I remember the first time I saw that you could walk right up to a wall in a game and the texture didn't become a mess of giant pixels. Sure, it was a mess of blurry pixels instead but still it seemed like (voodoo) magic to young me.
The 3dfx Voodoo1
91–100 of 241 posts
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#92Playing 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
Coming out of the spaceship never did it for me, but the intro in the menu did.
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#93My 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…
24bit and 32bit both have 8bit per RGB color channel, the extra 8 bit are either alpha (for textures) or padding (for performance). All other things being equal, colors should look the same on both.
If I remember correctly Matrox cards had the best video output quality through D-Sub at that time, which might be what your post's parent might have referred to.
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#94I 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.
Please write an extensive blog post about your recollections working in the industry at the time. Seriously.
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#95The main reason for the success of 3dfx were drivers that let you talk to bare metal hardware registers instead of dozens of GL abstraction layers. The simplicity of it all is very impressive. This is something programmers absoluteley love. Hence many games supported it and it was very easy to write drivers. Maybe it is time to reimplenent the glide interface in an FPGA ang make a super powered Voodoo card.
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
On many computers it did not run faster just differently. Regular quake and glquake were two totally different programs.
How would it not run faster, given that otherwise CPU had to shoulder the rendering entirely, in addition to everything else? Even high-end CPUs at the time would struggle with that, especially with resolution and bit depth being equal. IIRC the original Quake didn't even allow more than 256 colors in software rendering for this purpose, and even then I recall having to run it in weird resolutions like 400x300 to get…
The Voodoo was the indisputable king of 3D accellerators back then. Not everyone was running GLquake with a Voodoo card in their PC though.
I had an S3 Virge in my PC at the time. It was quite possible to get GLQuake running using a Direct3D to OpenGL wrapper, but damn it was slow. It sure looked better than regular Quake, but it wasn't really noticeably faster than software rendering.
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#97I 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.
Please write an extensive blog post about your recollections working in the industry at the time. Seriously.
I couldn't agree more!
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#98It’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…
What was the 4/5 debacle? Owned a 2 myself, loved it, but then totally drifted out of the PC gaming and graphics card 'scene'.
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#99Blast 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...
Oh I remember those days; black coax crisscrossing rooms, loose terminators, deciding whether to go on a Quake or a thrash metal spree in the garage.
Re: The 3dfx Voodoo1
#100I 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.
That was my first 3d video card and I am constantly name dropping it when people brag about their current 3d cards!