Voodoo for DosBox

[Sapphire Wolf]

I came across this article on an outside-this-site Forum-
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2 ... 136,00.asp

[Skyfaller]

Very interesting, thanks for posting this!

[LordNova2]

Sounds like a great move to me. The 3dfx Voodoo was a landmark in video renderng technology, and had lots of games configured and programed to take advantage of what these cards had to offer.
And as a side-bonus they are going to implement multi-core support in DosBox, which I stongly belive more modern games and applications that do heavy computing should be utilizing multi-core CPUs to start with.
They also mention about utilizing power from the VPU (which sounds to me like they are going to use CUDA). Which is also another good move.

[arclight]

I remember that my voodoo2 SLI rig kept me happy for almost TWO YEARS. It ran everything in 1024x768 and although color depth was 16bit frame rates were stupendous!

These days I'm unhappy with my GPU in about 7-8 months.

The beginning of the end was the Voodoo3 though. That thing ran hotter than Jessica Simpson at a Stanford alumni event...

[LordNova2]

Actually you can still get lasting results from a videocard for 2-3 years, it is just that you got to spend at least $600 on one (usueally a grand total of over $1,000 in multiple videocards to SLI with and use as dedicated PhysX cards).


It kinda all goes along with what i once told my brother when he was looking for a new PSU.

...For your PSU I gave a rough estimation on your system using the GTX 470 as your GPU and it came out to be around 725W, if you just go with the 9800GT you will need 582W. Starting to get the picture on how much performance power is in these GTX 470s? The two biggest ways to tell whether or not you’re looking at a good Video Card at glance is by looking at the heat-sink, more performance means more heat output, so the heat sink is going to be a Mr. Beefy, the second is the recommended wattage to use with the card, which confirms the need for Mr. Beefy. After that you start looking at the fine-print for the details and specs of that card.

If you think about the whole "Mr. Beefy" theory it holds true, most companies try to cut as much production cost as they can, so they are not going to get to extravagant with an oversized heatsink if they donot need it.

I would recomend getting a set, a 9800 GX2 and a 9800 GT.
you run the GX2 in SLI with itself and set the GT to be dedicated to PhysX. And the best part about the GX2 is that it is a dual card, I got two of them on my system and i recently replaced my mobo with a chipset that is for ATI Crossfire. So I can SLI one of my 9800GX2s by itself (for a Dual-SLI), you just cannot bridge cards on differant PCI-e slots (like try to ake two 9800GX2s to make a Quad-SLI). But i get way more performance out of doing a dual SLI on one card, and setting one of the GPUs in the other card to be dedicated to PhysX.
Try hunting down these cards in a good used condition, you can get some kick-ass results for arround $300 or less.
However the 9 series is rather out-dated and not very well future-proofed for the next generation of videogames at full detail, but you should be happy with the results of this set for at least another year.