changing rez on a V1

H

HangTime

Guest
one major problem ive had with all iterations of q3 (all the tests from 1.05 up to and including the ,ahem, full release) is that it wont function properly in resolutions other than 640x480. wherever possible i turn down the rez to 512*384 in most games, however doing this loox b0rked in q3. in previous versions it caused my pc to lock up on a grey screen, now it just draws an image with black borders.

this _isnt_ a shurken image, its like the 640*480 image with a chunk chopped off the edges. so stretching on my moniotr doesnt help, there are still parts of the screen i cant see, including buttons in the menus etc.

i am using a guillemot maxi gamer 3dfx card, 4meg, with the latest 3dfx reference drivers, and directX 7. in the driver info appelet it says my driver is:

'1.1.0 3dfx standalone may 26 1999'
or somesuch

basically i was wondering if ne1 else has had ne probs? have u been able to change rez on a voodoo1? if so what dirver version r u using?

thx for ne help
 
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old.Maverick

Guest
Sorry mate, 3DFX drivers are notoriously bad for pretty much anything that isn't standard (i.e 512 res).

A voodoo1 just doesn't cut it these days, you should really think about upgrading.

There's a lot of cheap cards about at the moment which you'll probably see a big increase in framerate and picture quality if you were to buy.

If you're on a really tight budget then I see Scan (www.scan.co.uk) are doing Voodoo3 1000's for £45. I have to say that's a complete bargain (though if you can stretch to it I'd get a TNT2).

// mav.
 
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old.TUG

Guest
Well mav a few comments i wanna make:

'3DFX drivers are notoriously bad for pretty much anything that isn't standard (i.e 512 res).'

Not true - My V3 has been trouble free from day one. (But im swapping to an Ultra TNT2 this week
smile.gif
)

'If you're on a really tight budget then I see Scan (www.scan.co.uk) are doing Voodoo3 1000's for £45. I have to say that's a complete bargain (though if you can stretch to it I'd get a TNT2).'

If you get a V3 1000 HangTime, give me a shout and ill send u details on a small registry tweak that enables the 2nd TMU on this card (which 3dfx disable to conserve memory seeing as its only an 8 megger)

This provides V3 2000 performance and as mav says - its a bargain!!

TNT2 Ultra - creative ultra gamer with cobra joypad (as a budle) from dabs is a piss taking 103 quid inc vat and free delivery if u order on the net. Thats what im getting!!

Me V3 2000 is for sale for 60 quid and it overclocks to 170MHz with a fan card - faster than a V3 3000 at this speed
smile.gif
 
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HangTime

Guest
Mav - while i know that u r very knowledgable guy i found your statement rather baffling with regard to non-standard resolutions. the 3dfx voodoo1 is THE MOST COMPATIBLE 3d accelerator in exsistence. q3 is the only game ive had trouble with in selecting 512x384 rez, where its been available. its very useful for older games which only support 3d acceleration under glide (and often only on the v1) such as carma/gta/screamer rally).

admittedly the 3dfx opengl drivers are a bit shaky, a little tinkering was required to get glquake to run at 512. basically im just pissed off that ID insist on using opengl, when apis like glide are blatantly so much faster. UT runs pretty well on my sys, as epic have taken the trouble to include propriatory apis (glide/power vr/s3 metal), as well as direct3d and opengl. i find it hard to believe that q3 would run as slowly in d3d as it does under opengl on my sys.

as regards an uprade, im planning on getting another 128meg ram and a reasonably priced agp card after christmas. i was hoping the v3-3000 would have dropped in price a bit more by now, its been £90 for ages ffs! i value glide support very highly and 3dfx have proved time and again to provide the fastest hardware at time of release.

im not gonna buy a new card until it really becomes necessary. atm qw is the only game i play online, which runs pretty decent in software on my celery 472.5A. i dont rate q3 high enuff in terms of gameplay to justify shelling out another £100. mebbe an updated 3dfx card for UT, it rox on my housemates v3-3000.
 
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old.Maverick

Guest
Tug:

3DFX's drivers _are_ bad. I say that as a long time user (I've had V1, V2, V2 SLI and V3). I'm happy for you that you've not had problems, and I'm sure that's also true of many others.

To paraphrase Carmack:

"3dfx and nVidia are roughly neck and neck in marketshare, however we get 10 times the number of support calls for people with 3dfx cards".

I know I had nothing but trouble with them when I used to run NT.


Hangtime:

I remember when I had my V2 under NT I could not get it to run at 512 in QW no matter _what_ I did. I tried different refresh rates and drivers and each time it would lock my system. I just assumed
that it may be related. And the V1 is far from the most compatible card on the market these days
smile.gif


If you're looking for a bargain card at well under £100 you might want to look at the Leadtek M64 TNT2 (32MB) for £70(http://overclockers.co.uk/graphics.htm)

M64 TNT2's don't run as well in high res (800x600 and higher) as normal TNT2's, but £70 is quite a bargain.


// mav
 
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old.Jamanio

Guest
Cut to the candy - get the NVIDIA GEFORCE DDR

For once, the chip manufacturers have caught up with the games developers
smile.gif


Now available in the UK (but not in the USA... hahaha... 1 all me thinks).
 
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old.TUG

Guest
Mav: Ive had both V1's and V3's and never encountered any probs whatsoever... dont know if its cuz im totally skilled or wotnot but if u know what u r doing there is never a problem.

Any PC ive had to mess with has always worked fine after a few straightforward tweaks that not everyone thinks of - mainly bios related and other niggles u gotta smooth out. Depends on the graphics cards...

"To paraphrase Carmack:

"3dfx and nVidia are roughly neck and neck in marketshare, however we get 10 times the number of support calls for people with 3dfx cards"."

No offence m8 but ppl who need tech support obiously dont totally know about the product they have brought... Not saying they are thick of course, but theres always something different with any grapics product on the market.

About overclockers - i work there (and i aint lying - check our msg board - Im OcUK Storm - just never changed me name for the BW boards)
smile.gif
The M64's aint that hot IMO... Ive just brought a Creative 32 meg Ultra TNT2/Cobra gamepad bundle for 103 inc vat at dabs (shouldnt really say dont buy from us should i?!)

I have some V3's for sale at www.clockspeed.co.uk
 
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old.Maverick

Guest
/*
Mav: Ive had both V1's and V3's and never encountered any probs whatsoever... dont know if its cuz im totally skilled or wotnot but if u know what u r doing there is never a problem.
*/

Errr bollocks. There's some things you just can't get round due to driver bugs, no matter how "totally skilled" you are. Just because you haven't had problems doesn't mean others haven't.

/*
No offence m8 but ppl who need tech support obiously dont totally know about the product they have brought...
*/

Again rubbish. When I used to run Q3 under NT on my V2-SLI's I had nothing but crashes and locks until 3dfx produced some half-decent drivers (after 2 or 3 attempts).

Likewise I run Q3 under a Rage card at work sometimes, and it's glitchy and full of artifacts. My fault? Me not knowing anything about a Rage Pro? I don't think so.

Speaking as someone who's written software for 3dfx cards I _know_ their drivers leave a lot to be desired. They have many undocumented catches (admittedly so do some other IHV's, 3dfx just have more) which can leave you hunting for bugs in your code which don't exist.

As a good example, With a recent V3 driver (might still not be fixed, this was in November) if you have a D3D app called "game.exe" it fails to create Z Buffers properly. Rename the exe to anything else and it works fine.

I'm sure you can imagine what fun it would be trying to track down that bug if you didn't know about it.

// maverick
 
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old.telescopi

Guest
The TNT2 pro looks pretty tasty (it's clocked between a TNT2 and TNT2u). It's got a 0.18 micron core (same as geforce), and overclocks as well as a tnt2u - be a good idea to check what speed ram is on it tho, 5ns is same as most tnt2u's.

I saw one a PCworld for 99 quid, so I'm sure you can get it a bit cheaper elsewhere.
 
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old.frankie

Guest
Hi there, well here i go.
I have a tnt2 U, a CL one, and i must say its pretty darn good. The thing is this, 3dfx are stuck to using glide right, and all the new games coming out are NOT going to use API's from specific card makers ( 3DFX ) so, whats the point in getting another 3dfx card if no games are going to support it. It has been said that new games wont be using glide as the main API, at all in some cases. Q3 is just the forst of these new games, epic have now said that they WILL NOT have glide as the api in their next engine, but will focus on OPENGL and DIRECT3D, which is good, caus the direct 3d performance now is absolutly cack in UT. Although the tnt2 on my system runs UT as fast as on a V3, but still not as fast what the tnt2 can do. Q3 runs absolutly blisterinly on the tnt2, the tnt2 also is very good at overclocking, from 150/183 core/mem speed, i have mine running at 175/200, and it will go up to 175/215. The extra memory speed increases the memory bandwidth which is a limitation in 32 colour modes, so 32 bit runs faster with higher memory clock. But back to the point. 3dfx has crap opengl support, q3 focuses on opengl, all the new games will focus on opengl, so theres no point in getting a 3dfx card. get what TUG got, caus that deal rocks. Thats if you can't wait till next year. If you can wait, get the the supped up Geforce, which will probably have a fill rate of around 600 - 800 mtexels. The 3dfx cards looks promising too, with their t-buffer technology and the cinamatic effects such as motion blur. But the lack of T&L would make it a bit obselete when all these new card will Hopefully come out with it. T&L will releave the stress of the transform and lighting from the cpu, which combined with a higher fill rate that is expected on the later geforces, wouldprobably mean you could get about 120 fps in 1024x768 x 32 in a game that has T&L support. Also it will look a lot nicer, as there will be more polys available for game programmers to play with.
If i were u, wait till all these darn good cards come out next year, around june time.

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[This message has been edited by frankie (edited 14 December 1999).]
 
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old.frankie

Guest
bad aint it
i can see this is gonna be a heated debate
TUG really likes his v3, and no matter what you do he'll stand by it like it was his sex toy ( PROLLY IS
smile.gif
).
Sill the geforce with the higher fill rates would easily be better than any v5, whats the point of having really high fill rates when u have a shitty cpu. and having more polys makes things look a lot nicer. although games will have tro take advantage of this. with the v5 full AA will work on anygame, although i fail to see why people would want full AA when at high res's it looks smooth ?

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DR_FRANKENSTIEN




[This message has been edited by frankie (edited 14 December 1999).]
 
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old.TUG

Guest
damn i cant be arsed to argue... too tired and shit...

But ill try
wink.gif


Frankie - V3 seems faster than TNT2 at q3 now for some reason according to latest review of ati rage fury max at www.anandtech.com - i think u will be a bit surprised my son.

Also, I dont love my V3, but compared to this UTNT2 i have IMO it looks better and it deffo goes faster...

LOL smooth at high res's? U'd deffo notice diff of full screen AA... But i like the geforce technologies more, and nvidia are a step ahead now technology wise... 6 moths ahead in relation to product releases i guess...

Right then, cant be arsed ti argue mav... but ill comment at least.

'Errr bollocks. There's some things you just can't get round due to driver bugs, no matter how "totally skilled" you are. Just because you haven't had problems doesn't mean others haven't.'

I was takin the piss bout me being totally skilled but ive never had a prob on PII/PIII/Celly and SS7 systems with a V3... U gotta admit though, theres a lot more ppl out there with less of an idea of what they r doing when configuring and setting up comps than those who do good jobs - even some so called quality shops make a right arse up of initial system config...

'Again rubbish. When I used to run Q3 under NT on my V2-SLI's I had nothing but crashes and locks until 3dfx produced some half-decent drivers (after 2 or 3 attempts). '

NT - I aint no expert here but i do know its a lot more troublesome for gaming... 98/95 is faster anyway so howcome u didnt use that for gaming instead?

'Likewise I run Q3 under a Rage card at work sometimes, and it's glitchy and full of artifacts. My fault? Me not knowing anything about a Rage Pro? I don't think so.'

Now u just sound corny... mr big man... I was having a joke - u obviously aint. But the thing is i aint gonna argue cuz its a bit pointless............

Toodlepip
 
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old.frankie

Guest
ding ding, and TUG is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the BW BB

heres your belt

- ___
-----------/ \--------------
----------/ BW \-------------
----------\ BB /-------------
-----------\___/--------------


thats a real work of art i say.

I HAVE Q3, have to say it aint really as good as everyone made it our to be
but hell, its Q3.


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DR_FRANKENSTIEN




[This message has been edited by frankie (edited 15 December 1999).]
 
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old.TUG

Guest
Yea i Ro0o0o0oOOOoooOOOoooooooooOOOoOooOo0000ooL!!!

smile.gif


Very.. errrr... creative, frankie!

I take the belt with upmost honour. Thank you my people
wink.gif
 
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old.frankie

Guest
smile.gif


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DR_FRANKENSTIEN
 

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