Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The 3dfx Voodoo1

fabiensanglard.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 241 posts

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#71

Post by taneq »

docker_up wrote: post #69

When I first saw 3dfx graphics, I knew it was the dawn of a new era. I bought thousands of dollars in stock in the company. I lost it all because unfortunately nVidia ate their lunch because they marketed themselves better. They had full 32-bit color vs 3dfx who had the superior technology but only had 16 or 24 bit color. 3DFX spent a lot of time trying to explain why it didn't matter but in the end it did. It matter…

32-bit colour is still just 24-bit colour with 8 bits of stencil or whatever (or at least was back when 3dfx was relevant). The only company I know of that was doing higher bit depths was Matrox who had 10-bit colour iirc.

I remember back in the day "serious gamers would never use a combined 2D/3D card". Then nVidia came out with their Riva chipset and suddenly 2D graphics cards weren't really a thing any more.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#72

Post by adventured »

pfranz wrote: post #46
derefr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They talk about a 4 year timespan. The Oculus Kickstarter was in 2012. DK1 was released in 2013, DK2 in 2014, and the final Rift in 2016. The Rift-S is rumored to be released in 2019. None of those have had quite the leaps 3d did back in the late 90s.

For contrast, id went from Doom to Quake III Arena in six years (Dec 1993 -> Dec 1999). Thanks to the rapid pace of graphics card improvement and the engineers writing the software engines to keep up with it (Carmack, Sweeney, etc).

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#73

Post by taneq »

ekianjo wrote: post #34
derefr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You cannot be serious. VR headsets have not been evolving at the pace of hardware back then. The resolution of headsets does not double every year or something and VR today is not much better than one year ago. Nothing comparable.

Linear resolution maybe not, but pixel count is roughly doubling. Vive and Rift are both ~1k x 1k pixels per eye, first gen Windows Mixed Reality headsets came out a year or two later and are 1440 x 1600, and the just-announced HP Reverb is ~2k x 2k. The teased Valve Index is likely to be 2k x 2k as well, with a field-of-view bump from 110° to 135°.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#74

Post by tntn »

manav wrote: post #63

I remember the Voodoo 2 SLI. I know it stands for something slightly different now but at least its a small remnant of that past. I wonder if nvidia actually got much ip out of the acquisition.

I've heard that GeForce fx was designed by ex-3dfx employees.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#75

Post by dfischer »

I remember being obsessed with graphics cards back in the day. My first graphics card i knew of was a 3dfx voodoo. I loaded it up to play Everquest. I vaguely remember going all the way up to a gforce 3 or so trying to get my games running smooth. Because of games I learned what every component in my system did and eventually started coding too. I miss those days :).

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#76

Post by kbenson »

The Voodoo2 was my first 3D video (addon) card. I was working tech support at the local ISP, and a failure on a circuit caused all authentication to fail for dialup customers for a few hours. They called in every off-duty support person they could get to come in and along with the scheduled staff we all (~20 of us) took 3-4 hours answering calls telling many of our 20k customers that yes, we had a major problem, no, we couldn't help them at that time, and hopefully it would be fixed within a couple hours.

To thank the support staff, the management/owner offered the choice of a Voodoo2 card or a DVD player (~$200 each IIRC) to every support rep that helped with the load that day. I ended up working for that company three separate times in different positions, leaving for college and coming back, and working for a relative's company for a while and returning again later. It's the wonderful people there and actions like that which keep that company in a special place in my heart. (For those wondering, it's Sonic.net, now Sonic.com, or just Sonic maybe. I'm not sure the official branding, and I have years of history with it being Sonic.net)

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#77

Post by ewzimm »

GuiA wrote: post #68
BuckRogers wrote: post #39

Being 14 years old and getting to experience and see it evolve first-hand with a Commodore (at home), the Apple II (at school) and 286, 386, 486 and Pentium era with a Diamond Multimedia 3dfx Voodoo card was amazing. People who missed it either being busy with other things in life or weren't born yet, believe me, as a technologist being there from the beginning of the home computer market till about 2000 was amazing.…

It is because you experienced these things during your formative years that they have such a unique luster, and that nothing seems to quite compare. People who are in their formative years today will look back upon the current times with similar enthusiasm; just like your elders a few decades ago found that your Playboy magazines and 3D video game cards were pointless debauchery. So it has been for the billions of hu…

People in their formative years see technology so clearly. Each generation invents something that changes things in ways people wish they could relive. Past the change, you can’t see things the same.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#78

Post by fabiensanglard »

kken wrote: post #33

Nice article. I would be interested in learning more about the rendering pipeline. Is anybody aware of a more detailed description? Or an online datasheet? 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…

The datasheet (i assume you mean the register mapping) is linked at the bottom of the article.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#79

Post by carey »

fabiensanglard wrote: post #26
starpilot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a js framework?

No. I dislike JavaScript. Because it bloats pages, slowdowns page loading and you always need libraries to do the smallest thing. I try to avoid JavaScript as much as possible. There is some on this page to flip the screenshots and that annoyed me.

You should be able to do something with labels, CSS sibling selectors, and the :checked pseudo-class if it matters to you. I found an example at https://codepen.io/ancaspatariu/pen/WpQYOP which does quite a lot more than you’d need.

Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1

#80

Post by p0rkbelly »

Playing Unreal and coming out of the spaceship at 800x600 on my voodoo2 and 400mhz Pentium II (I was spoiled and got the !2MB version!!!) was still one of the greatest gaming moments of my life
Post reply on HN