S3 Virge GX2, King of the Virge Cards
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- Опубликовано: 27 авг 2024
- Taking a look at the S3 Virge GX2 3D accelerator card. The fastest of the S3 line of Virge 3D accelerator cards.
Special Thanks to Definitely Casual Pc's / @definitelycasualpcs8789
Great coverage of the GX2!
Finally got around to watching this lol. I actually learned a lot about these cards and got me in the mood to get a test bench going to compare pci cards ...and to see if I have this card lol
And thanks for the shout out ! Was a lot of fun helping out
Thanks for taking the time to create that voice over, I appreciate it. After doing so many benchmarks over the years I see those Quake and doom benches in my fever dreams.
@@AncientElectronics Oh i feel ya there. Finally found a working 386 ( that wasnt complety eaten by battery leakage) and got to building a pc...and like a mascicist grabbed every 8 and 16bit ISA card i have and run them thru the Dos benchmark pack Phil did...just to see which fit it better. lol
I got a feeling Im going to be seeng quake in my dreams for a long time now lol
@@definitelycasualpcs8789 I'm working on a few 386 projects myself. I did my high end 33mhz 386dx build a year or so back but I'm currently working on a faster 386dx-40 build as well as a nice low end 16 or 20mhz 386sx build. Just having trouble finding a case i like for the SX build.
@@AncientElectronics The one i found is a ...386sx 33. I have a dead dx40 board that wont post at all (I think its missing the bios chip but no idea why its gone. And same boat with the case..I have a inwin a500 but wanting to save that for a super socket 7 build...I have a desktop style case but its missing the speaker and led display....gotta love old cases
fine tuning the values of the passives on the not so great black level cards should get things into some sembalence of order for those with smd soldering skills.
the values are probably within tolerance, but still allowing a given amount of signal through above what is ideal.
to know for sure, one would probe with an oscilloscope to find out where the higher (or lower) signals are for each path (rgb, syncs, etc), and then adjust the values of the passives to closer match the others on the card or on other cards that don't have blown out black levels, if one has a similar card. or closer to what spec is, if one can find what those values should be for the output ics, if any are present. these values _are_ mostly standardized, so it shouldn't be hard to trace them down.
Sending love to you and the dogs
All my years i never actually ever thought what is the fastest S3 card they made haha. Since it was always voodoo! Pretty interesting
It's a nostalgic feeling to see you reviewing s3 videocards once more )
I was reading your odds n ends article on the Gravis gamepads the other day, which reminds me that i also learnt elsewhere that Gravis also made a gravis mac-pad and even one for the amiga.
It's funny that I have/had a pile of various Virge cards and have never played or even seen any S3D games in action. So, thanks for the effort.
Edit. Oh and I find the black level issue quite ...unnerving. Yet it's not too hard to fix (under DOS where I use these cards anyway). They're capable DOS cards and some do even have VBE2.0 BIOS with nice tasty low resolution modes that come handy for things like Quake or anything Build engine. Or demos that want to use 320*200 or 240 15/16/32-bit modes.
I love the singing...never bores me. And the videos are great too
if there's a voodoo 1 or voodoo 2 in a system i'm pretty much always going to choose an S3 card as the primary video card. they're just o compatible and very good bang for buck even 30 years later. I've got a Diamond Stealth Pro 2000 which is a 4MB Virge DX paired with a Voodoo 4mb Diamond Monster 3D. Now all I need to find is a Diamond sound card lol
I've got a Trio3D/2x which is also good (the 2x means AGP i think) and that ran some 3D games just fine. I recall Dark Forces 2 Jedi Knight run really well at 640x480. I had to open the case up and double check it was the trio64 it was so shocking!
thanks for the vid :)
Most of what works on the Virge GX2, should also work on the Trio3D / Trio3D 2X.
HAVOC I know for sure, does.
Oh wow, a buddy of mine had that exact case! Man that was so long ago... lol Was a P-120 iirc
Carnosaur kind of reminds me of VelociPastor
I had a ViRGE / GX2 I used it for the 2D card in a Voodoo2 SLI setup
First vga I ever bought was an S3 Virge DX3
Awesome
The Virge series of cards are good to match with a Voodoo since for 2d it had great VESA support. That's the main reason why they were popular. 3D performance was never that good; even with its successor, the Savage. I had a Diamond stealth 3D 2000 (virge DX) card at one point.
Just use the S3 Trio or Virge cards for DOS 2D gaming. You can tweak them to get decent VESA performance too, but anything over 320x200 (or 320x240) just means frustration...
What's your opinion on Screamer s3d version with the gx2 ? Did you try to run it ?
fastest virge/dx card is clocked at 72mhz. and it may go slightly higher. 4mb ram is the limit for it.
I have a question for you, maybe you know the answer :). I recently purchased a QDI 815EP motherboard with P3 Tualatin support. I installed the chipset drivers but the integrated audio does not work. Windows recognises it as multimedia audio but i cannot find a driver that is compatible. I also tried the ADI Soundmax driver and Realtek AC97 but it does not work. Do you use i815 motherboards ? Do you know which audio driver has to be installed for such a motherboard ? Thank you :)
Hey. Your board, if I looked it up correctly, has an AD1885 SoundMax chip. You likely used an incompatible driver. If you are using Windows XP, I recommend Snappy Driver Installer.
@@aaron96244 thank you for your answer. I already tried the AD1885 Soundmax driver but for whatever reason it did not work. I guess I'll have to install a PCI sound card in the end :)
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 yeah ADI is dodgy AF driver-wise, takes ages to find one that work, ideally the one from the board manufacturer but not really worth it to be honest, go with the PCI card and be happy :)
@@3dfxvoodoocards6 is the onboard audio enabled in the BIOS? It usually is by default but maybe a previous user disabled it? or perhaps the sound chip itself is just broken?
@@AncientElectronics yes it is enabled. Either the driver is not the right one for whatever reason or it could also be that integrated sound card doesn’t work.
I would guess nobody talks about the GX/2 because very few owned them. The DX sold a lot but it was probably the last S3 product many people ever bought it was so terrible!
A shame since the later Savage cards were actually good value.
For some reason over the past few days I grew a weird interest in these ugly little ducklings. Maybe I should get one for my K6 retro PC, it currently just has a generic whatever SVGA.
Apparently turning off texture filtering gives a huge boost to these cards. Would have probably seemed like a step back at the time, but these days, I feel like the sharp pixels are more popular.
You want a fast 2d card you should try a voodoo banshee
I could make a pretty good guess, but how old are those dogs now?
About 10 and 16
@@AncientElectronics I've always been happy that you put them in the video or thumbnail one way or the other
Hello! You're talking about one of my favorite collectible cards. In fact, I have several models of the GX2 and it took me quite a while to find them.
The Virge cards are better than what is said and they paid for not foreseeing 3dfx, otherwise, they are not that bad. The problem is their fame, they were considered "desacelerator" but some Matrox or ATI cards are the same or worse.
Greetings and thanks for the video
Ps. I don't remember so bright the screen with my GX2...
Ps2. The link to the channel Definitely Casual Pc's doesn't work, I leave it: ruclips.net/channel/UC0uRWaxP9dept__-V0Z162g
Thanks for the comment. I'll double check the link when I get home. Unfortunately it seems my gx2 possibly suffers from the bug that makes some virge and trio chips output too bright of black levels. On my CRT monitor it doesn't appear as bad as it does through the capture device in the video.
@@AncientElectronics In vogons you can see them fix of this bug. I remember because translated It.
doesnt seem to be much of an improvement, the terminal velocity benchmarks seemed like the DX was running roughly 5-15fps and the GX2 10-25fps, the brightness level difference was either good or bad depending on the game, in tomb raider it looked better on the GX2 as it was to dark on the DX but with Terminal velocity the GX2 being brighter looked washed out and didnt look as vivid as the DX which looked better.
Idk who Phil or his labs are, but I know Ancient Electronics and I like his dinosaurs 😆 and the doggies too.
Please, I must know the words to the intro song!
Have to say the black level bug is quite bad on this GX2. You didn't bother trying any of the TSR fixes (s3vbefix/s3black/s3bright)?
I didn't even know there were fixes available, I'll try some of these and see if they help.