elianda wrote:

Ok I tested the Laguna 3D AGP.
The card itself is more or less DirectX5 compliant.

They are really skating the edge of compliancy from what I've seen. I found driver v2.0 last night on DriverGuide, which is many revisions past what I tested before. It's from late 2000 and yet it still can't display most games anywhere near correct. Quake 2 still doesn't run (I didn't look to see if there is any OpenGL ICD).

Even the stuff that does work is iffy. Their version of bilinear is one nasty approximation of it, for example. And the weird texture warping / jittering is a sign of more hardware shortcuts.

You should post the 3DMark99 image quality test results.

The version 2.0 driver has a changelog included and they list loads of improvements for many revisions. I imagine that the chip is just broken and/or really poorly designed if it still is a disaster after this many driver revisions.

review moved to first post

I uploaded my Laguna 3D Screenshots here:
http://rapidshare.com/files/430696590/laguna3d.zip

Oh and I would like to have a file of the 2.0 drivers please 😀.

CL Laguna drivers v2.0
http://www.mediafire.com/file/03tmevuo7xywb16 … 5w98%20v2.0.zip

I'll add your shots to my slideshow. Now we have one giant collection of ugly Laguna imagery. 😁

Any hint on who made those 2.0 drivers ? Because latest official Cirrus Laguna 3D drivers seems to be 1.70. More info here:
546x: http://web.archive.org/web/20001215053700/htt … phics/546x.html
5465: http://web.archive.org/web/20010418113358/htt … phics/5465.html

From the readme it looks like they were programmed mainly in japan.

Yay! finally got my own Laguna 3D card. It'll make a nice addition to my personal card collection. Here is a pic for anyone interested:

Cirrus Logic Laguna 3D CL-GD5465 (1997)
Creative Graphics Blaster Eclipse PCI 4MB RDRAM PCI

unmei220 wrote:

Any hint on who made those 2.0 drivers ? Because latest official Cirrus Laguna 3D drivers seems to be 1.70.

The v2.0 drivers were made by that ISD Corp as well.

Just asked because their site claims they provided support for drivers until 1st Jan 2001, and the latest references point to v1.70 being the latest ones.

http://web.archive.org/web/20020402052735/htt … com/drivers.htm

review moved to first post

...I actually like that pixelated look 🤣 🤣 🤣

keropi wrote:

...I actually like that pixelated look 🤣 🤣 🤣

Actually way back in 1997, I ran a Voodoo1 and a Mystique 220. I would switch between them because the difference between the blurry Voodoo and the pixelated Mystique was quite interesting indeed.

I have a Millennium II and Mystique as well. Millennium II seems to be a bit more powerful, but the Mystique got much more support. It had a lot of trouble with games from 1998 and onwards though. I could never get Blood 2 to play correctly, I always got the white textures thingy. I've got to disagree with you on the speed as well, I don't think they were really that fast on 3D (2D was fantastic as always). I think Matrox tried hard with the G200 and did a pretty damn fine job with the G400. However, the Mystique was their first consumer product aimed at 3D gaming and I believe it was a let down. The clown on the box said it all.

Don't forget Matrox resorted to a 3rd party (PowerVR chip) for a 3D solution after the Mystique received so many bad reviews.

I initially had a Millennium II in my retro box but just didn't care for it, I switched to Virge.

It's also bad when Matrox also provides Mystique/Millenium drivers RIGHT ON THE MATROX M3D (POWERVR) CD as if it were an emergency driver supplement. They know it's a problem so they had to make sure you'd get their driver.

offtopic fact: there's powervr sgl lib/development headers on that disc bundled with a matrox driver by accident - these are extremely hard to find nowadays as powervr are still supersecret superclosed about even developers making stuff on their old obsolete APIs. Who knows, the secrecy is probably a huge contribution to their failure in the PC market. No wonder SGL support was so sparse!

sort of ontopic fact: PCX-2 users can force off the filtering if you enjoy the pixelated look. 😀

F2bnp wrote:

I've got to disagree with you on the speed as well, I don't think they were really that fast on 3D (2D was fantastic as always).

By fast, I meant it's faster than a Virge. 😁 Of course you also need to consider that it's not doing as many effects. So yeah Mystique and Millennium II are junk for 3D. No disagreement from me.

The Mystique was a great budget 2D card though. It has good signal quality and it's pretty fast. I'm not convinced that it really has clear cut advantages compared to the other cards though. Virge DX/GX are quite fast and I'm sure the ATI Rage cards were nice too. And they were cheap as well.

bushwack wrote:

I initially had a Millennium II in my retro box but just didn't care for it, I switched to Virge.

Millennium II was primarily a very expensive 2D card. You probably won't benefit from it unless you need extremely high resolutions. Most of the video cards I've got are great quality up to 1280x960.

Some of the worst cards are the Verite boards. Also I have a Intergraph Voodoo Rush that is really blurry.

ATi Rage? No way mate, the drivers on those things would have probably crippled the cards. Do you have any ATi Rage cards to try btw?

I ordered a Rage 128 last week 😁 I don't have any of the older chips though. I just haven't had any of the Rage cards come into my possession and I haven't wanted to pay for them.

I did have a free notebook around earlier this year with a Rage Pro and I found it similar to a Riva 128 / Voodoo1.

I also have a Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro coming (Permedia 2). Very cheap ebay acquisitions are fun.

Oddly enough I have some Rage stuff:

3D Rage II AGP
Rage Pro AGP (With bonus memory expansion and TV tuner!)
Laptop with Rage Mobility M1 which wiki says is based off the Rage 128.

I can try them out with a few things and drop them into a new thread if you guys want.

If you want to put them in here that's cool too. It would be great to see this thread turn into something like the giant sound card thread with lots of info from everybody.

Maybe try to post something in the same format as I did for the other cards I've tested out. I tried to make the posts uniform.