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The 3dfx Voodoo1

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Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#201

Post by rasz »

JohnBooty wrote: post #134
djmips wrote: post #67

I was the lead and pretty much only programmer for the Canopus Pure3D. Ours had 12 RAM chips for 6 MB of memory. 2 MB extra Woo hoo! We also featured a Chrontel chip for composite and S-Video output. I wrote our DirectX driver (performance enhancements) and other sundry software for the Pure3D (pictured) and Pure3D II. Pretty cool to think back on those days.

Hah! That is super cool. I think about that card from time to time. The extra 2MB made me feel badass, though I'm not sure any games actually used it, did they? The Pure3D and Pure3D II were the first and last times I ever owned best-in-class graphics hardware. The Rendition-based card I owned previously wasn't half bad, but those early voodoo cards were really revolutionary.

At least one did, "Ultimate Race Pro (3dfx Glide) played in 800x600 resolution with Z-Buffer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb4yajgcLA8

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#202

Post by ido »

CoryOndrejka wrote: post #198

Oh, memories. We built a custom arcade board based on SLI Voodoo1, mips r5k, and custom jpeg decompression in hardware to do Magic the Gathering: Armageddon. https://youtu.be/cci5l21aMss We wanted to run at highrez (640x480 vga) at 60hz with tons of animating sprites on screen and realized nothing had the fill rate we needed. Rather than changing the game design, we kept looking and met the 3Dfx team when they had ba…

Interesting! I didn't realise SLI was available before the Voodoo2.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#203

Post by ben7799 »

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…

Yes for sure.. I had a 75mhz machine in 1995-1996, got a 200mhz machine in 1997, and then built a 1Ghz machine in 1999.

It was an absolutely wild ride! Each machine back then was dramatically dramatically faster than the previous one. It wasn't like today where you'd need a stopwatch to tell. You went from being unable to do something to it being possible.

By 2000 we had most of what we have today other than tons of video available everywhere. In 1990 we were still using DOS and character cell graphics most places. No CD ROM, 10mhz machines, no connectivity other than modems. Lots of people still had monochrome displays in 1990, memory was 640k/1MB/2MB in the early 1990s, hard drives were 100GB, etc.. 3D graphics was a thing, good video capabilities, high res desktops.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#204

Post by Crinus »

reacweb wrote: post #186
keypusher wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of good reasons to bash Microsoft, but 'lack of backwards compatibility' just isn't one of them. If anything, I think their obsession with backwards compatibility drove a lot of compromised design decisions at that company.

History of Microsoft is very long. Backwards compatibility was excellent until windows XP (included). This focus on compatibility has largely disappeared in more recent versions. I am not bashing Microsoft. I love visual studio code. I love the fact that I can edit office documents (powerpoint and word) for free using chrome on ubuntu. Maybe the work Microsoft is doing on Windows Subsystem for Linux will make me come…

Why do you think backwards compatibility dropped? Just recently they decided to not build newer versions of .NET Framework on top of .NET Core (even though they have open sourced practically everything on .NET) to ensure that older programs built on .NET Framework will keep working and wont face issues from any incompatibility with .NET Core.

IMO they are making their life a lot harder by introducing all those frameworks and platforms every five years or so, but despite that they still make sure that stuff keeps working.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#205

Post by shawnz »

reacweb wrote: post #186
keypusher wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of good reasons to bash Microsoft, but 'lack of backwards compatibility' just isn't one of them. If anything, I think their obsession with backwards compatibility drove a lot of compromised design decisions at that company.

History of Microsoft is very long. Backwards compatibility was excellent until windows XP (included). This focus on compatibility has largely disappeared in more recent versions. I am not bashing Microsoft. I love visual studio code. I love the fact that I can edit office documents (powerpoint and word) for free using chrome on ubuntu. Maybe the work Microsoft is doing on Windows Subsystem for Linux will make me come…

It seems like you're talking about the fact that they dropped 16-bit compatibility in 64-bit editions. XP was the first consumer version of Windows with 64-bit support so that timeline would fit. There were various significant technical challenges which caused them to drop 16-bit support in 64-bit Windows and I don't think it's fair to imply that they lost their focus on backwards compatibility just because of that one regression.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#206

Post by graycrow »

time0ut wrote: post #177
LeonM wrote: post #113

Oh man, nostalgia levels through the roof! I remember buying my first 3D 'accelerator card' as they were called back then. It was a Voodoo Banshee card. The Banshee had an onboard 2D video chip, so it didn't have the VGA passthrough cable. I bought the card at a trade show (the Dutch audience here will remember the 'HCC dagen'). That's where you could buy them cheap. Not sure if it was actually cheaper, internet wasn…

Ya, this brings back some memories. I also had a Voodoo Banshee. I put it in my AMD K6-2 with 192MB of RAM. This was right around when Windows 98 came out. My friends all had similar rigs. We were on the quest for max frame rate in Halflife, TF1, and original CS. It was a different time back then.

192MB of RAM in 1998? Back then it cost a fortune, I had just 16MB.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#207

Post by Gravityloss »

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…

Moore's law ended around 2015 or so.

Maybe software efficiency might start to matter again at some point.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#208

Post by rasz »

ZoomStop wrote: post #145
LeonM wrote: post #113

Oh man, nostalgia levels through the roof! I remember buying my first 3D 'accelerator card' as they were called back then. It was a Voodoo Banshee card. The Banshee had an onboard 2D video chip, so it didn't have the VGA passthrough cable. I bought the card at a trade show (the Dutch audience here will remember the 'HCC dagen'). That's where you could buy them cheap. Not sure if it was actually cheaper, internet wasn…

Remember clearly buying my Voodoo Banshee from Babbage's for $250 USD. My high school girlfriend at the time was so annoyed that I would spend so much on something so strange at the time. GLQuake blew my mind, but I was just trying to get Daggerfall to run acceptable more than anything at that point, and run it did.

You probably meant Redguard, Daggerfall sadly lacked any 3d acceleration support.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#209

Post by Crinus »

tntn wrote: post #163
ryacko wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Whenever i re-read Tom Forsyth's (who worked on it) article about Larrabee [1], i facepalm hard at Intel's decision to drop it. It is one of the few cases where i really wanted to put my hands on that sort of hardware. An essentially standalone manycore CPU on a PCI express form that is running FreeBSD or Linux, with a bit of graphics specific functionality that doubles as a video card and you can fully program like a PC?

I have "I WANT! I WANT! I WANT!" signs blinking in my head as i type this :-P.

(facepalm mainly because i wanted it, i do not know the economical details)

Funny enough, the Forsyth's (and another one from another team member i do not remember now) article sold me more on Larrabee than any PR speak Intel made.

[1] http://tomforsyth1000.github.io/blog.wiki.html#%5B%5BWhy%20d...

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#210

Post by glenneroo »

influx wrote: post #174
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…

The last time I was able to feel that same rush was replacing spinning hdd with ssd.

Wait until you upgrade your "normal" (SATA) SSD with an M.2 version - the speed jump is similar.
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