The end of Voodoo 3/4/5?

[SEG_Striker]

Hello,

I am mad Voodoo's lover, but it seems 3dfx products finally are going to the death... Damn, why nobody works at this unfinished Geometry Assist option? As the original help reads, it is still incomplete and buggy. I succeed to test my V5 5500 /also V4 4500 & V3 3000/ with Geometry Assist on with 3D Mark 99, 2000, but not with 2001. V5 (also other voodoos) are far away then any GeForce 256, 2 (ever TI)...
But I was unable to play any game with this option turned on. Comanche 4 found Voodoo with GA on like H T&L card, but crashes at loading level time.
Can anyone answer - is there any game, working with GA on?
I am sure, if someone can finish this code in the driver - Voodoos never will die!
Also, what about pixel and shader processing (even software)? I am sure it's possible - look at 3D Analyze... Is there anybody working on it?

Waiting for your comments!

[Nightbird]

The Geometry Assist was coded under DirX7 and this option is known to cause incompatibilites with alot (all?) of the T&L Games. So if you need T&L, the best is to use 3DAnalyzer which emulates perfectly the T&L under DirX8 and DirX9.
Many (but not all) games will start with 3DAnalyzer even if "some" problems will exist always.
The best would be perhaps to include 3DAnalyzer in the driver (but note here that's only my personal viewpoint).

[bloodworm]

@nightbird
   does the 3danalyzer proggy emulate TnL via openGL as well as DirectX?

[ps47]

everything that has an beginnig,has an end.3dfx,voodoos,ps47.all good things will perish in time..except nvidia,nvidia is evil and it will stay here forever(right amp?)..


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[amp_man]

yeah, nvidia will never go away...I'm just waiting for them to make CPUs, hey, VIA does. The voodoos will never die, some of the best games ever created will always run on Voodoos, I mean HL, UT, Red Baron, these were some of the greatest games of their time. The Voodoos might not properly support the newest games, but who says newest is always best?

[ChaosBlizzard]

I would like to see a voodoo 5 run halo. Thats a joke and a half..  I plan to replace my v5 with a radeon 9600xt, now thats a card.

[SEG_Striker]

I am unable to start any game with 3D Analyze. I started only Tien /it runs without 3D Analyze too, but the screen is flickering/. BTW, I want to see Geometry assist working without crashes.
Anyone in this world can code it??
I agree that part of 3D Analyze can be included in the driver. But only if improved.
What about pixel and vertex shader?

[darkfalz]

T&L is already a part of the OpenGL drivers. The Voodoo5 has no hardware T&L, it has a software based version that emulates it, more or less an answer to nVidia at the time implementing a sloppy FSAA to compete with the Voodoo5. It's only really meant for DX7 based games, and still doesn't work with some. However I do have one DX8 game it works with, Giants.

[amp_man]

wow, great job of completely bashing a fairly decent video card (at least of it's time) in the presense of a community dedicated entirely to preserving them. really, a great way to get respect fast.
[/sarcasm]

Geometry assist is not necessary with 3d analyze! If you are using 3d analyze properly, it should run some games, any which HW TnL is the only reason they won't run. I'm not sure if you're using 3d analyze correctly, check this page for better instructions and many game fixes.

pixel/vertex shaders are a completely different story. In comparison, the shader unit on a modern video card is about equivalent to a 10GHz pentium 4. That would make emulation very slow, if not impossible. 3D analyze can disable some shaders or limit their complexity, but this doesn't always work well.