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The 3dfx Voodoo1

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Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#101

Post by ryacko »

sprash wrote: post #95

The main reason for the success of 3dfx were drivers that let you talk to bare metal hardware registers instead of dozens of GL abstraction layers. The simplicity of it all is very impressive. This is something programmers absoluteley love. Hence many games supported it and it was very easy to write drivers. Maybe it is time to reimplenent the glide interface in an FPGA ang make a super powered Voodoo card.

I miss software rendering, games with that as an option are the only old games that still run on modern PCs.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#102

Post by DiabloD3 »

ablation wrote: post #98
rayiner wrote: post #16

It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the to…

What was the 4/5 debacle? Owned a 2 myself, loved it, but then totally drifted out of the PC gaming and graphics card 'scene'.

Didn't coordinate with game developers, and tried to pitch a fixed function effects pipeline (the T buffer) when shaders were coming into existence.

Ironically, we've now looped back, and do pretty t-buffer-esque usage with modern DX11/DX12 pipelines.

One of the simplest functions of the T-buffer was to do temporal AA using a fixed function supersampler but also do integration over several frames, which didn't come into being in a modern AAA title until Doom 2016.

For a technology invented in 1999, 3DFx was too ahead of their time.

For a modern example, imagine if the RTX debacle of current gen Geforces destroyed the entire company. Nvidia backed down and released the 16xx series cards, 3DFx went bankrupt instead while everyone else was releasing the 16xx equivalent of that time period (early Nvidia and ATI cards).

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#103

Post by ido »

ablation wrote: post #98
rayiner wrote: post #16

It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the to…

What was the 4/5 debacle? Owned a 2 myself, loved it, but then totally drifted out of the PC gaming and graphics card 'scene'.

as the article mentions they were not competitive with Nvidia's (and ATI's) offerings.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#104

Post by eecc »

taneq wrote: post #71
docker_up wrote: post #69

When I first saw 3dfx graphics, I knew it was the dawn of a new era. I bought thousands of dollars in stock in the company. I lost it all because unfortunately nVidia ate their lunch because they marketed themselves better. They had full 32-bit color vs 3dfx who had the superior technology but only had 16 or 24 bit color. 3DFX spent a lot of time trying to explain why it didn't matter but in the end it did. It matter…

32-bit colour is still just 24-bit colour with 8 bits of stencil or whatever (or at least was back when 3dfx was relevant). The only company I know of that was doing higher bit depths was Matrox who had 10-bit colour iirc. I remember back in the day "serious gamers would never use a combined 2D/3D card". Then nVidia came out with their Riva chipset and suddenly 2D graphics cards weren't really a thing any more.

I had a Riva 128, what a piece of crap it was... I used to assemble gaming boxes for friends and delaying delivery a day or two to take a ride on the Dual Voodoo setups.

Edit: well, according to Wikipedia it was somewhat competitive although drivers and support for rendering stacks was erratic for a while. I guess that’s what soured me up, and I was probably too n00b to have a clue

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#105

Post by kayamon »

docker_up wrote: post #69

When I first saw 3dfx graphics, I knew it was the dawn of a new era. I bought thousands of dollars in stock in the company. I lost it all because unfortunately nVidia ate their lunch because they marketed themselves better. They had full 32-bit color vs 3dfx who had the superior technology but only had 16 or 24 bit color. 3DFX spent a lot of time trying to explain why it didn't matter but in the end it did. It matter…

There were many reasons why nvidia won, but a higher bit-depth wasn't one of them.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#106

Post by amelius »

blt wrote: post #21
rayiner wrote: post #16

It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the to…

we hit the energy per mm^2 limit.

More importantly, we reached the point where the average consumer can do most of the things they need a PC for.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#108

Post by anthony_doan »

rayiner wrote: post #16

It’s crazy how fast stuff moved back then. Voodoo 1, to Voodoo 2 (both hits) to Voodoo 3 (meh), to Voodoo 4/5 (debacle), to bankruptcy was less than 4 years. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the to…

> What’s happened since 2015, by contrast? Many people still swear by their 2015 MBPs, the last model before the touchbar debacle. That Haswell based machine was getting long in the tooth even back then.

Moore's law broke. GHz and those low hanging fruits are gone. I'm using a 2013 MBP. It's a core race now but lots of legacy software that aren't coded for multicore.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#109

Post by ismail »

jaequery wrote: post #87

Someone start a Quake hackernews LAN party! Gosh I miss the Rocket Arena / TF days!

Count me in for this, good times. Carting your massive box + monitor To a buddies house and then playing lan games all day!

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#110

Post by fabiensanglard »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #15
julianlam wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... generated? It's just HTML.

I would be quite surprised if Fabien's website HTML was completely hand-written. The site does seem to run some PHP scripts. http://fabiensanglard.net/appleTechTalk2009/index.php

I have a php script inserting the header and footer. There is also a php function that accumulate references and prints them at the end.

Apart from that, it is all hand-written HTML, these is no CMS.

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