Voodoo2
Controls ?
(What do they do)
by d0gmA and 3 Fingers
Last Updated 12/20/99 12:03:01 PM -0500
Everyday I get asked what do I do with all these controls in my Voodoo2 Control Panel. What do all these mystical controls do? What does it all mean? Well read on and I will try to explain everything to you in the following control glossary.
The Following all apply to Voodoo2 cards in general. Some brands control panels might not have the controls named exactly the same or might not have controls for all the features but I tried to come as close as I could to making this as comprehensive as possible. It is recommended that you understand these setting before changing them and we do NOT take responsibility for their use or misuse.
I have added an entire page of screen
shots of Control panels in which you can click on a control to find out what it does.
I have also added the trusty Slider. Special thanks to Jim Anderson and the
Engineers at Canopus for their help with this
document. I also created a printable copy of this page here.
As usual if you find any typos mistakes or otherwise please let me know. d0gmA
Common Controls | Direct3D | Glide | Control Panels
Sets the rate or number of times per second the screen is redrawn on the monitor.
This should typically be set to the highest rate that your VoodooČ and Monitor both support. If you set the refresh rate too high on your VoodooČ your screen will become garbled and "freaked out". In this case you should lower your refresh rate.
Note: Setting the refresh rate of your card higher than your monitor can handle can damage your monitor.
Adjusts the intensity of the three primary colors red, green and blue. With these controls you can set the color mix your monitor displays. Typically most VoodooČ cards have a link sliders option which will allow you to adjust all 3 colors at once to change how light or dark your colors are. If your colors are all white or bleached out you should set the gamma higher.
Disables Scan Line Interleave mode when two VoodooČ cards are present in the machine.
This would be used when you had two VoodooČ cards and you wanted to play a game that was found to be incompatible with SLI mode.
If checked, a 3DFX logo wallpaper will appear on your desktop.
I found that this isn't an NT only option it is available in all operating systems.
This sets the clock speed on your VoodooČ.
Caution: You can damage your VoodooČ card if you overclock it and it overheats. Use at your own risk
Direct3D Controls
Wait for V-sync:
Sets whether or not to wait for the vertical refresh blanking period before updating the screen. This can be turned off to increase the rendering speed in Direct3D and Glide applications but some tearing may be visible.
Not waiting on Vsync will allow Voodoo2 to draw as fast as possible and will never be limited to monitor refresh rate.
Here is a Quote from id Software's Brian Hook on V-Sync:
VSync off isn't that useful or attractive to me, however some people prefer playing that way. In my opinion, disabling vsync is only useful for benchmarking purposes.
Note: Your graphics card and your monitor must support the selected refresh rate of your VoodooČ card or it could damage the monitor. It is recommended you only modify these settings if you have a high end graphics card and monitor.
Sets your VoodooČ as the primary Direct3D device for full-screen Direct3D applications. However, you can change this setting if you have another Direct3D device installed (like a VGA card with 3D capability).
The only time you would use this is if you wanted to play a Direct3D game using your primary display adapter and not your VoodooČ card.
Use trilinear filtering when possible:
Allows your VoodooČ card to use trilinear texture filtering if a Direct3D application is using bilinear filtering and mip mapping and the game doesn't support trilinear filtering. The two Texture Mapping Units (TMUs) can do trilinear texture filtering with no performance penalty incurred.
Some games may be incompatible with trilinear filtering.
Enable Anti-Aliasing for Direct3D:
Smoothes out the edges or removes the "jaggies" or "stair stepping" from polygon objects in Direct3D.
This makes Direct3D games much smoother.
Direct 3D has support in it's definition to use anti-aliased (smooth; blended with background) lines and polygons. Until now (Ver 2.17) the 3Dfx D3D driver did not utilize the hardware capability for anti-aliased lines. The support for anti-aliased lines is turned on by default in the 2.17 driver. Turning this off could buy some performance, in applications that use the anti-aliased capability, at the cost of blockier edges. I do not believe that the legacy of D3D applications use the Anti-Aliasing capability very frequently.
Glide Controls
Wait for V-Sync:
Sets whether or not to wait for the vertical refresh blanking period before updating the screen. This can be turned off to increase the rendering speed in Direct3D and Glide applications but some tearing may be visible.
Not waiting on Vsync will allow Voodoo2 to draw as fast as possible and will never be limited to monitor refresh rate.
Here is a Quote from id Software's Brian Hook on V-Sync:
VSync off isn't that useful or attractive to me, however some people prefer playing that way. In my opinion, disabling vsync is only useful for benchmarking purposes.
Note: Your graphics card and your monitor must support the selected refresh rate of your VoodooČ card or it could damage the monitor. It is recommended you only modify these settings if you have a high end graphics card and monitor.
Sets whether or not to override the Gamma and screen refresh settings which can be set in the environment using the 3Dfx SST commands. You may wish to customize each game using different settings.
This feature would be useful when you are having a problem with a game you could check this option to make sure the problem isn't because of some SST commands you have in the batch file used to start the game.
It is possible to limit the amount of texture memory available for Glide applications. This is required for some Glide games which don't handle the 2MB boundary condition in the texture memory properly.
Force mipmap dithering for Glide apps:
This option will guarantee that the mip map blending will use the hardware dithering option which can smooth the transition between mip levels. This can increase the visual quality in some games. Mip levels are pre scaled texture
>maps that are appropriate for polygons of various distances away from the viewer. Sometimes there is are visible texture transitions in a polygon jutting out whose surface transitions though several mip levels. The dithering can soften this effect.
The above will eliminate the "banding effect" you see when you look down long hallways. But at a slight performance hit.
Force triple color buffering in Glide apps:
The Voodoo2 is much more capable with regard to using triple buffering over the Voodoo1. Triple buffering has the same advantage as double buffering (no screen tearing - looks smooth) with the additional advantage of increased efficiency (i.e. higher frame rate) in some cases. One way to describe the advantage is that the CPU and 3D card are not as tightly linked with triple buffering which can lead to some performance gains due to work done in parallel. Triple buffering takes more memory in the video card frame buffer. This does not affect texture memory.
Brian Hook on Triple Buffering:
Triple buffering is definitely a Good Thing, since it decouples (mostly) your ability to render with the framerate. It does consume slightly more memory (50% more framebuffer memory than double buffering), but this actually isn't that big a deal anymore. With Voodoo 2 triple buffering takes away from your maximum screen resolution, but it doesn't reduce the amount of available texture memory because texture memory is divided from framebuffer memory.
And with modern architectures that texture directly out of AGP, triple buffering only reduces the maximum screen resolution you can run in. So it really is a win-win situation with AGP systems or Voodoo2, as long as you're willing to live with a slightly smaller maximum screen size.
3 Fingers on Triple Buffering:
What triple buffering does is improve the frame rate up to a maximum of the monitor refresh rate - triple buffering will not get you results higher than monitor refresh, though. It just smoothes out the drawing time to approach the monitor refresh rate and allows the Voodoo II to get framerate (FPS) as high as the refresh rate. It allocates additional framebuffer memory to use for image storage. Normally you have 2 color buffers and 1 zbuffer. With these settings, you have an additional color buffer that the Voodoo2 will use to store an image it has already created but which has not yet been sent to the monitor. Otherwise, if all the buffers were full, the card would have to wait until it sent an image to the monitor before working on the next image. If you are using the latest 3DFX Voodoo II drivers, you will have a box to check in your Voodoo II control panel/advanced tab to enable triplebuffering. If you are using the latest drivers with this "check box for triple buffering" and want to enable triple buffering, just check the triple buffering box. If you disable V Sync, then triple buffering will be disabled whether the "enable triple buffering" box is checked or not. GL Quake/QW users should add
"gl_triplebuffer 1" to their autoexec.cfg to eliminate tool bar flicker.
NOTE: I have been getting reports that enabling triple buffering in the Voodoo II control panel can cause freezing gameplay and jerky movement for some users. If you experience this, uncheck the box in your Voodoo II control panel. You can leave the gl_triplebuffer 1 in the autoexec.cfg. The check box in the Voodoo II control panel is the master over the gl_triplebuffer in the autoexec.cfg
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