I love my Voodoo 5500. My CUV4X uses VIA 694X chipset. Everything I have runs really well together.
I have tried all of the drivers on the internet. In the end, they all just mix and match the dlls from previous 3dfx official releases. For speed, stability, and compatibility, nothing works better for me than the 3dfx 1.04.01 Beta (more compatible with DirectX8 than any other release). Voodoo seems to like Win98 better than 2000. It doesn't like XP at all since it uses a driver set made by M$ that strips it of the outstanding OpenGL/Glide support and replaces it with a DirectX OpenGL wrapper at the price of speed, image quality, and compatibility. Supposedly, the online community has mixed and matched drivers to get it working almost as good as Win98/Win2000.
The only compatibility problems I have had in Win98SE are with 2 games: Warbirds III and X-planes. Both use some sort of DirectX 8 calls to draw terrain and clouds that is not supported properly by the Voodoo driver. Aces High, DeusEx, Max Payne, Operation Flashpoint, Battle of Britain, Mig Alley, all the Jane's sims, Starfleet Command, and all of the latest demos run fast and look much better than any other card I have seen (though the IL-2 demo runs too slow for my taste with any decent graphics settings).
For comparison, the framerate in AH at 1024 x 768 with x2 FSAA is actually 5 to 10 fps slower than the GeForce2 MX400 on the 933 MHz Dell computer at school at the same resolution with no FSAA (60 to 65 fps vs 70 fps). The Voodoo also slows down alot more around smoke and other terrain (dips as low as 35 fps compared to the GF2MX's 50 fps). However, for the price of a few fps, the image quality is unbelievable. Even at x4 FSAA, the GF2 image looks worse than the Voodoo with no FSAA, and the GF2 pays quite a few fps to run FSAA at all.
P.S. LePaul, the Voodoo 5500 interacts a lot with the CPU especially since it doesn't do hardware T&L, which results in the Voodoo's performance scaling with the processor speed. For you, that is a big disadvantage since you only have a PIII 550. I jumped from 40 fps to 60 fps by going from a PIII 650 / 100 to the PIII 1000 / 133. Those with highend Athlons get peformance that solidly challenges the fastest of the GF2 cards. The online community experts think the Voodoo 5500 will finally stop scaling and become a bottleneck to CPUs somewhere between 2 and 3 GHz. My dad's computer is also a PIII 1000 / 133 with a Voodoo 5500 almost identical to my setup, but his motherboard is a PCChips micro atx and you cannot jumper out the built-in AGP video (though I disabled it in the Windows device manager). It gets only half of the fps my system gets in AH (about 30 to 35 fps) using all the same drivers and settings. So I am wondering if your motherboard is the source of your problem. My brothers 600 Celeron and Voodoo 4500 gets at least 20 to 25 fps!
I am hoping NVidia will mix its legendary GeForce speed with the 3dfx technology to produce a card worthy of replacing my Voodoo. Until someone has equal or better image quality or I find games I like that aren't supported or run too slow, I am not giving the Voodoo up.
