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Fall of Voodoo

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Re: Fall of Voodoo

#61

Post by _noqo »

I remember those days vividly.

I was just getting to know the world of computers, I think it was the year 97, I had 13 years old and my first PC, Pentium 200mhz with Windows 95, I thought the games were fabulous! Quake 1, Duke Nukem, Carmageddon, Moto Racer.

But one day I bought the Diamond Monster 2 with a Voodoo 2 chip and 12MB Ram (3DFX accelerator card), I put that thing on my PC and it was like traveling to the future, the games looked amazing and I had a performance boost.

I think the game that impressed me most at the time was Need For Speed 2 Special Edition, before the card I had it installed and played, but the "Special Edition" was for being compatible with 3DFX and adding additional features, in addition to the smoothed textures, in a track mosquitoes were sticking to the screen, I do not remember what other special features.

Moto Racer, Descent Freespace and Tomb Raider 2 come to my mind now as others that I feel huge visual gap between regular graphics and 3DFX.

Then came Quake 3 Arena in 1999 and it blew my mind, I think that in 2000/2001 I upgrade to a Pentium 4 and maintain the legendary Diamond Monster 2 because it was still kicking ass. Awesome card, it has a place in my heart.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#62

Post by mulmen »

rfrey wrote: post #59
mulmen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Think about the root of the word "graphics" and why GPUs are well suited to processing ...graphs. Why would high demand for GPUs signal the death of PC gaming? I would expect the opposite.

I'm not sure what you mean, but the root of graphics is graphikos, Greek for writing or drawing. Mathematical graphs are called that by analogy to their graphical forebears.

You have confused root and origin. The root of graphics is graph.

The comment I replied to said GPUs are more useful in cryptocoin mining and AI rather than graphics. Cryptocoin mining and AI are graph workloads. This is why GPUs are well suited to these tasks.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#63

Post by upbeatlinux »

I remember my Voodoo3 quite fondly. There was quite a performance boost in games based on the Quake engine. I also recall their being poor Linux driver support until 2005 or so.

My Voodoo3 ran right up through CS v1.6 (albeit struggling at times). A new system I built in 2005 used 2x BFG 6800s in SLI (3dfx tech nvidia inherited). While impressive I seem to recall their being some variation in nvidia's SLI spec/implementation. Perhaps 3dfx SLI performance was seemingly better because of Glide support but my memory escapes me (obviously not an apples to apples comparison).

FWIW, there was also a huge aftermarket of Voodoo cards on eBay (1999-2004) and a decent community providing 3rd party driver support.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#64

Post by blue11 »

jwilk wrote: post #3

It feels weird that the article uses the term "GPU". This term wasn't widely used back then. IIRC, the Voodoo cards were called "3D accelerators".

From what I remember, the term GPU was invented by NVIDIA's marketing team for the GeForce campaign. It sounded a bit weird in the beginning. In hindsight, it was a strike of genius.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#65

Post by Zardoz84 »

chrisan wrote: post #29
TorKlingberg wrote: post #26

The article blames management failure, but I'm not convinced. There's a general bias to blame management any time a company fails. Of course management is always responsible, but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak. In this case, Nvidia and ATI were already making 3D accelerators for the professional 3D rendering market. All they had to do was to make stripped down cards that wouldn't cannibalize their h…

> but I don’t think anyone could have saved say, Kodak Why not? What if Kodak management had went hard on digital initially instead of clinging to film for so long?

interesting... my first digital camera was a Kodak. Only enough internal flash storage (no removable) that can hold around 75 JPEG photos at 640x480 . And without screen. How ever no body had a digital camera except me, for a few years. I kept it

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#66

Post by Zardoz84 »

IndrekR wrote: post #10
k__ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hehe, all my friends had Voodoo GPUs back in the days. A friend of mine even got a Voodoo 5500 and we tried to get Quake 3 Arena so tuned that we couldn't see any pixels anymore. I was the first one with a GeForce 2MX, which worked quite well and long considering it was the budget version of the gf2. If I look at the performance indexes, the Voodoo 5500 wasn't very much better than the GF2MX.

And there was simple resistor resolder hack to make GeForce 2MX think it is Quadro. It was very useless and very cool at the same time. Few people got into hardware hacking (read electronics engineering) thanks to this little and yet very positive soldering experience.

and the GF2 MX with DDR ram, can move Doom 3 at a barely playable FPS, if you downgrade the game textures. I played the whole game with these GPU.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#67

Post by b3lvedere »

I remember those gpu wars. Also had a Voodoo 3000 card which was relatively cheap but still very fast. It took quite some time to get those games running optimally though. Playing Quake on it was fantastic.

Specs and scores were all they could talk about. I also remember that very nice parody: https://imgur.com/SLG6hp4

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#68

Post by overcast »

I remember the day clearly when a case of Voodoo 2's showed up in our dorm room, 1998. Going from software rendered Quake 2, to accelerated was the beginning of the end for my grades that semester.

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#69

Post by pmiller2 »

My Voodoo 5 5500 was, at the time, and for years afterward, the best consumer level card I'd seen for OpenGL rendering. I still remember playing Diablo 2 on it and never lagging, even when insane numbers of mobs were on the screen. RIP

Re: Fall of Voodoo

#70

Post by T-hawk »

pmiller2 wrote: post #69

My Voodoo 5 5500 was, at the time, and for years afterward, the best consumer level card I'd seen for OpenGL rendering. I still remember playing Diablo 2 on it and never lagging, even when insane numbers of mobs were on the screen. RIP

Diablo 2 doesn't use OpenGL. It does use Glide, the native hardware API for Voodoo cards. And it looks amazing and silky smooth with Glide compared to the game's Direct3D mode.
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