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My first 3D accelerator was a Voodoo2, first used on Quake 2. The cast light from the moving rocket on the floor is unforgettable.
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
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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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"Just", as if taking tech from a $4,000 card and making it available for $400 isn't an enormous feat of engineering!
It's not a $4,000 card tho. Full SGI workstations cost from $4000 to $11000 (and this is with a display and software) [1]. This was a primitive texturing accelerator without T&L, without 2D, just a texturing unit. $400 was even a high price for it. [1] https://hsto.org/files/c34/cb5/939/c34cb59393e04c77af072be74...
The ones that were impressive were the ones that might have been $20k+.
At the time the Voodoo came out the run of the mill SGI workstations did not come with any of the advanced 3D graphics capabilites. Certainly nothing that blew you away. They did stuff like wireframe or unshaded 3D CAD and stuff like that, they had working OpenGL well before a PC did.
But the stuff that blew you away was stuff like the Onyx. Those blew me away when I saw them in the mid 1990s when SGI came to recruit where I went to school. They were $100k+ a year or two before the Voodoo came out.
There were other things they did that was way ahead of their time. I had an Indy for my workstation in 1996 at an internship. It had a webcam that could shoot stills or videos and do some basic video chat. In 1996. People used to fill up the hard drives with video cause hard drives were still so small. Irix had a really nice X Windows UI in the mid 1990s when Linux and the other commercial Unix variants had terrible UIs.
My first 3D accelerator was a Voodoo2, first used on Quake 2. The cast light from the moving rocket on the floor is unforgettable.
The difference from software-rendered Quake 2 to hardware rendering was massive, not least because of the colored lighting. In some places, it definitely bordered on overkill.
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I think the equivalent of the Voodoo in the soundcards-space would've been the Gravis Ultrasound. In both the evolutionary and soon-to-be-forgotten sense. PC Speaker vs. Soundblaster is more EGA vs VGA, something much more profound. And beneficiary to the gaming space, as opposed to early 3D, which basically ruined all the things for quite a while...
Not even close. PC Speaker vs Soundblaster is Hercules (monochrome) vs VGA. You could never go back, same as 3dfx. GUS was better than sb pro/sb 16 but a lot of games didn't take advantage of it and once AWE32/64 arrived, GUS was dead in the water.
And yeah, I knew that the GUS only enjoyed a very short-lived popularity, just like Voodoo cards when the Geforces etc. showed up. Okay, maybe the popularity at its height wasn't quite equal, but the next 3D fads are quite a few steps down (e.g. PowerVR or the first Matroxes).
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People act like portables are the only machines that exist. Any Mac user who needed 'real power' moved to an iMac (or even an iMac Pro) when they outgrew their 15" BMP
Aren't those still glorified laptops in another form factor?