BTS, The new Voodoo 5 for Mac looks like crap

[pritzl]

This is just a warning to everyone out there that the rave drivers that come with the voodoo 5 don't improve anything over the voodoo 3. They still suck and CM looks awful. You're better off sticking with the ATI card that ships with your mac. If a card can't make CM look right, I'm not interested in it. Lets hope the Radeon has rave drivers.

To Steve or Charles, are you guys planning on updating CM to support Open GL on the Mac?

pritzl

[Guest Big Time Software]

I think that the V5-Mac drivers that ship with the card have a bug, but you can download new ones from 3dfx.com that work better.

No plans to move to Mac OpenGL right now, but I'm sure we'll do it eventually.

Charles

[pford]

from : http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/archives/aug00/080800.html#S10173

Voodoo5 1.01 Driver Update:

Bryan Speece of 3dfx notes there's an update to the Voodoo5 drivers and ROM:

" We just posted v1.0.1 of the Mac V5 drivers. They're not officially posted in the normal area of the website. Rather users should upgrade through the button in the About Box of the 3dfx MacTools Control Panel. Then follow the instructions that will walk them through - including the flashing of their ROM's.

Mainly a few bug fixes. No big optimizations yet. For instance, v1.0.1 solves the problem with slow resolution switching on older non-DDC-compliant monitors, etc.

-Bryan "

[pritzl]

Thanks Charles and pford for the responses.

The voodoo 5 still does not support translucent buildings or smoke, but at least the game is now functionally playable.

I do hope they get the rest of those things fixed though as my supposedly inferior ATI Rage 128 is still a better card for Combat Mission. With CM out, the rest of my games just don't seem all that interesting anymore so I don't care how the voodoo 5 makes them look.

[pford]

You may want to e-mail baboon2 with the specifics of your problems with the Voodoo 5 card. He wrote the RAVE code or at least a large part of it. It was my understanding that the Voodoo 5 card would run CM with everything.

BTW, if you are not getting any smoke, try hitting the shift-I key several times to scroll through the smoke display. There have been time I was wondering why I was not getting any smoke only to discover I had turned it off previously. Evidently CM keeps track of this in its preference file.

[Baboon2]

Here's the deal with the Voodoo 5.

As soon as you install it, you should use the 3dfx Tools control panel to update your drivers. The ones available NOW fix the bug where all the textures are converted to 8-bits.

The only known bug is that transparent triangles are sorted in the wrong order. This has already been fixed and will be available in the next driver update, which will also have a 50% speed improvement in RAVE.

[Grim]

baboon2 wrote

>Later, it will be retrofitted to support the Voodoo3 and will probably be part of the b13 release.

and

>But the Voodoo5 has complete Combat Mission support. In a few weeks, 3dfx will roll this into new Voodoo3 drivers.

Please, please, please tell me that I'm not dreaming! I don't give two hoots whether the much anticipated b13 drivers support anything else, but I'm just dying to get hardware rendering for CM out of my VooDoo3.

Guys on the MacVoodoo forum say that V5 drivers work for some things with the V3 card/ROM, but in my own incompetent way I can't get it to happen for CM :-(

But if I read you aright, it may only be weeks before my V3 will be churning out 1024x768 goodness! Can it be true?