Very interesting. Some benchmarks would have been nice. In 1998 I had a P1 166 MMX and I later upgraded it on the same motherboard to a AMD K6-2 400 mhz (6x66). The difference in performance was substantial.
This gives me nostagia vibes back to the year 2000, when my brother upgraded our "family - PC" (that was mostly used by my brother and me) with a used Cyrix CPU with 600 MHz, 128 mb ram and a Voodoo 2 12mb 3D-accelerator. Before that i was used to playing N64 and thought i wouldn't be to impressed and boy was i wrong. The first time, when i was introduced to Unreal Tournament by my brother, on the new upgraded machine, i was stunned, i would have never expected that much detail and beauty in that "high" resolution of 800x600. Then (after UT) i've played Unreal for the first time and it felt "unreal" to me (12 year old me was easily impressed back then :-D), never ever would i have expected that much detail and smoothness in a game at that point (some N64 games ran with 15-20 fps). Quake II felt like a absurd horror shooter to me (thanks to the lack of a soundtrack, because we only got a pirated version from a friend, because that game was banned/restricted in germany back then) and gave me some nightmares (as much as Resident Evil 2, that i borrowed back then from a friend for my N64). Thanks for that video, gives back some good old memories :-)
That computer seemed great! I used an amd k5 with a voodoo 2 for quite sometime for lack of option, but later upgraded to a pentium 3 600. I love UT Tournment, I played it a lot. Also the original Unreal, the starting sequence and the waterfall reveal were amazing at the time. Unfortunately I haven't played Quake I or II with the soundtrack like yourself haha. Thanks for your comment, it's what this thing is all about.
@@SUCRA It was crazy to me to play Quake II for the first time without any soundtrack (we didn't have the cd, only the cracked game from a friend, who had "fast" internet, comparing to our 56k modem). Playing it with just the ambient of the levels, hearing clearly the sounds of the enemies in a distance felt eerie to me. Pentium 3 were actually very good processors back in the days, i've used a 1 GHz model with 384 mb ram until around 2005/2006 and it served me well until i've got a Athlon XP 2200+ for cheap from a flea market, which was good to the point, when i decided, that i want to try out Crisis... and a AMD X2 i had afterwards 😂
@@Konkretertyp sounds familiar. I went from the P3 to an athlon XP 1,200 that was sold to us after a lan cafe I worked in closed down. Stuck with that for a long time and then finally moved to an athlon64. But after that I was constantly upgrading. I use computers for much longer now. I'm still running a Ryzen 7 1800 and plan to keep it for a while.
Welcome back and great video! Yeah, I ran this card back in the day with a Celeron 333 Slot 1 CPU and it was buttery smooth. Just a little CPU limited in your test setup.
Hi SUCRA, the Voodoo2 has no "pixel shaders" but only a fixed pixel pipeline. The term "shaders" is commonly used to refer to "programmable pixel/vertex shaders", a function introduced with the GeForce 3. (Don't trust completely TPU for old cards 😉 ) And... the symbol for Megahertz is MHz (not Mhz or mhz) and the symbol for Megabyte is MB (not Mb or mb).
Haha alright my man, noted. I'll try to remember for next time, don't trust that I will though. I knew about the programmable vertex shaders, I didn't know pixel shaders were something else.
@@smarth4 He used that CPU because somebody in a previous video asked if pairing it with a voodoo 2 would have been good idea. In my humble opinion, to be "Cool/Great/Excellent" (as several people are stating, against the interests of @SUCRA in my opinion) this video should have had a voodoo1 result comparison with the voodoo2 results (otherwise how you know if anything improved?) and also the same tests conducted with a better CPU, in order to understand how much performance you are leaving on the table with the P166MMX.
@@framebuffer.10 oh, I got you, I'll try to remember if it comes up again. Just saying my memory is not the best and when you are trying to put out content you end up making mistakes, there's no way around it
There is one more trick you could try with the P166 MMX. Its a great overclocker, it can be overclocked to 200-250 mhz, the performance increases a lot especially in combination with the Voodoo 2.
@@SUCRA even an overclock to 200 mhz would be 20% which is a lot and will make a difference. What options does your socket 7 motherboard have for the FSB, 75 and 83 ? :)
@@SUCRA so it run at 208 mhz ? I was wondering why Unreal and Quake 2 run faster than I expected :). At 208 mhz (2.5x83) it is as fast as a standard P1 233 mhz because of the higher FSB (83 vs 66).
Even a Pentium 166 MMX does benefit from a Voodoo 2 compared to a Voodoo 1 especially in the games that are less CPU dependent and more GPU dependent like the Quake 2 engine games.
Cool vid, thanks! I did a similar experiment with a P200MMX and came to the same conclusion, the P200MMX is getting the Voodoo 1 and the Voodoo 2's are going into PII and PIII systems. BTW, i love seeing the CRT footage vs capture card, this should always be how you capture footage from this era! If you don't mind me asking, what settings did you use on your camera to capture the CRT without the lines
Hey, how're doing? No problem, thanks a lot for watching and taking your time to post a comment. I'm glad you enjoyed the footage. To capture the CRT without the phase lines you need to sync the shutter speed of your camera to the refresh rate of the monitor. Unfortunately I don't have a camera that can sync exactly, they're available but they're a bit expensive, so I used my Android smartphone with the Pro Cam X lite application.
Errata: As some of you corrected me there weren't Pixel Shaders yet, as those were programmable shaders and at this time, there were only fixed pixel pipelines. I made this mistake because I looked at the Techpowerup website to make sure I knew the specs of the card, and "pixel shaders" is how they described the pipeline. Tomb Raider 2 doesn't run on Glide, so I probably saw Tomb Raider 1 or even 2 in Directx, memory gets fuzzy 25 years back! Thanks for understanding and for the support.
Excellent video. Heretic 2 is based on the Quake 2 engine. Fraps 1.9D shows the FPS in Direct 3d, OpenGL and 3DFX OpenGL, it works in all Quake 1/2/3 engine games even in 3dfx OpenGL. Fraps 1.9D does not work in pure glide games like Unreal, NFS 2/3/4/5 etc
Cool! I think it's a valid pairing as I bet it happened more than one might think. Then especially what one has available these days. With original Voodoos becoming so flipping expensive if you happen to come across a V2 I see it as a perfectly good setup for a P1. Does it max it out? Clearly not as you showed but I think it still is a fully valid config. Nice video as always!
It sure did happen, my friend. Personally when I got my first V2 in 1998 I had an AMD K5, so slower than this. I have no idea what happened to that K5, but my V2 probably went with it, wherever it is. As of today I think it was a valid experiment, I might elaborate on it a bit more on the next weeks or so. Thanks for your support, always.
I just threw together a MMX 166 machine with a MSI MS-5128 430HX board, 64 MB RAM, S3 Virge DX 4MB, 3Dfx Voodoo 2 8MB, ESS ES1868F, 40GB Seagate HDD, and Windows 95.
Absolutely. The voodoo II can use more than that, I think it scales well up to early pentiums IIIs, but it'll still be great on your system. I would just use the latest official drivers from 3dfx. You can find them in Philscomputerlab website.
What is it with the 166mmx and Voodoo stuff 😍 I was in love with my 166mmx back in the day. No voodoo card then though! I tried a V2 with my 166 (non mmx) quite recently as part of beefing it up but I felt it struggled to back it up. I knew that would be the case but since it was lying around thought I'd try it. Enjoyed that as per usual Sucra. Cheers.
Good point! The pentium 166 MMX stands between the release of the voodoo 1 and the voodoo 2, and at that I think it does a good job at pushing the v1 a bit far and holding back the v2. I wouldn't pair it like this as of picking parts for a system, but hey, if we have the parts lying around, I think it's a great little system. I love answering to requests and this videos was because of a viewer request. There is still room to elaborate so next video I'll test it a bit further and throw some direct comparisons. Thank you so much for your support! Have a great week! 💜
The Voodoo 2 is 3x faster than the Voodoo 1, if the CPU is fast enough of course. In my country Romania in 98 the Creative and Diamond Voodoo 2's sold everywhere, sadly I could not afford one in 98.
To get max performance from this card (and also for sli, Banshee and v3) I would opt for P3 anywhere from 500 to 1000mhz, 512 MB ram and ide to sd adapter to remove any bottlenecks.
I managed to actually beat Half-Life in it's entirety on a Pentium 166 on hard and also with a Voodoo2. THE CPU bottleneck was quite horrendous in some parts while other parts ran fine. 512x384 ran about the same as 800x600.
Great Review as always, i had that card the 12mb version paired with amd k6-2 300 and a s3 virge 4mb and everything buttery smooth!! Before that i was using a pentium 166 mmx and everything was playable not as smooth as the amd k6-2 but way better than your system. Something is wrong with that, the framerate you get on unreal i was getting it with voodoo1..
Thanks for watching, Chris! I'm probably going to elaborate a bit more, throw a frame rate comparison in the near future. That's strange that you say it's slow, I had another viewer comment it was actually faster than his p 166 MMX. What sounded about right because this has a little oc to 200 MHz. Any suggestions to try out here?
@@SUCRA i have to go way back in memory to remember ;) i think the problem may be in the 8mb version of the card that you are using, i still have 2 voodoo2 cards if i have time this week i will do some tests with a pentium 166 mmx and the k6-2
@@chrisducati26 8 mb or 12 mb, the FPS will be the same on a Pentium 1 because the CPU is too slow for a Voodoo 2 anyway. Those results are actully very good for a Pentium 1.
Boooh! There can only be K6(2 and III) and Voodoo²!! Blind AMD CPU Fanboi - since late 1997! WHO ME!!?? Naaah :-D EDIT: 1:24 Oooh! There 'she' is! That IS my Creative Voodoo² 12MB! Still running and have the game CDs too ♥ (It's: G-police! Actua Soccer 2, Incoming and a not that great driving game)
Ok, I would love to take this same system, remove the cooler and cpu, stick a k6 in there with the same cooler and make a video about it with the same parts. Is that better Mr. Dalle?
![Gunna - HIM ALL ALONG [Official Visualizer]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/HiCxoDeo0hc/mqdefault.jpg)
Very interesting. Some benchmarks would have been nice. In 1998 I had a P1 166 MMX and I later upgraded it on the same motherboard to a AMD K6-2 400 mhz (6x66). The difference in performance was substantial.
Yeah, I really should start doing some benchmarks on the video cards. Thanks for watching, have a great weekend.
This gives me nostagia vibes back to the year 2000, when my brother upgraded our "family - PC" (that was mostly used by my brother and me) with a used Cyrix CPU with 600 MHz, 128 mb ram and a Voodoo 2 12mb 3D-accelerator. Before that i was used to playing N64 and thought i wouldn't be to impressed and boy was i wrong. The first time, when i was introduced to Unreal Tournament by my brother, on the new upgraded machine, i was stunned, i would have never expected that much detail and beauty in that "high" resolution of 800x600. Then (after UT) i've played Unreal for the first time and it felt "unreal" to me (12 year old me was easily impressed back then :-D), never ever would i have expected that much detail and smoothness in a game at that point (some N64 games ran with 15-20 fps). Quake II felt like a absurd horror shooter to me (thanks to the lack of a soundtrack, because we only got a pirated version from a friend, because that game was banned/restricted in germany back then) and gave me some nightmares (as much as Resident Evil 2, that i borrowed back then from a friend for my N64).
Thanks for that video, gives back some good old memories :-)
That computer seemed great! I used an amd k5 with a voodoo 2 for quite sometime for lack of option, but later upgraded to a pentium 3 600. I love UT Tournment, I played it a lot. Also the original Unreal, the starting sequence and the waterfall reveal were amazing at the time. Unfortunately I haven't played Quake I or II with the soundtrack like yourself haha. Thanks for your comment, it's what this thing is all about.
@@SUCRA It was crazy to me to play Quake II for the first time without any soundtrack (we didn't have the cd, only the cracked game from a friend, who had "fast" internet, comparing to our 56k modem). Playing it with just the ambient of the levels, hearing clearly the sounds of the enemies in a distance felt eerie to me.
Pentium 3 were actually very good processors back in the days, i've used a 1 GHz model with 384 mb ram until around 2005/2006 and it served me well until i've got a Athlon XP 2200+ for cheap from a flea market, which was good to the point, when i decided, that i want to try out Crisis... and a AMD X2 i had afterwards 😂
@@Konkretertyp sounds familiar. I went from the P3 to an athlon XP 1,200 that was sold to us after a lan cafe I worked in closed down. Stuck with that for a long time and then finally moved to an athlon64. But after that I was constantly upgrading. I use computers for much longer now. I'm still running a Ryzen 7 1800 and plan to keep it for a while.
Welcome back and great video! Yeah, I ran this card back in the day with a Celeron 333 Slot 1 CPU and it was buttery smooth. Just a little CPU limited in your test setup.
Thank you, Mike. Yep, limitation was expected, but all good. I was probably more limited the first time around in 1998! Have a great weekend!
@@SUCRA I meant of course you expected the limitation! You are the man, Bruno!
Haha I knew, that you knew, that I knew 😂😂😂
Hi SUCRA, the Voodoo2 has no "pixel shaders" but only a fixed pixel pipeline. The term "shaders" is commonly used to refer to "programmable pixel/vertex shaders", a function introduced with the GeForce 3. (Don't trust completely TPU for old cards 😉 )
And... the symbol for Megahertz is MHz (not Mhz or mhz) and the symbol for Megabyte is MB (not Mb or mb).
Haha alright my man, noted. I'll try to remember for next time, don't trust that I will though. I knew about the programmable vertex shaders, I didn't know pixel shaders were something else.
@SUCRA Switched off the video as soon as I heard that. This is so poorly prepared, also testing with this slow cpu doesn't do the card justice.
@@SUCRA Well, what I wrote was in the sincere interest of helping you, then it's up to you to benefit from it or not 😉
@@smarth4 He used that CPU because somebody in a previous video asked if pairing it with a voodoo 2 would have been good idea.
In my humble opinion, to be "Cool/Great/Excellent" (as several people are stating, against the interests of @SUCRA in my opinion) this video should have had a voodoo1 result comparison with the voodoo2 results (otherwise how you know if anything improved?) and also the same tests conducted with a better CPU, in order to understand how much performance you are leaving on the table with the P166MMX.
@@framebuffer.10 oh, I got you, I'll try to remember if it comes up again. Just saying my memory is not the best and when you are trying to put out content you end up making mistakes, there's no way around it
There is one more trick you could try with the P166 MMX. Its a great overclocker, it can be overclocked to 200-250 mhz, the performance increases a lot especially in combination with the Voodoo 2.
Yeah I'd need a super socket 7 Mobo for that. This one is socket 7, won't go over 200.
@@SUCRA even an overclock to 200 mhz would be 20% which is a lot and will make a difference. What options does your socket 7 motherboard have for the FSB, 75 and 83 ? :)
At that it is haha. Didn't think it was worth mentioning it. I overclocked it in the POD video I believe, and left it at that.
@@SUCRA so it run at 208 mhz ? I was wondering why Unreal and Quake 2 run faster than I expected :). At 208 mhz (2.5x83) it is as fast as a standard P1 233 mhz because of the higher FSB (83 vs 66).
I'm not absolutely sure, on post it says 200 MHz, so I guessing you're right. I might make a short to clarify this since it might be interesting.
Even a Pentium 166 MMX does benefit from a Voodoo 2 compared to a Voodoo 1 especially in the games that are less CPU dependent and more GPU dependent like the Quake 2 engine games.
For sure, I can definitely agree the extra power is not all a waste.
Cool vid, thanks! I did a similar experiment with a P200MMX and came to the same conclusion, the P200MMX is getting the Voodoo 1 and the Voodoo 2's are going into PII and PIII systems. BTW, i love seeing the CRT footage vs capture card, this should always be how you capture footage from this era! If you don't mind me asking, what settings did you use on your camera to capture the CRT without the lines
Hey, how're doing? No problem, thanks a lot for watching and taking your time to post a comment. I'm glad you enjoyed the footage. To capture the CRT without the phase lines you need to sync the shutter speed of your camera to the refresh rate of the monitor. Unfortunately I don't have a camera that can sync exactly, they're available but they're a bit expensive, so I used my Android smartphone with the Pro Cam X lite application.
I ran my 166mmx with a Trident 9440 back in the day 😆 I can't imagine how amazing that monstrous update would have been!
For sure! Haha it was fantastic!
Right!
Ha, great fun, nice one Sucra!
Thanks, Ted! I'm glad you enjoyed it! 😀 Have a great weekend!
Errata:
As some of you corrected me there weren't Pixel Shaders yet, as those were programmable shaders and at this time, there were only fixed pixel pipelines. I made this mistake because I looked at the Techpowerup website to make sure I knew the specs of the card, and "pixel shaders" is how they described the pipeline.
Tomb Raider 2 doesn't run on Glide, so I probably saw Tomb Raider 1 or even 2 in Directx, memory gets fuzzy 25 years back!
Thanks for understanding and for the support.
Excellent video. Heretic 2 is based on the Quake 2 engine. Fraps 1.9D shows the FPS in Direct 3d, OpenGL and 3DFX OpenGL, it works in all Quake 1/2/3 engine games even in 3dfx OpenGL. Fraps 1.9D does not work in pure glide games like Unreal, NFS 2/3/4/5 etc
I kind of suspected I had made a mistake, because GL Quake and all, but I knew one of you smart people would clear that up . Thanks! 😆
Cool! I think it's a valid pairing as I bet it happened more than one might think. Then especially what one has available these days. With original Voodoos becoming so flipping expensive if you happen to come across a V2 I see it as a perfectly good setup for a P1. Does it max it out? Clearly not as you showed but I think it still is a fully valid config. Nice video as always!
It sure did happen, my friend. Personally when I got my first V2 in 1998 I had an AMD K5, so slower than this. I have no idea what happened to that K5, but my V2 probably went with it, wherever it is. As of today I think it was a valid experiment, I might elaborate on it a bit more on the next weeks or so. Thanks for your support, always.
I just threw together a MMX 166 machine with a MSI MS-5128 430HX board, 64 MB RAM, S3 Virge DX 4MB, 3Dfx Voodoo 2 8MB, ESS ES1868F, 40GB Seagate HDD, and Windows 95.
Sounds good, that's a great machine for late dos and windows 95 games! Have fun!
hello, do you think tant with my Pentium mmx 233 , 64mb ram dimm and voodoo ll 12mb diamond fit good? what is the best driver for win 95?
Absolutely. The voodoo II can use more than that, I think it scales well up to early pentiums IIIs, but it'll still be great on your system. I would just use the latest official drivers from 3dfx. You can find them in Philscomputerlab website.
What is it with the 166mmx and Voodoo stuff 😍 I was in love with my 166mmx back in the day. No voodoo card then though! I tried a V2 with my 166 (non mmx) quite recently as part of beefing it up but I felt it struggled to back it up. I knew that would be the case but since it was lying around thought I'd try it. Enjoyed that as per usual Sucra. Cheers.
Good point! The pentium 166 MMX stands between the release of the voodoo 1 and the voodoo 2, and at that I think it does a good job at pushing the v1 a bit far and holding back the v2. I wouldn't pair it like this as of picking parts for a system, but hey, if we have the parts lying around, I think it's a great little system. I love answering to requests and this videos was because of a viewer request. There is still room to elaborate so next video I'll test it a bit further and throw some direct comparisons. Thank you so much for your support! Have a great week! 💜
Great video as always, my ATI Rage 128 GL have similar clocks to Voodoo 2. I hope you also try one day that Voodoo 2 with Pentium 133.
Thanks, Andrew! I will try an ATI Rage soon. I'm not sure which one, we'll know soon. Thanks again and have a great weekend!
The Voodoo 2 is 3x faster than the Voodoo 1, if the CPU is fast enough of course. In my country Romania in 98 the Creative and Diamond Voodoo 2's sold everywhere, sadly I could not afford one in 98.
I was lucky to get one, but my CPU was only an AMD k5. Still enjoyed the hell out of it.
To get max performance from this card (and also for sli, Banshee and v3) I would opt for P3 anywhere from 500 to 1000mhz, 512 MB ram and ide to sd adapter to remove any bottlenecks.
I agree! In the end I think it's going to a P2. Thanks for your comment! 👍🎉
I managed to actually beat Half-Life in it's entirety on a Pentium 166 on hard and also with a Voodoo2. THE CPU bottleneck was quite horrendous in some parts while other parts ran fine. 512x384 ran about the same as 800x600.
Nice, those were good times! Great memories of pulling all nighters messing with the PCs back in the day.
the Socket 7 Acer is actually a PCChips M560 with the ALi Aladdin IV (TX Pro) chipset.
Makes sense, I think I had read that at some point. Thanks!👍
Nice
Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Have a great weekend.
Great Review as always, i had that card the 12mb version paired with amd k6-2 300 and a s3 virge 4mb and everything buttery smooth!! Before that i was using a pentium 166 mmx and everything was playable not as smooth as the amd k6-2 but way better than your system. Something is wrong with that, the framerate you get on unreal i was getting it with voodoo1..
Thanks for watching, Chris! I'm probably going to elaborate a bit more, throw a frame rate comparison in the near future. That's strange that you say it's slow, I had another viewer comment it was actually faster than his p 166 MMX. What sounded about right because this has a little oc to 200 MHz. Any suggestions to try out here?
@@SUCRA i have to go way back in memory to remember ;) i think the problem may be in the 8mb version of the card that you are using, i still have 2 voodoo2 cards if i have time this week i will do some tests with a pentium 166 mmx and the k6-2
@@chrisducati26 oh nice! Specially to verify the performance difference with the P MMX 166. Thanks, have a great week!
@@chrisducati26 8 mb or 12 mb, the FPS will be the same on a Pentium 1 because the CPU is too slow for a Voodoo 2 anyway. Those results are actully very good for a Pentium 1.
🤯
=D
It's wild how much performance is lost by pairing a Voodoo 2 with any CPU slower than an Athlon or Pentium 3.
Oh! So you think there's benefit using a P3 over a P2 with a V2? Hum. I thought a P2 would top it off. Might be a topic for another video.
@@SUCRA they scale like crazy in the 200 to 600mhz range. Above that they'll still scale at lower resolutions, truly impressive.
P166 Is very slow for V2. Try at least a period correct p600
It was a viewer request. I will though, it's planned for a future video.
Period correct would be something from late 1997 through the end of 1998. Something like a 233 MMX to PII 450.
👏👏👏👏🇧🇷
Vlw!
Boooh! There can only be K6(2 and III) and Voodoo²!!
Blind AMD CPU Fanboi - since late 1997! WHO ME!!?? Naaah :-D
EDIT: 1:24 Oooh! There 'she' is! That IS my Creative Voodoo² 12MB! Still running and have the game CDs too ♥ (It's: G-police! Actua Soccer 2, Incoming and a not that great driving game)
Haha I would love to build one, but I don't have one yet. Some time I will though.
@@SUCRA It's Socket 7 = What's to "build"?
Ok, I would love to take this same system, remove the cooler and cpu, stick a k6 in there with the same cooler and make a video about it with the same parts. Is that better Mr. Dalle?
@@SUCRA That'll do ;-)