31–40 of 241 posts
I remember the first time someone told me about a card that you could put in your computer that would make quake run faster. It sounded so strange and exotic. Then I saw the screen caps with all their anti aliased glory and was devastated that I could never afford it on a movie theater clerk's salary.
Blast from the past. I have extremely fond memories of moving into my first apartment in 1999 and having friends come over to play Quake on the “voodoo box”. I had three PCs, a 10BASE-T LAN, and one machine that had been upgraded to a 3dfx card. We would play rock, paper, scissors to determine who got to play on the 3dfx box and spend many an all nighter playing till the sun came up. Those were the days...
I’m pretty sure 1999 summer I spent playing Quake III Arena all day every day (the full game or demo) on my @Home broadband connection.
Btw - already EDO DRAM favours reading entire memory blocks/lines. My suspicion is that the trick in increausing memory bandwidth is not only based on interleaving, but also on block transfers with on-chip caching. Especially critical for texture reads.
The Voodoo is a nice example of how much execution matters. They were not the only ones to follow this path back then, but by only concentrating on the core functionality they managed to beat all others to the market without compromise. (Compare to S3 Virge, Matrox Mystique, Nvidia NV1, Tseng, NEC and many others)
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 obvious comparison to the GPU arms race is the VR hardware arms race. Same number of companies rising and falling in about the same period. Carmack is at the forefront of both, too.
The Voodoo was, very literally, a game-changer. The difference in quality between Quake and GLQuake was astounding. Just a few seconds of gameplay was enough to get someone to make the purchase.
Same with PC speaker vs SoundBlaster.
The Voodoo1 4MB which I had back then as well, was unprecedented. I agree that the Sound Blaster was great (in isolation against older x86 PCs), but 3dfx was the first standout example of the fruit in the IBM-compatible space, and a clear demonstration in the gaming sense as to why it took over the market.
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…
One thing I'm very thankful for in life. It hasn't been the same since around the turn of the century, the magic and mystery is not like it was with PCs or game consoles in decades prior. The advancements were just leaps and bounds every few years.
It sparked your imagination more than things today, because creativity for some reason reduced without technical limitations. Today, within any reasonable definition, an artist's vision can be fulfilled. There's really nothing left for the end user to imagine or fill in the gaps (think Zork).
Not to be crass but this is a relatable example for many I'm sure- it's no different than finding a Playboy magazine back then, as opposed to extreme, explicit hardcore websites today. There's no mystery at all there, and it's not really an upgrade from your imagination being used at least a little bit.
I've actually rediscovered books because most media today (as in movies and sitcoms, not THAT sort of media) is so poor quality. It's really all about the writing, and I struggle to find games and films that are at the 20th century or prior quality level. Books can be exquisite entertainment, and leave plenty for your imagination to run free with. Which for me, is what it's all about. That's the joyful part to entertainment, or at least a part of it that I find critical.
Blast from the past. I have extremely fond memories of moving into my first apartment in 1999 and having friends come over to play Quake on the “voodoo box”. I had three PCs, a 10BASE-T LAN, and one machine that had been upgraded to a 3dfx card. We would play rock, paper, scissors to determine who got to play on the 3dfx box and spend many an all nighter playing till the sun came up. Those were the days...
I still have my original Voodoo card. It's the one piece of computer hardware I've never been willing to throw away. I still remember spending 8 hours downloading the Quake demo and having my mind blown. The only other time that holds a candle to that is when I got the GLQuake version. No other game has ever taken me on a ride like that.