LGR - 3DFX Voodoo2 PC Card in a Macintosh 6400/180
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
WizardNumberNext
well, no
3dfx and nVidia does NOT use same name
they happened to use same three letters, but names are fundamentally different and means something fundamentally different too
3dfx SLI stands for Scan-Line Interleave
while
nVidia SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface
technology is fundamentally different too
3dfx SLI is very simple and simply each GPU renders specific lines
for nVidia it is either whole frames or top/bottom halves of frames
load on 3dfx SLI is very even, while nVidia may very well lag very often due to uneven load on GPUs
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well, no
3dfx and nVidia does NOT use same name
they happened to use same three letters, but names are fundamentally different and means something fundamentally different too
3dfx SLI stands for Scan-Line Interleave
while
nVidia SLI stands for Scalable Link Interface
technology is fundamentally different too
3dfx SLI is very simple and simply each GPU renders specific lines
for nVidia it is either whole frames or top/bottom halves of frames
load on 3dfx SLI is very even, while nVidia may very well lag very often due to uneven load on GPUs
reply
Chris
I realize this video is 8 years old BUT, old apple OSes basically made the OS compatible with PowerPC by emulation the 68k code really limiting the potential of the POWER ISA. The PowerPC and pretty much all other RISC CPUs where superior to Intel and other CISC chips at the time (again, for the most part) even when running at lower clock speeds. On the Mac side we didn't really see the true benefit of PowerPC till OS 9. 1 and even more so till OS X 10. 4. POWER ISA is still in use today for high performance computing and other big iron solutions.
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I realize this video is 8 years old BUT, old apple OSes basically made the OS compatible with PowerPC by emulation the 68k code really limiting the potential of the POWER ISA. The PowerPC and pretty much all other RISC CPUs where superior to Intel and other CISC chips at the time (again, for the most part) even when running at lower clock speeds. On the Mac side we didn't really see the true benefit of PowerPC till OS 9. 1 and even more so till OS X 10. 4. POWER ISA is still in use today for high performance computing and other big iron solutions.
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1blisslife
I remember buying one of these when they were new for $250, but had 32MB. That was an upgrade from an 8mb voodoo card & made a huge difference at the time! I upgraded to play Need for Speed, Midtown Madness 1 & 2 at the time. I also remember buying a 40gb Hard drive for $200 because only had a 4gb one on that machine which was I think 366MHZ, had 64mb of ram, and didn't have enough money for a K6 processor in the end. That card served me very well & was impressive for me at the time coz I saw a huge difference in my setup (win 98Se.
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I remember buying one of these when they were new for $250, but had 32MB. That was an upgrade from an 8mb voodoo card & made a huge difference at the time! I upgraded to play Need for Speed, Midtown Madness 1 & 2 at the time. I also remember buying a 40gb Hard drive for $200 because only had a 4gb one on that machine which was I think 366MHZ, had 64mb of ram, and didn't have enough money for a K6 processor in the end. That card served me very well & was impressive for me at the time coz I saw a huge difference in my setup (win 98Se.
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Garrett
Hey LGR, you might not get comments for this video anymore i'm not sure but I would love to see you do a review for the powermac 8500, when i was about 7 or 8 my dad passed it on to me when he found out it had some issue getting onto the internet or something like that, I have many fond memories of playing sim city 2000, mantra, and wolfenstein 3d lol that is until I deleted something I shouldn't have and it would boot up to a menacing red screen with a frowny face, it always scared me as a little kid lol
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Hey LGR, you might not get comments for this video anymore i'm not sure but I would love to see you do a review for the powermac 8500, when i was about 7 or 8 my dad passed it on to me when he found out it had some issue getting onto the internet or something like that, I have many fond memories of playing sim city 2000, mantra, and wolfenstein 3d lol that is until I deleted something I shouldn't have and it would boot up to a menacing red screen with a frowny face, it always scared me as a little kid lol
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Madd
Regarding the 67 Hz refresh rate: You should be able to go into Monitors and Sound (on that OS Version) and set the refresh rate to 60 by showing all the resolutions available. The OS might complain about the refresh rate not being supported by the monitor, but I think that would only happen if you were using a Multiple Scan Display monitor.
Which the adaptor makes the video card thinks is attached.
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Regarding the 67 Hz refresh rate: You should be able to go into Monitors and Sound (on that OS Version) and set the refresh rate to 60 by showing all the resolutions available. The OS might complain about the refresh rate not being supported by the monitor, but I think that would only happen if you were using a Multiple Scan Display monitor.
Which the adaptor makes the video card thinks is attached.
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Robert
Well, I happen to have a Power Macintosh 5500/225 which COULD work, if I could get around the fact that it's an All-in-One, and wondering if a Voodoo2 card would fit in it at all. So, yeah. I'm probably going to be installing this into an IBM Personal Computer 340 instead, assuming that a Pentium 133/Windows 95 PC can handle this AND a Sound Blaster 16 ISA without giving me an Error 67 again. -Groan-
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Well, I happen to have a Power Macintosh 5500/225 which COULD work, if I could get around the fact that it's an All-in-One, and wondering if a Voodoo2 card would fit in it at all. So, yeah. I'm probably going to be installing this into an IBM Personal Computer 340 instead, assuming that a Pentium 133/Windows 95 PC can handle this AND a Sound Blaster 16 ISA without giving me an Error 67 again. -Groan-
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Crest
This Mac suffers from a PPC 603e the chip has a 32bit FPU (not relevant for gaming) and a tiny cache (iirc 16kB) on a slow memory bus. If you have one give the software renderer a try on a single CPU PPC 604e or even ev system from the era. I vaguely remember a 120MHz 604e beating a 200MHz 603e in integer only benchmarks and blowing it away in code making have use of 64 bit floating point math.
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This Mac suffers from a PPC 603e the chip has a 32bit FPU (not relevant for gaming) and a tiny cache (iirc 16kB) on a slow memory bus. If you have one give the software renderer a try on a single CPU PPC 604e or even ev system from the era. I vaguely remember a 120MHz 604e beating a 200MHz 603e in integer only benchmarks and blowing it away in code making have use of 64 bit floating point math.
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wysoft
Ahhh those days. I remember actually fitting 486 heatsink/fans to the texture units on my Voodoo2 so I could overclock it a tiny bit more. I believe the default clock rate was either 90 or 110. It was a big deal to get an extra 10MHz out of those things. Tons of hours spent playing GLQuake, Quake 2 and Action Q2, Freespace 1 & 2, then later on Half Life and Counter Strike.
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Ahhh those days. I remember actually fitting 486 heatsink/fans to the texture units on my Voodoo2 so I could overclock it a tiny bit more. I believe the default clock rate was either 90 or 110. It was a big deal to get an extra 10MHz out of those things. Tons of hours spent playing GLQuake, Quake 2 and Action Q2, Freespace 1 & 2, then later on Half Life and Counter Strike.
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game. different
I remember playing Unreal (the original) with a Monster Diamond 3D on a Motorola Starmax 5500 (Mac clone) It had a 200MHz 604e and an onboard ATI Rage II+ 3D. It could do rudimentary 3D, but was unplayable at 640x480. The Monster 3D, with some Mac drivers I downloaded from a Mac Voodoo manufacturer, allowed me to get full 3D functionality. It was a revelation.
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I remember playing Unreal (the original) with a Monster Diamond 3D on a Motorola Starmax 5500 (Mac clone) It had a 200MHz 604e and an onboard ATI Rage II+ 3D. It could do rudimentary 3D, but was unplayable at 640x480. The Monster 3D, with some Mac drivers I downloaded from a Mac Voodoo manufacturer, allowed me to get full 3D functionality. It was a revelation.
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game. different
I had a Voodoo card in a Mac clone, the Motorola Starmax 5500 (200Mhz 604e. The onboard video was a Rage II+, which could technically do 3D, but it couldn't hold a candle to the Voodoo. A nice thing about the clone was that it had an SVGA output, making the passthrough cable a snap to install. I didn't have Quake, but it ran Unreal like a champ.
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I had a Voodoo card in a Mac clone, the Motorola Starmax 5500 (200Mhz 604e. The onboard video was a Rage II+, which could technically do 3D, but it couldn't hold a candle to the Voodoo. A nice thing about the clone was that it had an SVGA output, making the passthrough cable a snap to install. I didn't have Quake, but it ran Unreal like a champ.
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