Thank you!

On a Sempron, the FX5500 would be like 10 times faster than a Voodoo 3

Nice upgrade :)

i remember got that video card voodoo 3 a launch day that was good old days still have

Roy Hess i still play unreal tournament 2004 lol

I too still have my Voodoo 3 in a box with the passive cooler painted black for better heat dissipation (if it works or not!)

Roy Hess I still have my voodoo 3 2000 pci

That's because there is no better pure multiplayer shooter IMHO. Onslaught is legendary but no-one plays it any more. :/

Do you still have that card to dump the BIOS?

I do indeed still have it, though I do not know how to pull the bios off. Do you have a guide of some kind? It would be neat to see if these other FX cards could have their bios flashed so they can run on more computers.

nvflash? www.techpowerup.com/download/nvidia-nvflash/

I'll dump mine and see what the options are. Then I'll put something together for you that's easy to use. I'll be in touch!

Will do. Feel free to contact me via Facebook.

voodoo3 never "fully supported AGP". AGP was used as a 64bit 66MHz PCI slot. no amount of drivers will support AGP features like AGP texturing.

rasz you haven't been following the open source drivers. the only voodoo agp card that can't use it is the voodoo 5. of course usefulness is limited, because most games don't need it. however, PCI texturing was also added to the voodoo2, which allows a single voodoo 2 to run quake 3 with high detail@1024, which is not possible without using these driver hacks. newer os support and development has stopped, but last I checked there were 64 bit voodoo 2 drivers, which I tested years ago, and it is mind blowing what has been patched into them. I did experiment with a voodoo 3 too, but it's usefulness is not as good as the voodoo 2, which can supplement a more modern agp card. I have a 9x retrobox with an obsidian x24 paired with an 8500 aiw. plenty of experience with the older hardware, so I know what is or isn't possible on it. also, the v3 ran incredibly hot and it's efficiency wasn't as good as the 2.

you could always run games with >textures than texture memory, but its not the same as DIME (AGP direct memory execute). Load Quake2 with 9MB texture level and Voodoo(2, 2sli and 3) framerate drops by 2-3x.

I kept Voodoo3 3000 up to ~2004 only because of Q3 and UT based games (Tactical Ops etc) I played online. Loved that card to bits.

John Doe Interesting, I literally bought a X1900 XTX today as my hunch was that it would do Dx9 better than my nvidia 6xxx and 7xxx cards. I use a X1950pro AGP in my main Dx9 rig though, the XTX is more just to test my theories and bench with

nice troll

I wouldn't put a V5 in a Socket 7 machine. It really needs a decent Pentium III or AMD Ahtlon IMO.

PhilsComputerLab Yeah, true. However in my win98 p4 build I use gf5950 with glide and getting better performance of course. Now I'm looking where to put voodoo 5. So I'm wondering whether it will be feasible at all in a dos-focused time-machine build

That's how we learnt first lessons back in the day. Marketing always got you at some point, but after that you study reviews carefully.

A few games do use the refresh rate as timing. Lotus III for example. But once again, let's focus on what works and not a few games that don't :)

A channel called "Pixel Pipes" did this and found interesting results.

The 5500 is held back by a CPU that is about as powerful as a pentium ii 350. There is no mystery here. AGP won’t help.

@@soylentgreenb Yeah, I realize there's a CPU bottleneck with this specific test, but if the test was done on a more powerful platform where the CPU isnt the limiing factor then AGP would likely make a difference. I think that's what I was trying to imply by this statement many years ago. I've run into performance differences with AGP vs PCI on my own personal systems back in the day and I was curious about seeing some test results to demonstrate it imperically.

@@IronicTonic8 The 5500 is not a very fast card, has a lot of memory and it has T&L and vertex shaders. T&L and vertex shaders means that games don't need to keep sending vertices to the graphics card each frame unless an object has actually changed (position of vertices might change due to software skinning of character models, but level geometry, foliage etc doesn't; wavey foliage was just a simple vertex shader). This means you can have a buffer of tens of thousands of polygons and just give the GPU a couple of matrices and draw commands across the PCI bus and it will draw all that without using the bus. The only time the PCI bus bandwidth would have mattered for the 5500 is in old games that use GL immediate mode and similar (and they don't need the performance) or during loading. A game that streams in assets without a load screen might stutter a bit; but most of those won't really run acceptably on the 5500 to begin with. AGP texturing and similar was just a bad idea to begin with, invented when memory was expensive.

@@soylentgreenb While I appreciate you going into depth about how graphics cards process information, I'm already well aware of this. I'm a computer engineering who has been working with technology for over 20 years. I've also been following enthusiast tech sites for several decades and I understand how rendering is done. I can agree that the PCI bus is MOSTLY not a limiting factor for a card like the FX 5500, but it's not a black and white situation. The point I'd like to make is there's a difference between what you described and actual practice. The reason is because other devices have to share the limited PCI bus bandwidth. When you add things like a sound card, a network card, or any other device on the PCI bus then it gets crowded really fast. Back in 1999 I was able to create a situation in several games where a PCI Voodoo3 2000 16MB card was producing low framerates and severe stuttering. I upgraded to an AGP Voodoo3 (same exact model, same frame buffer) and the performance was buttery smooth in all games. This was with an Asus P3B-F motherboard and Pentium II 450. The real benefit of AGP is the fact that it's a *dedicated* bus for the graphics card. The FX 5500 is a more powerful card than the Voodoo3 so I guarantee you will run into situations where the PCI bus will be a limiting factor. There's a big difference between how things operate in theory and the real world. That's the flaw in your logic. There's plenty of information out there to show that the PCI bus is a limiting factor, even for slower cards like the FX 5500. If there wasn't a significant difference between AGP and PCI, then it probably wouldn't have been implemented in the first place... but clearly engineers felt it was necessary, even in 1998 when graphics cards were slower and less bandwidth hungry. If you have to share the PCI bus with other devices, you're going to run into conflicts.

voodoo is LOVE.. fx is whatever

Yes it's Quake for DOS, not GLQuake with 3D acceleration.

Yea it doesn't work with all boards. I've had good luck with PCI only boards that have onboard VGA, as that is often connected to AGP. Also look out for PCI 6200 cards, not so great for Windows 98, but with XP they work well/ And Radeons of course, although I don't have any I believe.

Well, my motherboard have an onboard VGA, and it also have some AGP settings in BIOS, but still doesn't work with FX5500. Couple days ago I bought PCI Riva TNT Viper V550 from ebay, hope it'll work. Anyway, thanks for nice videos! Great channel!

Yes I'm sure.

It's a compaq OEM model, not all of the voodoo 3 cards out there are retail. The dell v3 3000s are missing a tv out (s-video)for instance.

There really was an all-in-wonder voodoo 3, but I believe they are rare to find.

Yup this one looks like an OEM Voodoo3 3500. I had one in my possession until a few months ago, when I got the retail version with a built-in TV + FM tuner. The Voodoo3 3000 is a bit shorter as it doesn't have anything above the memory chips.

TIL There was an OEM 3500 without the TV tuner on it. Thanks for the info!

+1 for testing with nGlide.

LOL I can only do so much :D I do want to check it out, but got other videos in the works first. Time is limited :(

I use nGlide on my modern PC to play some of the old games as D3D and OpenGL run like shit on win7, FPS is good but the input lag is really bad. Under nGlide its like a million FPS and super responsive and looks good as well apart from text seems to be low quality.

Not nglide, but back in the day I tried zeckensack's glide wrapper on an FX5200 (on a Pentium 3 450). Performance was way worse than on my Voodoo2 300mhz Pentium 2 300. (about 10-15fps on Dethkarz)

Phil, you're covering tons as it is. Your content is consistently good quality. But nGlide could be worth covering in future.

I think some of the cards were able to do so. The one Phil used must have a later bios or just a different one. There are a ton of them on ebay and I'm not sure who built them.

Post some info about that card, might help

Axle Geforce FX5500 256mb PCI www.cyberport.de/axle-geforce-fx-5500-256mb-ddr-pci-grafikkarte-vga-dvi-tv-out-2805-101_797.html

This is the one I have: www.ebay.com/i/112401845268?chn=ps&dispItem=1

I have two Gateway 2000 G6-266m Pentium II systems @266Mhz of course using the 440FX chipset as they were before when AGP became released in August of 1997.These were goodwill thrift store finds.

I'll be getting a PCI 6200 soon, but I'm not sure what to do with it. It's too new to use with Socket 7, so it might be a good candidate for an APG less Socket 370 system.

I used a Radeon 9250 PCI with my AGP-less S370 Gigabyte board with a P3S 1266. Runs pretty well, but I would imagine a 6200 would make it a killer combo.

sure, if you have Gigabit internet and happen to download something at full 100MB/s ;)

It needs a different patch, often called Voodoo Rush patch. Also use XMS memory with Tomb Raider!

I'm sure I had mine overclocked to 200 at some point.

Cool

maybe simulate one of those or do an 'overclock' special?

I have my doubts if I have ever seen one on eBay and I have seen several voodoo 5 6000 sell over the years there, would love to get one but chances are to have one it would have to be a modded card where all the memory is replaced with higher clocking chips. Also all the caps and the cooling would have to be replaced for obvious reasons, the stock cooler is one of the very worst.

Not where I live because of the hot climate.

Duron will feature for sure.

If You can get K6-3+ 400 or 450, both cups can get 600 mhz very easily

Well AGP will win by a long shot, especially on a fast system.

Well, considering that you used the AGP version of the Voodoo3 vs the PCI version of the FX5500, I think it's only fair that you revisit this test with the AGP FX5500 for the sake of an even playing field.

its K6, but this FX has around GF4 MX440 performance (~GF2 Ti/Ultra), GF3 Ti200 was >10% faster in ut2ķ3 :)

rasz okay, thanks for that :)

I know :D

Yea we found out of this limitation later. A huge letdown and so it is best to look for a branded version of the card rather than AliExpress version.

@@philscomputerlab Wow, I had no idea it was worth making "fake" chinese version of such obsolete hardware., even 3 years ago, I'm shocked. 😳

Not yet. These are still quite modern, so I'm just goofing around :)

Cos it's the first proper modern day type of 3D nVidia card right? So i take it that you are planning to review it in the future?

All these cards are limited by the CPU. I will for sure test the GeForce cards in my regular GPU test machine.

that's very true, but when I tested the 8400GS struggled more with the slower CPU than the v4 (I tested downcloking the CPU), so it's interesting, for sure if you can test the FX5500 PCI on your regular testing rig against other old AGP geforces on this game it will be interesting from this perspective,

yes but voodoo 3 is a pci card with pci-agp bridge and agp connector

I think you might be confusing PCIe cards with AGP slots that used a PCIe to AGP bridge in the geforce 5 and 6 series as AGP is an extension of the PCI bus system there is no bridge required and nor were any 3dfx cards that made it to market that used one. The only one I know of that used a PCI bridge was the canceled voodoo 5 6000 and is part of the reason it failed as they had so many issues with the first standalone intel bridge and then their own custom chipset with integrated PCI bridge so that multi processors on the same card was possible and fully scaleable.

no, I'm not confusing it. Just read specifications of Voodoo 3 cards. they are in fact pci cards with agp port. here it is [quote] All AGP 3dfx cards use the port as a mere 66 MHz PCI port and do not utilize any of the special features that AGP offers. www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/3dfx

and why did the fx had PCI ? at that time, you would only buy PCI cards if your PC didn't have an AGP...but then it doesn't work...weird !

Resolutions are written on the graphs.

Checkout the previous video, it explains more about the FX.

The CPU is holding things back bigtime. In a fast Pentium III the FX 5500 would be much stronger. Something I thought about, if a board doesn't have an AGP slot, but onboard graphics, I reckon this card should work. Something I want to try out, so this could be a good card for these basic Socket 370 boards (Celeron) with no AGP slot.

Yeah man, the 5500 PCI was at the time (maybe still is) the best PCI card specs-wise. In order to afford my PCs back in the day, I got them from Fingerhut (a mail order catalog that lets you pay on things in payments). Somehow I didn't realize it lacked an AGP slot when I ordered it. I got stuck with that motherboard for a few years, but the 5500 really made it manageable. As far as the Socket 370, I bypassed that and went from my Slot 1 PII 350, to that Athlon, and then back to Intel with the first low end Core 2 Duo. Anyway, from what I'm reading, it does seem the 5500 would definitely suit a non-AGP 370 board the same way it did me and my Athlon.

I don't have a lot of experience with ME yet, but at least with the FX series the drivers seem to be a bit weird. A GeForce2 however should work just fine. And the Radeon doesn't work with nGlide?

I've never had much luck with nGlide and Radeon cards. Driver support is certainly a little weird on ME, though.

Milan Jovanovic Sadly, the Biostar M7NCD doesn't have onboard video. Not too bad otherwise, even if Win9x driver support for it is a little lacking.

PhilsComputerLab I have a Voodoo 2 in my Core i5 atm. I managed to get it running under Windows 10 using the GlideXP driver. (you also need to disable driver sig checking at boot, and anything over 640x480 seems to BSOD, but it does work.) I wondered if you've tried an original Voodoo 1 or 2 in a recent system, as it may be interesting to benchmark?

PhilsComputerLab btw, did you know you can get AGPPCI adapters? Not sure if it has any serious bottlenecks, but the bus protocols are essentially the same. I think I saw the schematic and PCB layout for an adapter recently, and it was fairly simple.

These "new" Chinese cards are weird and only work on newer motherboards that have AGP. Look for a used one instead, then shouldn't be an issue.

@@philscomputerlab Thank you for the reply I really wasnt expecting one on such an old video. I really do appreciate it. The one Im looking at is on ebay and is from China... I cant believe how little choice there is out there now, like I said Im using an old Elsa Gladiac 511 PCI which is a Geforce 2 MX. Would an FX5200 PCI be a decent upgrade from the Gladiac? I think the FX5500 wont be possible as there is no AGP on my board, its got an intel 815E onboard graphics chip. Im looking to play some old games... C&C Tiberian Sun, Rainbow 6 Rogue Spear is "new", nothing fancy.

@@BladeRunner21577 A lot depends on the processor. You need to find out if the processor or graphics card is the weak part. Your Elsa seems to be a GeForce MX. Certainly a decent graphics card but yes the FX will be stronger in 3D.

@@BladeRunner21577 It can be easier sourcing a motherboard with AGP for your system, but even AGP cards suitable for windows 98 aren't so cheap these days.

@@philscomputerlab CPU is a socket 370 Celeron 1.3GHz. So Im not expecting anything fancy.

AmigaMerlin.

Worst is the stability issues with many Nvidia, and other, AGP cards. Switching to a PCI card can work very well. They are much harder to find however.

Yes. I've found at that time that disabling AGP Texturing solve the most stability issues on Appolo chipsets + Nvidia. From what I can remember, it can be disabled from dxdiag window.

The ones on the CD should work!

hmm. mine didn't come with a CD.

John May Odd. If I remember correctly, the driver was version 56.something.

I got it working finally.. i had to go back to 169.21 for it to work.. the later versions do not work. I wonder if it is a genuine Nvidia Graphics Processor or if this is a cheap knockoff. I will order a real genuine FX5500 and see how they compare in benchmarks.

Yea they are legit, the FX 5500 is the FX 5200 GPU, but with the full 128 bit memory interface. Are you running Windows XP? For Windows 98, the 56.xx drivers worked great for me.

The ones from AliExpress can have this issue. Only one way of finding out when it arrives. Hope it works.

@@philscomputerlab Bought it used, but it appears to be an AliExpress one. We'll find out when it's here. One thing that gives me hope is the manual for my SS7 board claims that the onboard graphics "runs on an AGP Bus in AGP 2x mode" - despite not having a slot. So I guess we'll see. Thank you for the reply, and for all the content. Big fan of everything you do.

@@DanR__ Let us know, I'm always curious to hear back from the community members.

@@philscomputerlabGood day Phil, I can confirm that the Chinese FX 5500 does work on my SS7 board with no AGP slot but I reckon the key is that the board must mention an AGP bus in the BIOS. It seems that some boards from that era use chipsets that are designed to work with AGP devices but certain variants were made with no physical slot. The only problem is, with my 6x86MX PR300, the bottleneck is too much, 3DMark 2000 is 4-5x worse than a Pentium iii-500 with the same GPU. Lack of SSE and slow FPU make the FX a poor choice for my machine. I’m making a video about the build which I’ll share in time. Cheers Phil.

Checkout the previous video, it explains it.

Ok, but how did Socket 7 mobos have AGP issues? Did this apply to Super Socket 7 as well? I think I only ran PCI on my rigs (because that's all they had), but I don't remember any AGP issues known at the time.

I said it didn't work. No image in POST, BIOS, DOS. Switching cards in Windows isn't going to address this and is not a usable solution IMO. Apparently though there are versions of the FX 5500 that will work, but mine didn't.

I had no image either but I found the internal card still gave a display up to a point. The 5500 did not show anything even at post or windows as if it was dead and not even installed until I got windows loaded and then installed the 5500, disabled the build in card in device manager, then at lease it would start displaying once windows loaded the drivers. otherwise it looks like it doesn't post and then the desktop/login screen would suddenly show up. I could not disable the built in card as there was no option in the bios. Sometimes it would fail to display from either, so you reset and also sometimes the display would randomly switch back to the built in one so you had to switch the cable around and fix it up.

Yes, sorry but to me that is not working. Swapping cards and switching cables? No.

yeah I know what you mean. was a lot of mucking around but it did stay working in the end. But what made me give up was the awful performance. I forgot to mention, what actually got it working on the card stable was finding a PCI slot it liked. It worked fine once it was in the 2nd slot. I ended up abandoning the system and going for something around the 6800Ultra

The exact FX 5500 PCI worked on a Via MVP4 Compaq Camaro motherboard and didn't on an ASUS TX97-XE. I guess there is a PCI slot issue with 3,3 V not being implemented on particular models of motherboards.

Lots of other PCI cards available. You can also use it as a DOS gaming machine, get a cheap S3 PCI card and you're good to co.

i might end up buying an Epox Ep-mvp3g2 i think it is super7 and with that i can run DOS and win95 games. it is the only motherboard super7 that i can buy in my city. it costs 50dollars, I only had an epox motherboard once, and it was an athlon xp, and when i flashed the bios the motherboard just died, so that brand i never trusted.

Your board DOES have an AGP(SiS 530 AGPset, PC Chips favorite), its used for the integrated 6326AGP. The only question is can you disable integrated vga in bios ? and will it be enough to make FX hack work (FX5500 is an AGP card wired into PCI, exploiting undocumented compatibility modes). But why would you want to assemble the ultimate combo of crap (K6, sis, FX) is beyond me :) You say DOS and win95 games, you can play those on the integrated VGA(~400 3dmark 99) no problem, slap in Voodoo 1 and you get 2x 3D performance, enough for early titles.

LOL I almost spilled my drink. Ultimate combo of crap :D

like RegularCars guy - goes to UK, test drives Rolls-Royce, likes Peugeot 206 better :o

I do keep my eyes open for one, but prices haven't dropped enough yet. Because apart from doing a video I will likely never use it again, so it has to be super cheap or donated.

too bad you don't live in or near germany. i have a board with an atom 230 just sitting here doing nothing. it would even color match the blue card you got. could send it over but shipping to australia (that is where you live, right?) would probably cost about as much as buying another board. i did pair the atom 230 and also an atom 330 with a geforce GT610 and tried running more "recent" games on that setup for the fun of it. it actually wasn't all that bad. portal 2 was around 30fps average with occasional drops but since the game isn't that fast paced it was an acceptable experience. i also tried doom 3 wich was around 20fps-ish but with all the shooting and running going on in that game it's no fun playing like that. both systems also had no problem playing 1080p movies from my NAS with kodi - probably because of the GT 610's hardware video decoder.

Voodoo has DOS drivers?

@@philscomputerlab Yes. They were included as part of the games. Many games had patches that were released later, like e.g. for Tomb Raider. Hence it felt like an apples to oranges comparison to compare the Voodoo and the FX in DOS. I assume then you tested software rendering with both?

@@js-123 You are referring to the Glide API. This of course only works on the Voodoo. Glide is not supported on the GeForce FX.

@@js-123 Also, that's not what a driver is. The games supported Glide API natively. Just for clarification 🙂

@@philscomputerlab Yes, but in your video, you mention benchmarks on DOS - which is weird. Because Glide is available on DOS, while nothing is available for the FX.