Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The 3dfx Voodoo1

fabiensanglard.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 241 posts

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#151

Post by smcl »

pjmlp wrote: post #128
SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the Wolfenstein 3D black book, written by the author of this article actually, there's even mention of a company trying to do this with Wolfenstein 3D

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#152

Post by matwood »

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…

> When I first saw 3dfx graphics, I knew it was the dawn of a new era.

I came to write the exact same thing. It was gaming pre-Voodoo 1 and post. The difference was so striking - like going from SD TV to HD.

Most hardware I've purchased has been evolutionary. It's not often I bought something and verbally said 'holy shit' like I did with the Voodoo 1 card.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#153

Post by jorvi »

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…

> That Haswell based machine was getting long in the tooth even back then.

2015 models run on Broadwell and even today the one I use runs everything quite zippy.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#154

Post by shdon »

saluki wrote: post #65

How about the Voodoo3 with the giant blue dongle?

The Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP? I had one of those (after a Voodoo 1 and a Voodoo Banshee) and it was a huge disappointment to me. The whole thing seemed terribly unstable. Heat issues? driver bugs? hardware conflicts? I could never figure it out.

On a side note, that blue cable was so incredibly stiff you could probably club somebody over the head with it and it still wouldn't bend.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#155

Post by jbarciauskas »

ernst_klim wrote: post #118
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…

Nothing. Staff moved fast on a PC market, which was affected by the transition from PC being a mere toys to serious devices. These voodoo boards were a mere joke in comparison to what SGI could provide, so the PC market was catching up, hence it moved fast through the well trodden path. I mean, all these voodoo and nvidia guys already worked for SGI or similar companies and just brought to the PC market the technolog…

"Just", as if taking tech from a $4,000 card and making it available for $400 isn't an enormous feat of engineering!

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#156

Post by shdon »

shereadsthenews wrote: post #35

Maybe it was the voodoo 2, but I seem to recall that 3dfx cards could render into a chroma-keyed window, not just full screens. In any case the main problem with them was they made your 2D desktop look like junk for the 99% of the time you were not playing Quake, due to the extra analog-digital-analog conversion.

This was done my some MPEG decoder cards, like the Sigma Designs RealMagic. The Voodoo didn't process the input VGA signal itself in any way. Image quality suffered slightly simply because the signal had to travel further and through a few more components, but there was no significant degradation of the kind you describe.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#157

Post by DiabloD3 »

NL807 wrote: post #150
DiabloD3 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

What's the RTX debacle about? Bit out of the loop.

They tried to sell functionality that isn't good at raytracing for raytracing, and hardware that has a 4x4 matrix ALU as a tensor unit for AI, but it isn't big/powerful enough for existing AI frameworks to take advantage of in normal usage (nor should a desktop-oriented card have such a thing).

... and then they enabled their raytracing API on GTX 1000 series cards, after repeatedly telling them it requires the hardware acceleration that RTX 2000 series cards have. Not only that, it didn't perform all that badly.

So yeah, that new Radeon series is looking mighty nice right now.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#158

Post by userbinator »

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…

As manufacturers continue to make increasingly questionable design choices, it's natural that users will become hesitant. You can get a possibly not-that-much-faster system, at the risk of losing functionality that has worked for a long time.

In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3.

...and most if not all of your existing hardware and software would continue to work unchanged, in addition you got new features. I remember going from a 233MHz Pentium to a 2.4GHz P4 and pretty much everything was the same, just faster. The situation isn't so clear now.

To summarise, with the 90s to early 2000s each upgrade really was an upgrade. Now, not so much.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#159

Post by z3phyr »

pornel wrote: post #125
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.

Mobile phones still come with pretty limited operating systems though. I can't seriously shift my local home server [running on a beat up old 4GB ram intel computer, with various kinds of heavy duty services] to my 8GB mid-upper range android phone, even with turmux.

Also, I can't turn my stock mobile into a good desktop like environment, given I have a big screen. I work with LLVM and Haskell, with Emacs or VSCode [lately], with some Blender3D mixed in.

My phone was not built for this. It is a purely consumer device.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#160

Post by Crinus »

userbinator wrote: post #158
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…

As manufacturers continue to make increasingly questionable design choices, it's natural that users will become hesitant. You can get a possibly not-that-much-faster system, at the risk of losing functionality that has worked for a long time. In the same timeframe, we went from a 200 MHz Pentium MMX to a 1 GHz Pentium 3. ...and most if not all of your existing hardware and software would continue to work unchanged, i…

I'm not sure what you have in mind... generally speaking Windows software keeps working. PCs aren't speeding up much anymore, but what functionality is lost? I can still run (and i do run) software from the mid and late 90s on the Windows 10 PC i bought four months ago.
Post reply on HN