rec.autos.simulators

Hi Everybody,

My son has a Celeron 333 with an onboard SiS 3D video board (8 Mb). The
performance of the video board on D3D is bad. He is almost out of budget,
but he is thinking in buy one of that unexpensive 3DFX (the first one) with
4Mb (cost around U$ 40). Creative was selling Voodoo 2 on their web site for
50, but are out of stock now.

My questions are:

1. Suppose he is going to limit the resolution to 640x480 (as I understand
it is the maximum for 3DFX), will he be able to get good frame rates on
NFS3, F1RS (or Monaco GP RS2), GPL,  N99, FIFA99 and NBA99?

2. Are there any games that, being 3DFX based, will run just on Voodoo2 or
up?

Any other comments that you might think is important?

Thanks for your help,

Roberto

get  the  Hercules Thriller 3d 8mb pci/agp card.

voodoo banshee boards (2d and 3d card all in one) are dropping rapidly in
price as they have been superceeded by the voodoo 3 and these are very fast
in games as they are voodoo2 based, ive seen them in magazines for 40 inc
vat which is quite cheap considering i bought mine about 2 months ago when
they first came out and it cost me 100,

howeevr im not sure if it will work with a built in video motherboard (most
allow you to disable the onboard sound so this may be the case with onbord
graphics as well

jay "rubinio" B

Hi Roberto,
I would suggest going for the 3dfx over the rendition..
If all you wanted to run was Papy sims, then the rendition card would
be fine, but if you want to enjoy other sims as well, then my advice
would be to go for a 3dfx based card.
Even the Voodoo 1, which is a 4 meg card, will allow GPL to run at
800x600..
I used a Voodoo 1 with my old P150 and it give quite an acceptable
frame rate at 800x600 and a good frame rate at 640x480, in practice
mode.
With the 333, you won't have a problem at all.
There are no games at present that require a Voodoo 2 or up, the Voodoo
1 is still fine and a better choice than the rendition card if you want
to run a wider variety of games.
Cheers,
Ron

The
*snip*

I can only comment on part of this.  I ran a P2-266 with the first 3Dfx board,
the 4MB Diamond Monster 3D, for quite a while.  NFS2SE (SE being "Special
Edition", the one optimized for 3Dfx), F1RS, GPL and N2 (which, with the 3Dfx
patch, is basically the same as N99) all ran just fine.   At 640x480, frame
rates were completely acceptable, and all the games looked great.  It was a good
video card, but it's getting pretty old.  Unless dollars are really limited, I'd
step up to the least expensive V2 you can find or maybe a Banshee board.  JMHO.

            Zog

--
Don't let the bastards grind you down.
Doug Schneider
Bedford, Nova Scotia
Canada

I've also got a voodoo banshee card and it does work with a built in video
motherboard. I haven't even had to open the pc up to disable the video on
the motherboard.. the voodoo banshee seems to quite happily run regardless
of this.

Peter H