Just picked up a box of old bits and found a 3dfx voodoo card - it has a floppy type connector on and a 2nd vga input it looks like - I want it on my xp m/c to run a 2nd monitor - any idea of where to get the drivers?
You need an existing graphics output to run through that, since the older ones were "3D accelerators" and not video cards in their own right. You need to run a standard VGA d-sub into the input part, then connect the output to your monitor. Not much good for multiple monitors If you still want drivers, a quick Google search revealed this. By the way, the floppy type connector is for... SLI! It was originally implemented by 3dfx but when they were acquired by NVIDIA the technology was resurrected.
Cheers hitman , SLI would be nice but I think that my nice 9500 pro might be more powerful than the card... seems like a no go then... ho-hum - back to the drawing board...
Yeah, the Voodoos were capable of SLI, which, back then, stood for "scan line interleave". Obviously, it wasn't as advanced as what we understand SLI to be nowadays - each card simply rendered a line in turn, as opposed to the AFR and load balancing techniques of the modern implementation. It cost a pretty penny then, too
No, it just needs extra power, and gets it from a floppy connector. The SLI cards were only specific brands - you could have the equivalent of an Ati there...
No - he was referring to a floppy-style data connector, not the power plug. See this picture, it should clear things up
You can get two of those old cards to work together, much like the modern SLI system. In fact, as nVidia bought 3Dfx, I wouldn't be surprised if there's some of the old SLI tech in the new SLI.
I think people have made it pretty clear that old Voodoo cards with a floppy-style data connector were capable of an old version of SLI. What more do you need to know? Does your card have a different connector on it?
Its not hard to re-wire a floppy connector to work as the SLI bridge tbh, just needs a few wires switching over on 1 of the cards. Connect up the graphics card to the "master" and away you go... Performance is quite good tbh, can run Original UT @ 1024*768 at ~ 65-70 fps, using Glide. Pretty impressive for 2 12mb cards tbh lol
I dont know if the original Voodoo's were SLI capable, but the Voodoo 2's definately were. A 9500pro will be about a million times faster and will actually have drivers you can use.
You need to run a graphics card with these voodoo's anyway, since they're only 3d accelerators... If you hook up a 9500pro (for example) and 2 voodoo's in SLI they'll "pass through" D3D/OpenGL without processing, but will accelerate any glide games. This way, you can play your favourite D3D game, and switch straight over to a glide enabled title without faffing about with cards... The only issue is the lack of DVI on the voodoo's...
thanks for your help peeps - just ordered a dvi to vga adapter from fleabay for £4 for my dual array - see if I can make that back by auctioning the voodoo off!
You won't get anything for them mate. I had 3 Voodoo 2 cards a while ago, and I gave them away for the cost of postage.
