Caddberry, the main reason I like option tweaking, is because it's the closest you can get to taking the card apart and putting it back together again in order to see how it works, without actually doing that or looking at the driver source code.
3Dfx added an insane amount of tweakable options that can be accessed via reg tweaks, and with a little bit of registry know-how, it's possible make those options show up in the main "3Dfx Tools" program.
I'd post a list of them, but the problem is that then this post would be to long...probably because the guy who wrote that list combined all known possible registry tweaks for all Voodoo cards, since a LOT of them are Voodoo2 and lower type options, and then right after it you get a bunch of TV-output stuff, then it immedately jumps to V4/V5 and its FSAA; then to a bunch of SLI timing options, which he didn't specify which are for the V5's dual/quad chip SLI and which are for the older style dual-Voodoo2 card SLI mode the V2's had....in other words, mass randomness in listing, LOL.
How much better does it run. In %
I was thinking about getting one, because I too have a voodoo3 2000....
First, my specs, so you know where I'm coming from:
1.5Ghz Pentium4
Windows 98SE
SiS645 motherboard chipset (400Mhz Front Side Bus)
256MB DDR-RAM on a single stick
Maxi-Sound Fortissimo sound card (with a hardware XG synth and the Yamaha YMF744 chipset)
13gig HD by Maxtor (I think it's Maxtor)
52x CD-ROM drive by Actima, with speed throttling software (set to 32x to keep the noise down
)
Voodoo5 5500 AGP, running the "Amigamerlin 2.9 Win9x driverset for V3/4/5 (Unified driver architecture, if you're wondering how its doing that)
Well, in FF8, I had a definite speed increase during motion blur effects, compared to the V3... and that's with the FSAA maxed out, too. If it's doing that well with FSAA on, then it'll probably scream like heck in that game with FSAA off...but then again, so would any of the latest-generation cards.
I have to go now (getting me a new car...or that's what they told me....), so I'll post more later.
-edit-
Ok, I'm back, it turns out they only wanted me to give it a quick test drive.
Now where was I?
Oh, yeah, I remember. At the very least, you'd get a pretty good performance return, assuming your CPU speed is at least 600Mhz (to avoid any excessive CPU bottlenecking).
Consider this: The Voodoo4, which is a single VSA-100 chip, can hold its own against the V3, performance-wise. The Voodoo5 is a dual VSA-100 setup, running in an SLI (Scan Line Interleave) configuration, which basically means that each chip, while perfectly capable of rendering an entire scene at a higher framerate in comparison to the V3, only needs to do half the work, since the chips work in tandem. And this means that the relative performance of each chip, I suppose, is doubled, on top of whatever speed increase that a single VSA-100 chip configuration gives in comparison to the V3.
But, Caddberry is also right in a sense. Unless you like to tweak stuff; play a lot of Glide-rendered games and/or know enough programming to write your own drivers from the leaked source code that's out there (in order to get better compatibility with the newer games), then you should probably make the V5 a secondary card; otherwise you may find yourself frustrated at the lack of game support....
...however, with a V3, it's that much worse, as the features that the V5 supports in hardware that the V3 doesn't are often the difference between whether or not the game initializes or runs but upchucks texture errors/missing textures (remember that 256x256 texture size limit? Yeah, it came back and bit me a few times in games that don't use low-res textures a lot), or it doesn't look as good because of the texture size and textures that are designed with 32-bit color in mind and aren't dithered to 16-bit color so well (Some of the textures in
Return to Castle Wolfenstein come to mind).
Not to mention, while most of the 3rd party driver sets that are being released (most notably the 3DHQ beta's and the Amigamerlin sets) are designed for the V3/V4/V5, they are mostly geared toward the V5, and sometimes I think some kick-arse speed update they made in the code for the V5 turned out to sacrifice some stability/compatibility in the V3, since they both use the same driver file.
All in all, I think that if someone is gonna try pushing 3Dfx based technology for as long as it can handle it, they should at LEAST get the V5 because it at least is complaint with _most_ of the DX6/7 spec in hardware, IIRC; and sometimes that is the deciding factor in whether or nto a game'll run. Of course, insanity comes in many levels, I'm comfortable with my level of "torturing" the hardware with the newer games.
Other than that, though, my suggestion would be to go with ATi for DX9 hardware, mainly because of my _personal_ boycott of nVidia stuff.
