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
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
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
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.
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.
Big SLI energy.
Big SLI energy,
smol ATA floppy data cable.