Is Voodoo2 SLi worth it in 2024?

Is Voodoo2 SLi worth it in 2024.
Getting matched cards now is hard, and expensive, so what can to you do with 2 cheap but different bargain Voodoo 2 cards to capture some of that SLi magic. We explore how to get them playing nice together.

[@all.day.day-dreamer]

If I may, I will share my history with Voodoo and SLI. I'm 55 now, and first started building my own PC's around 1992 or 93. I had just sold a massive Amiga 1200 collections, tons of original boxed games, and believe it or not, I got $2700 dollars. I then used that money to move to the PC which, was pretty expensive at the time. I think my first PC was an AMD DX4 100, then an on to an Intel Pentium 60, so on and so forth. I bought all my parts from Teletronics in OP, Kansas, long since closed. One weekend, I went into the store and everyone was standing around a demo of "Quake GL" and, it was incredibly buttery smooth. All of us knew this was hardware assisted and, we all just stood there in shock, muttering amongst our selves. Shortly thereafter, they came out, or, could have already been for sale at the time I saw the demo. I do not remember exactly, but, I went back and bought my first Voodoo card for $189 dollars days later. Weeks later, I bought the 2nd one and ran it in SLI. I believe the brand was Diamond. Back then, you could run two different Voodoos from different manufactures in SLI. I forget the games that had support, but there were not many. In around 1998, I bought 2 of the new VooDoo 2 cards with 12mb each, for a, at the time, incredible whopping 24mb. They were expensive as well. $400 each? I remember being on top of the world and, also, at the time, my wife, now ex-wife, being VERY upset I would spend $800 without telling her first. I remember telling her, "look, I don't smoke, drink, run around, I don't even buy new shoes until I need then, so get off my back." and, she left me alone about it. Had a lot of fun back then. Today, I own a RTX 4090 and love it to death.

[@66mhzbrain]

Very nice. You were an early adopter 😁. I could only dream, I had a banshee around then, which I have fond memories of. People I knew had SLi setups, it's taken this long for me to get there.

[@dextrodemon]

that's funny i remember seeing a similar thing, going into the computer store and I saw two cards in SLI blowing everyone away, but it was like 2008 and they were running crysis, lol. the more things change the more they stay the same, maybe linked cards will come back in vogue now that there's not too much point to any more rendering performance and things like ray tracing still need grunt.

[@stoshstew]

I also remember the first time I saw quake gl. Was pretty shocking, had no idea games could look like that.

[@SOWA85]

You lived through the best era of gaming and hardware evolution at the age where you had money to throw at it. I was a broke teenager and had to settle for S3 Trio and Riva TNT later on and totally missed out on the 3DFX revolution. I just bought a 17" CRT and Voodoo 3 on eBay to build a retro PC and going to play some Glide games. In my daily I have a 3090 so not short on power these days, but want to go back and relive the past with better hardware that I used to have.

[@66mhzbrain]

@@SOWA85 it was an exciting time, though I had no money back then. My first voodoo card was a banshee and that was bought used, Its great being able to get this stuff now for reasonablly less money and exoeruence whatbit would have been like in the fast lane back then.

[@boydpukalo8980]

The days of 3DFX were magical exciting times. I got my 1st computer in 95 while in college and after graduating in 1998 and with my 1sy paycheck I bought an Evans & Sutherland OpenGL workstation accelerator. Fast forward to these days and I became fascinated with retro systems and recently bought a NOS Voodoo 3 for an Amiga w/Mediator, and a pair of NOS Voodoo 2's w/black PCB for an intel build in the future. Have to decide what CPU for the Voodoo 2's. Really cool video. Thanks for making it.

[@66mhzbrain]

Thankyou for watching! amazing you got some nos 3dfx cards, you should end up with a really cool machine😁

[@L4wnM0w3rM4n]

This is the kind of weirdo super niche content I live for nowadays, even though I'll almost certainly never possess any of this vintage hardware myself. Nostalgia is a heluva drug! Thanks.

[@66mhzbrain]

Thankyou for checking it out😁

[@L4wnM0w3rM4n]

​@@66mhzbrainwould be kinda neat to see Diablo 2 running on glide if you have any interest in that

[@adambgunn]

I love that pcb sli bridge! so much nicer looking than the old floppy cable.

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

Very interesting benchmarks. The Voodoo 2 has an advantage over the Voodoo 3 when it comes to compatibility with older games from 1996-1998. Although the V3 has excellent compatibility with older games still there are some which do not run or run with some issues, whereas with the Voodoo 2 they run perfectly. Such an example is Klingon Honor Guard from 1998 a game using the Unreal engine, with the V3 it runs but only with some graphic errors while with the V2 it runs perfectly.

[@66mhzbrain]

Cool, I guess that explains some of it. It's never as straight forward as it seems😁

[@MrStenrad]

Another great video. Thank you. ☺

[@66mhzbrain]

Thankyou! For taking the time to watch it 😁

[@phillycheesetake]

The Voodoo 2 is just such a great card, 3DFX at their peak. I've got 8 (IIRC) with 3 of them being Gainward Dragons. Oddly enough Gainward sold boards to "2 The Max", which one of mine is. Definitely my favourite card from 3DFX. Also the best cards to build in a modern windowed case so that you can look at them working!

[@AllboroLCD]

Went from the Banshee, to the Voodoo3, onto a Geforce 256, then was my ATI AIW Radeon 9800. Stopped gaming for about 10 years, then built a rig around the GTX 950 which is still serving me to this day with modern AAA titles.

[@66mhzbrain]

Cool, you went through some cool cards😁

[@AllboroLCD]

​@@66mhzbrain I have a radeon 9250 PCI card I wanna try in an old HP P4 rig. The hope is that it might handle late DOS games to early XP era stuff nicely.

[@nothingelse1520]

How in the world do you game on a 950? I would lose my mind. I just upgraded from a 2070 Super which was still fine for 1080p but I got a 1440p monitor.

[@AllboroLCD]

@@nothingelse1520 the secret is the 720p TV from 2007 i have it connected to : D

[@nothingelse1520]

@@AllboroLCD ah yeah playing at 720p would help

[@knalltutemichl3473]

Gosh..those were the days ❤❤ I remember my first Vodoo 1

[@emmabentley7945]

awesome video. Subbed ! , in my youth in the early 90's here in the U.K i had a Voodoo 1 3DFX Orchid card my Grandad bought me for my Pc, and at the time , didn't appreciate it, ( lets be honest we never do when we are young ! ) i would love to have the card right now, rebuild that AMD K6 system i had. Anyway enjoyed the video !

[@66mhzbrain]

Thankyou for checking it out😊 I never really knew what I had back in the day either. It's nice to be able to go back and appreciate stuff in a bit more detail now that things are relatively cheaper.

[@spavatch]

Is it worth it? Oh hell yeah! Just not necessarily with a fast CPU. Remember that the fastest CPU available at Voodoo2’s launch was Pentium II 333 and early Pentium IIs were what the cards were designed to work with. Sure it requires a 1100-1200 MHz Pentium III to squeeze out the last bit of the cards’ performance but it’s the early 1998 hardware where Voodoo2 can outshine even the Voodoo3, they simply scale much better with 200-300 MHz CPUs than the rest of the bunch. Good video by the way, thanks for that!

[@66mhzbrain]

Yes your right, the cpu is probably fine. Thankyou for watching it 😁

[@Thee_Dr_Evil]

Phil had covered this in great documented fashion.

[@66mhzbrain]

Yes I read his voodoo 2 scaling project.

[@john_ace]

And before 3Dfx, a group at Apple had developed the Quickdraw 3D accelerator that could be accelerated by adding a second, third or even 4th card. It went to market in Ocober/Novenber 1995. The driver would give each card their respective scan line for performance reasons. The QD3D accelerator used a similar rendering concept as the PowerVR. Since the QD3D accelerator was very limited, each had only enough cache for 16 x 1 pixels at 36bit internally (apart from object cache and texture memory) and was driven by DMA enabled 'buckets' in main memory. They called the method of rasterization a "modified scanline renderer".

[@66mhzbrain]

Cool, I just looked it up, badly handled by the looks of it. In an alternate universe could have made macs the gaming machines of choice!

[@john_ace]

@@66mhzbrain It was most likely a kind of test ballon by probing the grounds for a more powerful successor. The QD3D accelerator has trilinear filtering and transparency but not many other features. It lacks sprites, per-pixel transparency and advanced blending-modes. All in all very limited. The team at Apple had actually planed to have a 3D accelerator with roughly 10 times the performance ready in 1997 but that was canceled when Steve came back to Apple. I also suspect some connections to the Pippin that was released in early 1996. The timelines of both projects overlap substantially. Just think about it: a gaming console, 3D accelerator and an always-online setup-box with MPEG-HW all developed at the same time. Smells like there was a conceptual idea in the center of it all without the technical or financial ability at Apple to realize it.

[@john_ace]

@@66mhzbrain strange enough the QD3D accelerator implemented trilinear filtering but because there are only 16px available in the rasterizer, there are artifacts that appear if a texel is streched beyond the 16px boundary. Even more strange is the arbitrary limitation on the smallest texture to 128x128. This results in the 12 Texture limit

[@MANITECH89]

Very good material I also invite you to compare Voodoo 2 8MB vs 12MB vs SLI (English subtitles)

[@66mhzbrain]

Thankyou, yes would be nice to do that. I will, if I can ffind cards😁

[@MrAlan1828]

I have a Sli setup, one card has the connector, the other doesn't and I made my own ribbon SLI cable, lots of fun playing older games not much fun playing newer titles

[@66mhzbrain]

Yes I saw a few how tos on mak8ngbthe link cable online, never thought to try but I will give it a go.

[@oldschooldude8370]

Absolutely worth it for an era correct 98SE box running 1024x768. Good stuff. If the price is right.

[@66mhzbrain]

Yes it is though hard to find at the right price these days😬

[@dabombinablemi6188]

I've still got the original cable for my Diamond Monster 3DII, and later on assembled a solid SLI bridge for using with my STB Black Magic - but at the end of the day, my old 15" LCD (used it with my second PC over 20 years ago) looks fine with games at 640x480, so I'm better off having a card in both my fast and slow Slot1 PC instead of both in the 1 for improved compatibility. Glide, S3 Metal, DirectX and OpenGL support all in 1 PC is amazing. Plus heat is a concern in the old cases, so running them in SLI in either PC means they get quite hot.

[@66mhzbrain]

Sounds cool, yes I read about heat, was going to maybe put some heatsinks on the other card and get some bi case fans going.

[@dabombinablemi6188]

@@66mhzbrain You'll have to check any heatsink you buy to ensure that they are flat. The ones I ordered have a visible gap when looked at from the side.

[@pazsion]

yea i find it very odd they never put heatsinks on these things. do memory the chips and the voltage regulator. any chips the flow data. heat is the main cause of artifacts and other glitches

[@Dxceor2486]

Your card seems to be artefacting indeed. Like at 9:37, that polygon shouldn't stretch towards the drone like this. Or at 9:41, 9:45. The race is also glitching at 7:56 There are some more, but I'm not going to enumerate all of them, I think you got the idea :)

[@66mhzbrain]

Yes I saw, was just 3d mark, I reseated the cables abd it was all fine, was too lazy to film again.

[@jorkenhuang8857]

I still have two of them in my drawer voodoo2 👍

[@66mhzbrain]

Nice, I wish I had 2 just lying around😁

[@aaldrich1982]

video idea for you , if you can be bothered - what is the maximum length an sli link cable can be before sli becomes unstable. you'd have to be bothered to get an IDE cable, twist those 2 wires , start off with the full length of the IDE cable (which i imagine would not work) and gradually reduce the length of the cable.

[@66mhzbrain]

Haha, that would be fun. I'll experiment

[@vanderlinde4you]

It never was a IDE cable, but a FDD cable with a few twisted wires.

[@aaldrich1982]

@@vanderlinde4you OK well same principle applies??

[@vanderlinde4you]

@@aaldrich1982 IDE vs FDD are 2 different cables.

[@aaldrich1982]

@@vanderlinde4you I understand that but you could get an fdd cable and twist the pair in the middle and do this experiment? Just out of curiosity.

[@StephenFarrow-gx6qu]

I'm lucky enough to own a matched pair of original Voodoo2 12Mb cards. I brought them for a couple of hundred quid just before the prices went mental. Had them running in SLi on a Dell Dimension m200s. Overkill for the cpu which is only a Pentium 200Mhz MMX. Beautiful GPU's which I'd never sell.

[@66mhzbrain]

Nice. Yes getting a matched pair thesedays for the popular cards is pricey, hang on to them😁 there is something still magical about running 2 together. Before I found the athlon in the vid I had them running on a k6-2, so similar and they ran nicely.

[@dholzric1]

I still have a pair i bought back when they were released. I guess i should dig them up.

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

I remember sli'ing two Monster Voodoo II cards back in the day and all it did was enable 1024x768 resolution, there was no other boost of any sort! (Diamond Monster Voodoo II 12MB)

[@66mhzbrain]

Yes I was expecting more of a performance boost but then read it was mostly about resolution

[@JohnDoe-ip3oq]

I have an x24 and sli. The SLI is faster due to bandwidth bottlenecking, but the x24 has a better vga cable. Of course, it helps to have a motherboard that can virtualize PCI for extra performance or something like that, with dual channel rambus or ddr. Voodoo 2 is faster, voodoo 3 is slower with worse overhead, but voodoo 3 has superior 16 bit and 2D visuals. I doubt there is any real driver issues using the open source drivers. The one thing I don't like is that voodoo 2-5 support bump mapping and have no game support or driver backwards compatibility. The doom 3 driver was a joke. No reason it couldn't have been supported, the damn GeForce 2 had support. Also, all driver work has dropped since xp64 being the last update which doesn't work on modern windows. You can actually run high resolution textures on a voodoo 2 using mesafx, but overall it would be nice if the drivers were still worked on.

[@edsiefker1301]

The ribbon cables are preferable because of inherent strain relief.

[@goldenamazon6857]

Laying the bare card directly on the steel chassis made my eye twitch a little 😮

[@66mhzbrain]

Really! Why?

[@goldenamazon6857]

@@66mhzbrain if the chassis isn’t grounded, then the possibility of a static charge touching all the contact points at once has the potential of making the card unhappy.

[@66mhzbrain]

@goldenamazon6857 yes, its england and we have 3 pin sockets so the power lead eaths it

[@66mhzbrain]

@goldenamazon6857 me handling the card un earthed is what should have made your eye twitch😁

[@RedSaint83]

I wonder when the sweet spot is for picking up hardware that'll end up becoming vintage and harder to get, because there has to be a period when they go out of fashion when it becomes cheaper for a while until it starts becoming a collectors item. Either way, interesting blast from the past. I bought Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 early on. Combined the Voodoo 1 with a Matrox card, but it's been so long that I don't recall if it was 2 MB or 4 MB VRAM. I was jealous when my kid brother bought a 16 MB Voodoo Banshee, and wow, Quake 2 never looked better, just incredible how hardware performance moved at that time.

[@66mhzbrain]

Haha yes. I wish I could predict that. I started getting stuff about 7 years ago and its interesting to watch how the value of things changes. I guess mid late 2000s would have been the sweet spot for most of what we niw think of as classic stuff. Will be interesting to see if later stuff has the same level of nostalgia in a few years.

[@SnakeBush]

Techmoan certified

[@Phantomhdilluminate]

Back in the days I got Voodoo to play Mario 64 😂

[@exodous02]

Oh man, didn't know Voodoo2 had SLI! I still have my voodoo2, or was it 3? I got the last one they released. I had the first one and then upgraded. I was sad when nVidia bought them, I remember nVidia sucked back then but now they're the standard. The tech they got from 3Dfx put them over ATi back in the day.

[@66mhzbrain]

Might be 3 as that didnt have sli. Yes 3dfx were cool😁

[@88t5]

3dfx on Windows = Easy Mode 3dfx on Unix/Linux = dev/cbt Mode

[@PROSTO4Tabal]

Did you bought this voodoo2 sli pcb bridge on ebay? If yes the you bought from me. I use mirohiscore v2 SLi on epoxy 8kha+ atholon 1Ghz, Aureal Vortex 2 SQ2500. Matrox millennium II win98. All 90s retro pc games plays flawless

[@66mhzbrain]

Yes, I had no problem with it, it worked fine!

[@wowitsshit9734]

i gave up, 2x voodoo 2 expensive, i just went with voodoo 3 3000 £70 for my win95 pc it was sold as for parts / not working, i gambled and got lucky!

[@66mhzbrain]

Cool, yes sometimes its worth taking a chance😁

[@stevec00ps]

Did you notice much difference in image quality on the Voodoo 2s vs 3s?

[@66mhzbrain]

Not really, though I'm not very picky and if I dont register a glaring problem I'm happy. I probabaly should have taken a closer look, I imagine the voodoo 2s would have been a bit fuzzier with the passthough cables etc.

[@stevec00ps]

@@66mhzbrain I assume it only passes through one card and the other SLI'd scan lines are transferred digitally across the little link board? Or is that analogue video across that link? I can't remember how it works.

[@66mhzbrain]

Think it was alternating lines across the board and yes 1 pass through cable only on the first card

[@heilong108]

what operating system was used for these tests?

[@66mhzbrain]

Was windows 98se

[@VEC7ORlt]

Law of headlines... Seriously, why is the title a question?

[@66mhzbrain]

Because is it worth trying to sli thesedays🤔

[@GoldSrc_]

Boost your mic levels a bit, it's a bit on the low side.

[@telengardforever7783]

The VooDoo Banshee was a life saver in college. Yeah, I played games with it, but its real power was in accelerating web browsing and web apps which was totally unexpected in the mid 2000's. Without the VooDoo banshee, using my college's web pages and apps would have been painful on the 400mhz computers of that day.

[@66mhzbrain]

I love the banshee, was my first 3d card

[@mikatorkkeli4932]

Want to swap cards? I have that green dragon for one. Just to get a same pair for you and me :)

[@66mhzbrain]

Haha, who would get the dragons?

[@MrGencyExit64]

Totally worth it, how else are you going to play Tomb Raider at > 15 FPS in 2024? ;)

[@66mhzbrain]

Exactly😁

[@fLaMePr0oF]

You missed single Voodoo 2 (non SLI) scores on your graphs, wasn't that kinda the point?

[@66mhzbrain]

Not really, was more to compare sli with faster cards, but there were graphs for both cards single for each of the games.

[@TheCatherineCC]

til what sli means...

[@FartInhalerSlamPoetry]

SLI died the moment GPU manufacturers figured out that instead of selling you two gpus, they could sell you a single GPU for twice the cost.

[@66mhzbrain]

Haha, true

[@vanderlinde4you]

Nah. It died because both AMD or Nvidia had to put large amount of time into making proper working profiles, while dev's refused to put any work into it. So now no more driver level needed, DX12 can handle 2 or more cards. The games that did support SLI or crossfire worked perfect.

[@supermario8416]

Like

[@joetheman74]

What does that even mean? Is it worth it in 2024? Obviously these old cards can't do modern gaming so based on 2024 standards.....NO. But the YEAR has nothing to do with the VALUE of these cards and if they are worth something to the individual and their use case. I'm so tired of youtubers using these nonsensical video titles that make no sense. Just copying what every other youtuber has or is already done or doing. Why not "Is Vooodoo 2 SLI a good value for your retro gaming build?" Or some other title that is actually relevant to the content.

[@66mhzbrain]

Bit of a rant, but no, nothing to do with value, and being a retro site (clues in the site description), nothing to do with modern gaming, but yes, to do with availability of matched cards and drivers, which is the cheapest but riskiest way if doing it, as per the video for those that watched it properly. And yes youtubers try to invite people to take a look with their titles (its what they're for) 🤔 ! And no, obvious descriptions like that have been done even more than this kind and get less attention, and usually get no clicks, I know because I've tried all kinds. The video answered the question and invited other peoples thoughts (those that are actually interested in discussing it that is), but thanks for the feedback.

[@Bramon83]

well obviously not

[@66mhzbrain]

Obviously?

[@Ragesauce]

I love vids like this but your whispering voice is killing me.

[@66mhzbrain]

Maybe I should invest in a new one?

[@Ragesauce]

@@66mhzbrain just SLI it.

[@O.Shawabkeh]

​@@66mhzbrain just overclock it :D