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The 3dfx Voodoo1

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Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#161

Post by vgoh1 »

I collect vintage electronics, mostly computers and gaming consoles. The Voodoo cards are considered quite collectable because of their GLIDE API. There is a decent stack of games that will ONLY run on Voodoo cards, or will only support Voodoo natively, which matters to a lot of collectors. Back then, a good eye could sometimes identify a card just by looking at the game. For one, for a brief period, games were only made to run on specific cards, so you could narrow it down just by what game is playing. Also, the artifacts would give them each a different look. Some were grainy, washed out, etc. The Voodoo 1 cards would stand out by the artifact that I can only describe as what looked like faint artificial scan lines.

They are really special cards, and two of my vintage computers were built around a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2, meaning, I started with the cards, and knew I had to build a PC to run them optimally.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#162

Post by josteink »

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…

> and most if not all of your existing hardware and software would continue to work unchanged

It’s funny how backwards compatibility back then allowed us to have massive progress, by making gradual steps forward possible.

These days, where we are seeing less and less real progress, we now hear many programmers claiming we have to sacrifice and shed backwards compatibility if we want further progress. (I’m looking at you Apple and Google!)

Something is very very backwards. And yes, an upgrade may no longer be an actual upgrade.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#163

Post by tntn »

ryacko wrote: post #137
Crinus wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenGL games should run fine, some old games that used static sized buffers to hold extensions (like all Quake/Quake2 games that dump the available extension string to the console and the console having a hardcoded buffer for each line) will crash it because of how long the extension string is nowadays, but most drivers have an option to limit the string size (AFAIK Nvidia and AMD drivers check the executable name an…

Software rendering will only be slow until everyone has manycore processors with SIMD. The die area of threadripper isn’t far from a GPU’s die area.

(Hi Larabee)

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#164

Post by mathw »

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 part, physics happened.

Pesky universal laws! I want my faster-than-light spaceships and decreasing entropy!

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#165

Post by TorKlingberg »

rasz wrote: post #54
tom_ wrote: post #18

My claim to fame is that the only Voodoo card I've ever owned was a Voodoo 5 6000. I picked it up in the early 2000s during a pre-closure clearout at my then-employer, a UK video games developer. The sheer size of the thing made me LOL, that and the number of fans and the additional power connector. Then I noticed it was a 3dfx - oh, hey! I could play that Glide-based motorbike game, that I remembered enjoying at a f…

at least you didnt throw away Voodoo5 9000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3iHV0NvLPI

I almost thought someone has de-soldered 32 Voodoo5 chips of old cards and made an entire new giant card to hold them.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#166

Post by dwater »

Zenst wrote: post #30

My flatmate owned a Voodoo2, was impressive though the market soon caught up and and when the following year I did get myself a 3500, after a month I sold it and got a Matrox G400Max as it did the 3D level I needed (more so the less demanding games of the time). But more so, the colour gamut was so much sharper and stood out on a CRT of the time. I was curious so I had a dig on the specs to relive the decision of the…

I graduated from high school in 1999 and worked at a big box computer store during the spring and summer. I remember when the demo machines with the Voodoo3 3500 and TNT2 Ultras hitting the floor and all of us employees crowding around before the store opened to watch the demos, and endless hours spent arguing about which was better.

I saved up money to build my first computer that summer and chose a Creative 3D Blaster TNT2 Ultra, paired with an Abit BX6 motherboard, a Pentium 3 450 CPU, 256MB of RAM, a white box Sound Blaster Live, a 3Com Etherlink XL, a US Robotics 56K modem, generic 40x CDROM drive plus a CDRW drive, and I want to say an 8GB Western Digital hard drive, connected to a 19" monitor that was so big I had to pull my desk away from the wall to fit my Model M keyboard. It was pretty much perfect, except for the fact that technology was improving so quickly then that I started feeling the need to upgrade it in 6 months.

That fall I went to college and hooked it up to the university's broadband connection. I probably got my money's worth in all the hours I spent on that machine. It definitely gave me a sense of wonder and power to have something top of the line. I spent countless hours playing Half Life multiplayer, Team Fortress, and then Counter-Strike beta. I don't know if I'd do it again, but I had a great time back then.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#167

Post by degenerate »

smcl wrote: post #129
ablation wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 & lightin…

My first card was a GeForce 2 MX, after seeing countless ads in every PC mag for the Voodoo's which were too far out of reach for my piggy bank.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#168

Post by reacweb »

Crinus wrote: post #160
userbinator wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On windows 10, I was unable to install "Flight Simulator 2004" that I bought in 2007. Have you tried to install Word 6 (mid 90s) or visual studio 1.52 on windows 10 ?

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#169

Post by smcl »

degenerate wrote: post #167
smcl wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 & lightin…

My first card was a GeForce 2 MX, after seeing countless ads in every PC mag for the Voodoo's which were too far out of reach for my piggy bank.

Good choice. I really feel for anyone who plumped for a V5 over a Geforce 2 MX - that must have been painful

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#170

Post by jonplackett »

I wanted a 3DFX card so bad in 1998 but I'd already convinced my dad to pay extra for a Matrox Mystique 3D card (which didn't support openGL) and he just couldn't get his head around why i now also needed another 3D card add-on. Even seeing the names of all those cards brings back so many memories.
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