Quake 3 Tweak Arena - Voodoo 3 Overclocker

This is in fact a very useful program for your Voodoo 3 2000 / 3000 / 3500. It doesn't just let you overclock your Voodoo but also lets you turn off VSYNC and set your own refresh rates and Video filters. As a guideline, I have set my Voodoo 3 3000 PCI to 175 MHZ with no additional cooling. This is as far as I would take it without a fan of some sort. This program is readily available as Freeware off of the web and you can find it in my Downloads section.

Overclocking a graphics card is most noticable when running in high resolutions, as the extra Mhz really help performance. I myself run in 800x600, and I found minor speed increase when setting the core clock frequency from 166Mhz to 175Mhz. More serious overclocking (and thus performance) can only be achieved by fitting a heatsink, or preferably a CPU fan attached to the card to keep it cool.

As for the other settings, I would tick the "Use high quality video" tab in both the Direct 3D and GLide selection tab, and definately place a tick on the VSYNC settings. VSYNC (vertical syncronisation) can kill many of your games, and for Quake 3, also induce slight input lag. It will also limit your maximum FPS to the refresh rate of your monitor. The "high quality" setting improves image quality slightly, and had no noticable impact on performance on my machine. Try it and see if it harms FPS in any way.

3dfx have secretly added some special advanced tools in their new set of drivers. They give you the option to overclock your Voodoo, and to disable VSYNC in Direct3D and OpenGL / GLide! The advanced tools can only be accessed by editing your registry. Find this reg folder:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\3dfx Interactive\3dfx Tools\Installed\Tools\{AB040305-8AA1-11D2-8DD1-00104BB5EAD6}

Now find the key "Complete Registration" and modify this so that it is 1 instead of 0. Now reboot, and you can then select the new options from the advanced display settings. Unfortunately, I believe this only applies to Win9x owners, and will not work on Win2k.

EDIT: Its seems that this technique only works with the 1.04.09 driver sets.