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The 3dfx Voodoo1

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Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#121

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

mpalfrey wrote: post #116

I had a Voodoo Banshee (combined 2d/3d card). It wasn't as good as a V2 but was OK for me back in the day. I then moved to NVidia predominantly (TNT2 Ultra), although I did pick up a cheap V5 5500 which I ran for a bit. Like other's have said, it was a fun time to be involved with PC gaming. Unfortunately life has got in the way since, although I do spend time on Vogons looking at old systems and wondering if I shoul…

You definitely should. I have a 486 DX4/100 running DOS / Win3.1 and a Slot A Athlon 650MHz with a GeForce MX440 running 98. So much fun reliving my youth in DOOM, Red Alert, and Half-Life!

If you need justification you can tell yourself that these machines will only go up in value. Works for me ;)

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#122

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

skocznymroczny wrote: post #92
p0rkbelly wrote: post #80

Playing Unreal and coming out of the spaceship at 800x600 on my voodoo2 and 400mhz Pentium II (I was spoiled and got the !2MB version!!!) was still one of the greatest gaming moments of my life

Coming out of the spaceship never did it for me, but the intro in the menu did.

I remember firing up the game just to sit and watch that intro run. Good times.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#123

Post by nothanksmydude »

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…

The best/worst example of buyer's remorse I've ever had was saving up all summer to buy a Voodoo 3, having to make a deal with my parents because I still didn't have enough, only to realize entirely too late that by the time I had gotten one it was already outdated.

Honestly you could go all the way back to 2010 or so. Zen, Zen+, and especially Zen 2 are the most exciting things to happen since Sandy Bridge.

Intel fucked up big time, not only did they let moore's law die, but they repeatedly suppresed one of the only companies capable of carrying the torch further

Edit: before anyone event thinks of trying to reply defending intel, I suggest you look into the increasingly common reports of internal hubris being the core cause of many of their failures. They failed to realize this themselves until they tried pitching customers features that competetors had already sold and were shipping!!

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#124

Post by SmellyGeekBoy »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #85
rasz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afaik there is no CPU where software Quake would run faster at same resolution as GLQuake on 3dfx.

and an actual CPU ? I think that running at 3 GHz would help a lot.

It's not just about "running faster". GL adds a lot of shinyness over and above the software renderer.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#125

Post by pornel »

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…

In more recent years the same thing happened in mobile phones and tablets, and then watches.

In 5-year spans they all had 10x increase in power, from toy single-core CPUs and GPUs that barely moved pixels on screen, to proper multi-core CPUs and GPUs that would rival your laptop of only they had more thermal headroom.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#126

Post by pjmlp »

I was quite sad to exchange my newly bought 3dfx card by a NVidia TNT one due to PCI connection issues on my motherboard, specially since I was looking forward to play with Glide.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#127

Post by augustl »

therealmarv wrote: post #83
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…

At least the newest better 4 core Macbook Pro 13" are now beating the 2015 15" MBP in raw CPU power. I'm looking at (only) CPU benchmarks the recent years and for me it seems Intel was pretty much sleeping from around 2013-2017... maybe it was also their internal problems with going to 11nm and also lack of competition! I think Intel could have stepped up their no. of cores with low thermal CPUs a lot sooner. The las…

I just got a 2 core Macbook Pro 13, because that's the only fast mac you can get today without a touchbar. I'm just not sufficiently pragmatic to spend any money on one of those horrible touch screen keyboards.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#128

Post by pjmlp »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #119
santoshalper wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR has been a wet fart compared to 3d graphics. Tons of hype but very little progress and almost no broader impact on the technology or games industry.

Not sure why you've been so heavily downvoted, perhaps there are a lot of people here working in the field. It definitely seems the case that the average consumer couldn't care less about it, however. VR is the new 3D TV.

People were already trying to play Doom on the first iteractions of VR headsets during the mid-90's.

I don't believe it ever become a real thing.

AR on the other hand, has quite a few interesting industrial applications.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#129

Post by smcl »

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'.

My recollection as a nerdy teenager who had a Voodoo 3 at the time. The Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5 series were highly hyped and anticipated and after the success of 1, 2 and 3 this kinda made sense. They were quite delayed however and before they made it to market they were slightly blindsided by the NVidia's release of the Geforce 256, which was (iirc) the first graphics card which had its own onboard transform & lighting support, which when supported gave an insane performance bump. In the end the Voodoo 4/5s were released late, board + driver quality was supposedly not great and the range of cards was far less than originally promised (only the low end Voodoo 4 4500 and upper-middle Voodoo 5 5500 were released, the lower-mid range Voodoo5 5000 and ambitious top-end 6000 never saw light of day). Performance wasn't great either, it was generally slower than the G256 even in games that didn't utilise the G256's T&L unit. Then shortly after NVidia released the Geforce 2 series (I ended up getting a Geforce 2 MX, which was insane for the price) which was so far ahead of 3dfx's offerings it wasn't even funny.

Hope I remembered this rightly but I really remember that Geforce 256 being so much better it was like night and day. I stopped playing PC games when I went to university around the Geforce 3 era, so that's when my knowledge of the topic drops off a cliff :D

edit: and now I reached the end of the article it seems Fabien has said exactly this! Note to self: read first then comment

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#130

Post by Crinus »

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.

The only success the drivers had were the lock-in they created to the hardware with Glide, which itself was a thin layer on the underlying hardware. Many games used Direct3D or OpenGL without Glide support and worked just fine.

Hell, Quake itself was written on miniGL which was a subset of an abstraction layer built (IIRC) on top of Glide.

And really, OpenGL at the time was simple too. [Check this OpenGL 1.1 reference](http://www.talisman.org/opengl-1.1/Reference.html) which also includes GLU and GLX function and even with those, the number of calls is very small.

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