Since I tried it out a while ago I think Voodoo2 SLI is grossly overrated. Image quality and performance are inferior to a Voodoo3 and there is a nasty interlacing artifacts issue with disabled VSync due to the way the analog SLI works on these boards.

The practically useful cards are Voodoo1 for those old statically linked games and Voodoo5 for newer Glide games with 4xFSAA. And of course Voodoo3 as they can be had for next to nothing still.

Its indeed overrated, but back in the days it makes the differents of nicer looking graphics or using games in ugly software mode. (same as could not play the game because of lack of speed, or play it on the full speed)
I only bought this cards because there are games i want to play having 3dFX support.. And mosty (like in a pentium 1 system) can it make the differents of better looking graphics.

When things get too dear or too rare, I switch to emulation.

It depends on how you define "worth it" really. If you have games that don't really support any other hardware 3d acceleration than Glide, then it's worth having some form of 3dfx card. If not, and if the "cool" or "nostalgia" factors are not enough, then save your money.

maximus wrote:

Over the past year, I've started to collect older high-end video cards.

I think your sounding hypocritical right their, you complain that Voodoos are expensive and asking about the utility/usefulness of these cards yet your buying older high end cards to play games when maybe 1 card will do the job? That ti4600 makes anything beneath it obselete so why waste the money buying more cards that wont do anything the geforce cant?

Number of reasons, nostalgia, period correctness for a build and its cool to have a 3DFX, many other reasons too, I dont think $100 is too much for something like a Voodoo 5500 its easily affordable come back in 5 or 10 years time these things be easily worth 5 times as much.

tbh I haven't spent nearly as much as that on any Voodoo card, even the V5500 cost me some £25 (so 40 dollars) , and that's before I sold my spare V3000 to cover the cost of some of that, so in reality I spent more around £15...

fair enough , Im the kind of person who is willing to wait for a long time for a good deal to appear , but Im pretty sure 100 dollars is too much for most cards (unless they were boxed with everything included)

as for the question itself it obviously depends on what games you're looking to play, I think the reason people go for 3DFX cards is really because they have their own API , while also being very compatible (something you aren't going to get with other , more exotic cards from the time). Of course if you don't play any Glide games, then I can certainly see why a non 3DFX card can be used, although really until the Geforce2 came out, 3DFX cards were usually some of the fastest cards out there.

as d1stortion said, I would personally go with a Voodoo3 3000 over V2 SLI , you get better image quality, a bit more performance, and a free PCI slot, should also cost less.

personally I have a GF2Ti I could use instead of the V5500 , but I use the V5500 since I prefer the image quality and the fact it beats in the GF2 in Glide games, while somewhat older games run fine on both. Its true that for games like Max Payne or Warcraft3 the GF2 stomps all over the V5500, but then , those games benefit from much newer cards.

Voodoo 3s are still pretty cheap and work nicely, these are good cards on a budget.

V4/V5 are nice due to FSAA and 32bit colour, but the 16bit colour on the V3 is better than say a TNT2 running in 16bit, so there is that 😀

dirkmirk wrote:

I think your sounding hypocritical right their, you complain that Voodoos are expensive and asking about the utility/usefulness of these cards yet your buying older high end cards to play games when maybe 1 card will do the job? That ti4600 makes anything beneath it obselete so why waste the money buying more cards that wont do anything the geforce cant?

Number of reasons, nostalgia, period correctness for a build and its cool to have a 3DFX, many other reasons too, I dont think $100 is too much for something like a Voodoo 5500 its easily affordable come back in 5 or 10 years time these things be easily worth 5 times as much.

As I said, I have no doubt that the Voodoo 5 5500 is a good and useful card, and it's clearly a sound investment from a collecting standpoint. I'm just wondering if I would get my money's worth in terms of entertainment, as that's currently the lens through which I view my retrocomputing hobby. If I spend $100 on something, I expect to get $100 worth of fun out of it. We all have different ideas of what value is, though, so I'm sure the $100 price tags on these cards are perfectly reasonable to some.

As to why I am buying multiple video cards, well, we all know that one is never enough. Every card has its own strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies, and I find it immensely enjoyable to set up each specimen and see what it's capable of. I'm sure many in the Vogons community can relate 😀

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Voodoo 2 SLI will always be "special". The value of many items can be debated, in the end the market decides how much they are worth.

I think they are worth the money and they will just keep going up in price. So better to get in now than later 😀

Voodoo2 cards have exploded in price in the last few years. It wasn't too long ago that I acquired a pair of STB BlackMagic cards with the now hard to find Tennmax Stealth coolers on them for $30 and the seller had over 20 cards available for sale.I should have bought more when I had the chance but I wasn't accumulating surplus for possible resale at that time. They aren't worth what most sellers are asking for them because as was stated already, a Voodoo3 is faster than V2 SLi and cheaper.

As for Voodoo5, as the last card produced by 3dfx, they will always carry some additional value and they are also boosted somewhat by the extreme rarity and high price of the Voodoo5 6000. Since there are only a small number of V5 6000 cards available, most people can't afford them so they go in search of one of the other VSA-100 cards instead.

maximus wrote:

As I said, I have no doubt that the Voodoo 5 5500 is a good and useful card, and it's clearly a sound investment from a collecting standpoint. I'm just wondering if I would get my money's worth in terms of entertainment, as that's currently the lens through which I view my retrocomputing hobby. If I spend $100 on something, I expect to get $100 worth of fun out of it. We all have different ideas of what value is, though, so I'm sure the $100 price tags on these cards are perfectly reasonable to some.

As to why I am buying multiple video cards, well, we all know that one is never enough. Every card has its own strengths, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies, and I find it immensely enjoyable to set up each specimen and see what it's capable of. I'm sure many in the Vogons community can relate 😀

Thats fine, at the end of the day "collecting" is a mixed bag in terms of value for money but that means some great hardware is dirt cheap, whilst the rarer stuff usually commands a premium.

IMO Examples of great value for money items are like

Tualatin 1.4ghz
AM5X86-133mhz
Slot 1/Socket 370 motherboads.

Cleary theirs an oversupply issue but if that was'nt the case I have no doubt people would pay alot more for those items.

sliderider wrote:

Voodoo2 cards have exploded in price in the last few years.

Indeed; I was kind of taken by surprise by this when I started looking at older 3dfx cards again. I bought a Creative Voodoo2 probably ten years ago now, I don't even think I paid $10 for it. Today that's unheard of. 😒

To the original question:
I think the biggest question with 3dfx hardware, or any other "rare and special" hardware, is what does it mean for you as the owner/user. If your goal is just a part to satisfy a requirement/need and get you back to the game, you're spot-on with getting a $10-$20 GeForce or Radeon or whatever else that's the cheapest/easiest choice. But if the machine/parts/build itself carries some intrinsic value, then you should probably pay more attention to the specific parts you're choosing, and that may mean picking parts that fit more into the "collector's item" and less into the "replacement parts" category. I don't think pragmatism and collecting can happily exist. 😊

maximus wrote:

I'm interested in acquiring some 3dfx hardware, primarily a Voodoo 2 12MB SLI setup and a Voodoo 5 5500. However, both of these setups run about $100 at the moment. This is hard for me to stomach because both are easily outperformed by 10$ to $20 cards (i.e., they fail the traditional price to performance assessment).

Um.... Glide?

Exactly. Cards compatible with propriety engines will always command a premium.

I'm happy with nGlide. It's free and powerful. 😀

Firtasik wrote:

I'm happy with nGlide. It's free and powerful. 😀

nGlide is great for modern systems or at least "overpowered" systems. If you want to run the games on period accurate systems though, then nGlide probably won't be an alternative.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I have the impression that among all other things already mentioned running a game with a real 3dfx card offers a unique appearance, the graphics that only with a voodoo one can experience (as long as it supports it). For me it's not about performance, framerate or anything else, all those can be better covered with other cards. It's about seeing the game with different graphics that any other card. I'm not implying better, just different. Especially when you've actually lived that period this is something to look for.

Of course all these apply when running on real hardware, I've been seeking a cheap voodoo card myself but as I don't yet own one (for the second time in my life 😀 ) I'm still using nGlide to get again "that look" in games I used to play.

LunarG wrote:

If you want to run the games on period accurate systems though, then nGlide probably won't be an alternative.

No doubt about it. I'm not a fan of the period accurateness, though.