card together in about 15 minutes or less. So it's certainly faster but doing it your way is very impressive.

Thanks Laurie, good to know you are still watching! 😁

Yes i do think this might be possible. But as games were optimised for the 8mb texture ram i doubt you would see any difference.

They're worth good money these days just check eBay otherwise keep them.

I have a win98 box with two voodoo2, took it all apart and put it in storage after I figured out that glide wrapper actually works better

@@MrKillswitch88 I have 3 voodoo2 cards one is new..

The Voodoo 2 12mb cards had a 4MB frame buffer + 8mb separate texture memory. That's 12mb total. That's what is shown at 16:15.

Generally speaking the quoted size of a voodoo 2 includes the frame buffer.

@@DextersTechLab Gotcha 👍

The memory on Voodoo 1 and 2 cards works very differently from later cards as each of the frame buffer and tmu chips has its own memory. The frame buffer is limited to just 4mb and doesn't scale in sli while the tmu memory does which tops out at 16mb according to documentation though never tested.

No. The circuit board can only access 12 MB; there are no traces on the board going to the pins you'd need to address more memory.

Yes, in theory it is possible: darwin-3dfx.sourceforge.net/voodoo2.pdf I've never heard of anyone trying it though, or if other configuration settings or software support are needed.

Ooh, that's a nice document! Thanks for the link!

I think that was utsource. They have their proper website and they are present on ebay under the same name utsource

Would be interesting to find out. I don't think anyone's ever created a V2 with more than 12MB on it.

Thanks, you can choose to use the postal service not one of the couriers. It's cheaper.

@@DextersTechLab ahh missed the shipping options. Its a bit discreet. Thats a lot better at 6 dollars or so cheers for that 👍

Erm.... maybe

Sure, it's utsource

Most likely, i am sure the frame buffer is fixed at 4Mb. The TMUs i believe can address 16Mb, but i have never seen anyone try and upgrade a card.

@@DextersTechLab 16mb version of the card might be a neat thing to try

It's a hayear microscope camera and a Kowa LMZ45T3 macro lens

You can buy small kits to build and practice on, i got a small audio amplifier kit and it came with a board and a bunch of resisters and capacitors. great practice and it doesn't matter if you mess it up.

No glue was used!!!

It's www.utsource.net/

Most likely the driver wouldn't initialise the card and it simply wouldn't work.

I am just simplifying it as the total RAM on the card. Made up of 8Mb Texture + 4 Mb Framebuffer, before the upgrade it was 4Mb+4Mb.

25ns is 80mhz for EDO, so the standard cards already overclock the ram at 90mhz. The later ones with the faster 100mhz and 125mhz ram will overclock easier if you can keep the 3 3dfx ICs cool enough. At least that is how i understand it.

@@DextersTechLab Future video potential? I'd love to see two Voodoo2s modded with 125mhz RAM and some copper heatsinks glued to the 3dfx chips with thermal epoxy. You could do a clickbaity "Fastest Voodoo2s in the world" title too. =P

@@Match451 Not a great idea when these cards are over $100 a pop sometimes a lot more.

It's a Xytronic LF-8800

More VRAM does not increase performance beyond games that do not need more than 8. Pascal cards are a good example of this, my xfx 580 came with 8gb of 2000mhz mem, but I can get far more out of it by over clocking the memory rather than adding more or even over clocking the core.

uhh thank you for that response, but not everyone has 8+gb of ram on their video cards

Yes, there are plenty of options to adapt newer drives and ssd to the old parallel ide interface. Compact Flash cards are probably the easiest to use.

Actually only about an hour. Would have been quicker without videoing it

Ah oke, gladfully.. in that way, i was allready concerned he was going to blow his soldering iron..