Paladin of the Pegasos
Posts: 1193 from 2003/2/24
From: Helsinki, Finland
Jim,
I'd avoid Voodoo 3 because:
1)I think most models (this one excluded, I guess) have only VGA output. At least the model I had in the past had noticeably worse image than my first Radeon 9100 with DVI. Replaced with 9100 when 3D support was finally added, and never looked back.
2)You're limited to 16bit screenmodes when using 3D (if you run OpenGL program in window, the screen must be 16bit, of course less of an issue if using own screen)
3)At least most Voodoo 3 hardware has only 16MB of memory (half of "worse" Mac Mini models, that most users consider "not enough" - of course memory consumption is half of what you use with 32bit screens)
4)Max texture size 256. Texture width or height cannot be higher than that. Better coded games surely will downscale textures automatically, but then the quality will be worse, of course.
5)If we ever get shader support to TinyGL, that most definitely won't work on Voodoo 3.
6)I don't think many people from users or developers use Voodoo 3 actively anymore, so it's more likely (than with Radeon boards) that there will be unnoticed bugs in future releases of MorphOS & fixing them will be lower priority.
7)You get a much nicer looking pointer with "less outdated" graphics card. I think the pointer is restricted to something like 4 colors on Voodoo 3.
Sure, if I saw one for "almost free", could buy it as curiosity, but I already got that covered with Voodoo 5 5500 I got for 5 euros
(Actually I used it for a while, when I had problems with my Radeon 9000 pro and it definitely wasn't "much slower", and that with using only one of the 2 GPU's afaik)
