Falconfly 3dfx
Bridget Peral
When I tried to install the 3dfx 4 4500 graphic card into my Windows 98 machine by using a driver from internet, it says that the
"This device is either not present, not working properly, or does not have all the drivers installed
Hi kixs and akula (I think it means shark:)
Thank you very much for your replies, appreciated. I tried all the different version of the driver for Voodoo 4 /4500 on the falconfly.3df website. Unfortunately no one worked on the freshly installed Windows 98 SE
Then, I installed the unofficial service pack 3, U98SESP3.exe, and finally the win98 found it and it worked.
I am not sure but either there are some missing dependencies in fresh Windows 98 installation (w/o service pack), or there is some HW issues on my voodoo4 card (bought from ebay for a cheaper price), so vodoo4 did not work.
Now, vodoo4 is working, but now I have different issues. Now the HTML pages are not displayed by windows. I mean either help topics, or IE does not show any texts on the windows. I think the unofficial service package has issue or virus etc.
Did you guys have any idea what can be the cause this HTML pages are not shown issues?
Thank you
The FalconFly site sometimes includes text and/or HTML information on the right side of a driver entry on the page. So, for example, for the Voodoo4/5 Driver Version 1.04.00 (Date 09 November 2000), there is an HTML page with System Requirements for the driver:
The key thing to note is that a suitable DirectX version must also be installed in addition to the Windows base install. Odds are this so-called Service Pack you mentioned is providing the DirectX that you need, but it may be causing problems as well. As Shagittarius mentioned, you would probably be better served by doing a clean Windows install (not using the Service Pack) and then installing DirectX 7.0 or higher manually. Fortunately, the FalconFly mirror I mentioned above also has a variety of DirectX packages for various versions of Windows: Since you are using Windows 98, the DirectX 7.0a (08 December 1999) package would be a good candidate, and you can choose the English or German variants. Note that you need Windows 98 SE, since Windows 98 First Edition is not supported by DirectX 7 or later versions of DirectX. There may be other mirrors for the Microsoft DirectX files as well.
I know, that's why I wrote "after that". You install dec 2006 and then can install up to nov 2007 without errors, although I don't think there are even any 98 compatible d3d9 games that would need the newer d3dx9_* files .
I've just ordered one of these as it was the card I has back in the day. I was scouring the net for info (including here). I found a copy of the manual at falconfly.3dfx.pl, it's in Russian so a bit of pasting into a translator is required, just scanning the diagrams etc. not sure if the jumpers mentioned or not. There are a bunch of other manuals from creative etc. on the site too, along with a mass of technical, coding and other nice stuff re 3dfx though the manuals are in a range of languages (some English). Bit more searching here and the answer is - Voodoo Banshee JP1 Jumper Block - What does it do?
Alright, so I ordered this card a couple days ago and just got it in today. Checked the board over physically, don't see any missing resistors or broken traces off hand (attached photos just in case I missed something y'all can find). Card actually looks fantastic.
Swapped it into my Packard Bell, which already had a Diamond Monster 3D II installed and running reference 3.02.02 drivers with no issues, and Win95 OSR2 immediately identified the card no problem. But once it was finished booting, I got the infamous "_GlideInitEnvironment:glide2x.dll expected Voodoo^2, none detected" error. Sure enough, dxdiag didn't detect the card for 3D rendering, and Glide games (D2_3DFX, Freespace, etc) would crash upon opening. Opening up display settings and going to the V2-1000 tab freezes the window, but not anything else, just as described on the listing. System works fine otherwise.
What would be the best next step to take here? Listing said it worked fine for Glide API games when they had it, so I'm tempted to try it in one of my Win98 rigs and / or with different drivers, but that of course doesn't fix whatever the root issue here is. I'm a V3/4/5 veteran, not at all familiar with these older 1 and 2 cards.
No dice, all drivers returned the same Glide error and none of them had dxdiag show the card as a working 3D accelerator. All the drivers installed fine at least, and device manager showed no issues. Just trying to get the card running solo before testing the SLI setup again. Might try one of my Win98 rigs. Seller got back up with me and said they were using Win98 with the latest ref drivers to at least get Glide working.
EDIT: I did notice this card has slightly different chips than my working card - see attachment for the working Diamond card I currently have, compared to first post photos of the currently non-working card
I haven't been able to get the card stable enough to check the settings and read what the memory count is on it. This is supposed to be a 12MB card, but I know at least certain 8MB cards could be user-upgraded to 12MB, correct? Possibly the reason for the different brands?
I have returned from my quest with the two Win98 machines, and... no luck. Actually went worse: The card was recognized on first boot as a PCI multimedia device, but when directing Windows to automatically pick up the drivers from the folder (used the ref drivers this time), Windows couldn't find them. Did it the manual way, and sure enough, Windows felt they were the wrong drivers for the device. Went ahead and installed them, rebooted, device manager showed the device as working properly, but no settings available in display properties, nothing in dxdiag, and no Glide found in games. Similar to the Win95 rig, Everest only found the device in device manager and not as a physical device on the PCI bus or anywhere else, which makes me think the card's device ID is missing or wrong. I'm sure that's not the problem in and of itself, but it makes me wonder if that doesn't hint at what the root of the problem is?
Using the latest ref drivers. First thing is, it's now recognized as a 3dfx Voodoo FX (??? Does that even exist?). Display properties also only recognizes 4MB of the total 12MB of RAM, and Everest only shows 8MB (worth note: my working Diamond card only shows 8MB of total 12MB in display properties, despite Everest showing all 12MB). When testing the card under dxdiag, the spinning cube represents just fine in both software and hardware mode, but 3dMark 99 test has no textures at all, just polygons. But when running Glide API - in this case, Descent: Freespace v1.06 - the textures all show up fine, but the fps bog WAY down once a fair bit of action is going on screen, compared to the performance of my other Diamond card.
Just compared the display properties info to the working card: the working card shows 2 TMUs, whereas the broken card is only showing 1. Got it running on a Glide game (Descent 3) right now, and sure enough, the PPU and the top-right TMU are hot, but the top-left TMU is room temp.
The Voodoo 5 was the last and most powerful graphics card line that was released by 3dfx Interactive. All members of the family were based upon the VSA-100 graphics processor.[1] Only the single-chip Voodoo 4 4500 and dual-chip Voodoo 5 5500 made it to market.
One of the design goals for the VSA-100 was scalability. The name of the chip is an abbreviation for "Voodoo Scalable Architecture." By using one or more VSA-100 chips on a board, the various market segments for graphics cards are satisfied with just a single graphics chip design. Theoretically, anywhere from 1 to 32 VSA-100 GPUs could be run in parallel on a single graphics card, and the fillrate of the card would increase proportionally. On cards with more than one VSA-100, the chips are linked using 3dfx's Scan-Line Interleave (SLI) technology. A major drawback to this method of performance scaling is that various parts of hardware are needlessly duplicated on the cards and board complexity increases with each additional processor.
3dfx changed the rendering pipeline from one pixel pipeline with twin texture mapping units (Voodoo2/3) to a dual pixel pipeline design with one texture mapping unit on each.[3] This design, commonly referred to as a 21 configuration, has an advantage over the prior 12 design with the ability to always output 2 pixels and 2 texels per clock instead of 1 pixel and 2 texels per clock.
This is the first 3dfx graphics chip to support full 32-bit color depth in 3D, compared to 16-bit color depth with all previous designs. The limitation of 256px 256px maximum texture dimensions was also addressed and VSA-100 can use up to 2048px 2048px textures. Additionally, 3dfx implemented the FXT1 and DXTC texture compression techniques.[3]
The VSA-100 supports a hardware accumulation buffer, known as the "T-buffer". When rendering to the T-buffer, VSA-100 can store the combined outputs of several frames. This mechanism allows for creation of effects such as motion blur (if used temporally) and anti-aliasing (if used spatially).[3] VSA-100 supports rotated-grid super-sampling anti-aliasing (RGSS AA) modes, with a maximum anti-aliasing level determined by the number of VSA-100 chips in the SLI configuration. One chip allows 2 AA, two chips allows 4 AA, four chips provides for 8 AA and so on. The RGSS method of anti-aliasing combines multiple samples of each frame, resulting in higher quality than the brute force ordered-grid over-sampling of ImgTech PowerVR, ATI Radeon DDR and Nvidia GeForce 2.[4]
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