Is Voodoo2 SLi worth it in 2024? 

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

Another great video. Thank you. ☺

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

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

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 !

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.

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!

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".

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

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

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 :)

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.

Phil had covered this in great documented fashion.

The ribbon cables are preferable because of inherent strain relief.

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.

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.

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

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)

I still have two of them in my drawer voodoo2 👍

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.

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.

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

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.

Techmoan certified

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

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

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.

til what sli means...

what operating system was used for these tests?

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

are they worth it? depends if you want the full retro experience. alot of old games will run on win 10. get a cheap ish 6th gen intel and you can use a glide wrapper to emulate 3dfx. better performance that a retro pc, cheaper. pcem will also allow you to emulate old pentium hardware and voodoo, then allow you to run win98. but full experience get old hardware and voodoo.

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.

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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.

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

well obviously not