rec.autos.simulators

Hello all,

I came upon some Christmas money and was thinking
of upgrading my video capabilites by adding on a 3dfx
card...

I was wondering with the current crop of sims as well
as the ones under development, what would YOU do?
Pick up a Voodoo 2, a Voodoo Banshee, or wait a
little while for the Voodoo 3 to come out?

Also, I've currently got a Diamond Viper V330 4 Megs,
AGP version in my system (P2-266, 96 Megs SDRAM).
Would it be worthwhile to update that to a Riva TNT card
with 8 or 12 Megs at the same time? (For what it's worth,
when I'm not playing, I'm working with AutoCAD, so I have
to have some kind of a 2D accelerator card... I've heard
there are glitches with AutoCAD and the TNT cards -
anyone know anything about that?)

But really, the main thing I'm interested in is making the
racing sims (and occaisionally a flight sim or two) more
enjoyable...

I'm just looking for opinions from this, what seems to be
(at times! ;-) ) an intelligent sim-ing community... :-)

Thanks,
- Mike.

============================================
     Mike Holthouse - Indianapolis, IN
        Drop the "X" to e-mail me.
============================================

I'm leaning Banshee since you get:
more memory
somewhat faster (in non-multitextured games)
no passthru degradation
somewhat cheaper

OTOH, I'm worried about some new whiz-bang must-have 2D/3D card that will
invariably come out, leaving me with no 3d support (other than my ageing V1).
Guess by then, I/you could always get a V2 then cheap (used or bargain-bin).

One Q is: will sims support multitexturing?  Do any now?

How'd you hold out so long without a 3dfx??

I would say no.  Why?  Because unless your current 2D is inadequate for
autocad, 2D isn't really a factor.  The TNT won't be appreciably faster
than the Banshee or V2, sometimes slower.  And the TNT will soon go to a .25
micron die that will allow it to run faster and cooler.  Also, the Rage Fury
(32MB, built-in DVD decoder) looks promising.  My general approach to the
upgrade world is: don't get it *until* you really want it.  As by then, you
get something better, faster, cheaper.

Sims are the one area that seem to be sticking to 3dfx support. Expect it to
wane, but heck, sims still come out as "3dfx only" with other support added,
sometimes kludged, later.  I wouldn't do without 3dfx just yet.

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Nice caveat :-)

Under $100 for the Monster Fusion at buy.com - and
that's before Diamond's $30 rebate...

I'm not familiar with any... but I don't know much about it,
either...

I was waiting to see if this whole 3dfx thing was just a fad
or something that was going to stick!  ;-)

Thanks! :-) And thanks for your thoughts...

- Mike.

============================================
     Mike Holthouse - Indianapolis, IN
        Drop the "X" to e-mail me.
============================================

Games that require glide (3dfx) will decrease in the future. Actually, I
think any game being released in 99 should offer either OpenGL or
Direct3D support. The reason the Glide interface was created was that
the Direct3D version of the time the first Voodoo 1 card came around,
didn't support all the features the card had to offer and was not very
well optimized. Also, the Win95 versions of the time didn't have OpenGL
support. With DirectX 6 and later versions of DirectX, there is no need
to use a proprietary graphics API because DX6 can do all the same for
all 3D cards and OpenGL is supported in Win98 and later builds of Win95.

It's a long time since a game offered sound only too Soundblaster or
whatever cards. It's just as primitive to have a game requiring a
certain graphics card.

TF

Hehe...

-Larry