The 3dfx Voodoo wasn’t the first 3D card, or the most complete. It was the first that made games feel smooth. Four years later, Nvidia bought what was left of the company. What went wrong? #Voodoo #Gaming
Dang. That Voodoo card was my gateway drug into upgrading my PC. Such awesome memories…
I missed out on 3dfx, but I was exposed to it indirectly when I needed a glide wrapper for N64 emulation back in the day.
Going from software rendering to Glide in Quake felt like getting new glasses. Wild that the whole run was only about four years.
You could look into the water!
Ha, true. Seeing through the water was the real Glide upgrade.
I remember playing carmageddon 2 for the first time with 3dfx graphics and i was blown away. Thing was crazy good for the time.
I always wanted one of those. From what I remember it was tied to the CPU speed so the faster your processor the faster the card was able to render.
From the article I see that the card only did texture mapping, which is still a lot of work, but it makes sense that if the CPU needs to handle transforms then the GPU is just waiting on that data before it rips through it. Later in the article it mentions nvidia implementing geometry calculations in hardware, then I remembered that “hardware T&L” was a selling point at the time. It’s crazy to see how the role of the graphics card has evolved over the years, now a massive chunk of them aren’t even used for graphics work.
I bet if i had a whole datacenter I could finally play Crysis at full resolution.
I always remember the boxes being really trippy.
We really did just give up designing box art one day didn’t we? Now you’re lucky if they even give you a render of the card inside, normally it’s just a black box with a flat logo.
I had one. I really remember the click as you booted a 3D game as the S3 graphics card switched off and display switched over to the Voodoo1. It has a cable bridging the display connection on the back. The Voodoo2 could do 2D graphics as well which killed quite a lot of cards like the S3.
The OG galaxy brain.
I was there, 3000 years ago.
My shelves still feature two 12MB Voodoo 2 in nostalgic reminder of the good old times.
2 Voodoo 2s? Well hey: now you can run Doom 3. https://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/index.php?topic=1462
Yes, I knew about that & was as amazed back then as I am now (also you don’t need SLI for Doom 3 iirc).
I, painfully, had to buy my friend a Voodoo 2 card while I had a crappy Riva 128 because I owed him money. He then proceeded to show me how awesome GLQuake was and I couldn’t run it.
Don’t worry, you can buy a Voodoo 2 today for the price of about a 3070 or something :‘’(.
(and yes, mine are my retirement plan … no, not financially, for gaming, bcs soon having 12/24MB of vram will be far beyond the reach of normal pleb)
I’m gutted, I tried to add heatsinks to the RAM in mine and I fried it.
I wish I kept my old boxes/hardware now. At least I still have my old consoles /boxes I guess
Nice, I didn’t keep them.
But did you use wicked3d glasses? 😁
No, but I did buy (and still have) a GeForce 3 that came with 3D glasses (proper stereoscopic active glasses).
ASUS V8200 Deluxe, good oc.
Dang, I was happy 25 years ago.
Nice! Did that work with all games too? (in general, not perfectly)
Yes, it was api & driver level iirc (you adjusted the “difference between the eyes”/two different fov points), basically anything polygonal 3D worked I think.
But your PC also needed to produce twice the fps (for each eye a separate set … so if your monitor could do 120Hz (I had a Samsung 959NF) & your card could do 120fps you got 60 frames per eye), … so there was a limited number of games that had a playable fps even with a top pc (with home-made water loop!).
And this is “3D effect within the physical monitor” (unlike VR goggles that fake the 3D perception from close to your eyeballs) & most games dont really have 3D objects displayed close to you, eg in fps like Quake 2 the gun was noticeably 3D, but the rest (correctly) much less simply bcs of the fov/the distance.Also CRTs weren’t extremely bright & the glasses (with the LCDs “open”) were still kinda dim so it was like playing with uncomfortable sunglasses.
Fun as a gimmick, still remember it fondly.
Yeah, the shutter hz/fps halving. I was on the 60 -> 30 route I think, which was still bearable to me, at least at that time.
But all in all until now I accepted that “3D” output will always be niche for a lot of reasons. But it pops up every 10 years or so.
I’m still slightly mad that my parents got me an 8 MB Voodoo 2 instead of 12 MB. And I couldn’t even formulate my frustration because I didn’t quite understand VRAM yet.
Still, Unreal never looked better.
Omg Unreal is epic, those marble corridors still look legit today.
With two Voodoos you could run it in 1024×768.
Big SLI energy.
Big SLI energy,
smol ATA floppy data cable.
A friend of mine had one and he was so proud of it. At the time I didn’t have the notion of it, or how groundbreaking they were.
They were magical. When I got my first 3D accelerator (Voodoo 2, 8 MB) I would just marvel at how quickly the weapon switching worked in Jedi Knight.
The site just touches on it a little, but the Nvidia TNT that came out in 98 (but what felt like forever after the Voodoo 2 was already out) was supposed to be MUCH faster than it was. The original specs ended up being what the TNT2 card had, and it was a large difference and would have trounced the Voodoo 2. I bought the first TNT on the market, ironically released by STB that 3DFX bought right after, and it had the original specs on the box. If that had happened today I am sure there would have been a lawsuit.
I never had a 3D accelerator card, nor did I ever see one in action in person to know what the differences were. My first GPU was a GPU; I think a Radeon 9800? I know it was an ATI card, and it would have been around… 2001/2002 or so? Freshman or Sophomore year of highschool is when I built my first PC entirely from parts I purchased instead of getting some prebuilt office machine from my parents.
A GPU is a 3D accelerator card, they just changed the name.
the passthrough cable setup is so weird looking back. a second card just for 3d with a vga cable looping out the back, and it still felt like magic
Back in the day, 3dfx was like magic. I had a PC with the horrible S3 Virge card and when I got a cheap 3dfx card, suddenly my old PC was good enough to play the newest games smoothly!
The S3 Virge was called a 3D-decellerator back in the day because games ran slower using it (though prettier) than with software rendering. Always made me laugh.
The marketing was catchy and everywhere. I remember doodling the logo in class without understanding or really caring what a graphics card was. Same for Amiga advertising…
After inheriting the family PC and taking it apart years later, I discovered it had a TNT-based card. It was such a solid piece of hardware for a long time in computer years. Used it until it failed and replaced it with an MX400 that wasn’t much different.
I remember the TNT and the detonator driver release which massively boosted performance.
3dfx was great too.
Nice write-up. At the time I only had a N64 and never realised how short this era was. Must have been quite exciting for hardware enthusiasts, nowadays 2 years come and go and nothing’s happened.
It was super exciting. We were constantly modding everything, running hacked experimental drivers to get some game to work or get some performance boost was fairly normal.
I had one of these, it was such a massive difference, made playing Quake 2 and 3 actually possible on my hardware.
Is it though? Very light on details, doesn’t really dig into any of the technical stuff in any meaningful depth. Reads like it was written with a lot of ‘help’ from AI, honestly.
The short sentences. Each containing a little information that builds on the idea before. But then next comes a thought written out in a more subtle, human way that just doesn’t at all feel like AI. Your description of “‘help’ from AI” seems like a good way to describe it.
Well it’s concise and not a deep dive. A few sources would have been nice, but AI detectors say none was involved, also style doesn’t match.
To be fair, the N64 was ahead of most PCs at the time, antialiasing wasn’t a common option on PCs at a comparative price point, but on N64 it was default.
I was a kid and was only bummed that video and sample-based audio was out of the question in most cases.
I had the voodoo 2 card… I played quake, quake 2, quake 3 all on the same card.
