Well.....wait a while longer and prices will be back where they were when they were new.....just checked ebay.com and pffffft....prices are steep over there in the states.

Boxed prices are insane! If 3dfx only knew, they would have kept a lot of boxes 🤣

I am spoiled over here in the netherlands!

dosquest wrote:

Voodoo graphics cards, what's so special?

I was wondering the same thing a while ago, then I got a Voodoo3 3000 AGP. Put succinctly, the advantages of 3dfx hardware seem to be:

• bulletproof compatibility with Win9x games
• surprisingly good performance (high fillrate and Glide-optimized game engines help with this)
• great image quality in 16-bit color mode due to 3dfx's special post filter

I have a TNT2, Rage 128, and G400 MAX as well, and the Voodoo3 isn't miles ahead of any of them. It's just obvious that most games from the era were designed with 3dfx in mind.

However, newer cards that work with Glide wrappers will wipe the floor with most any 3dfx product, IMO. For example, cards prior to the Voodoo5 didn't support 32-bit color or trilinear filtering.

maximus wrote:

dosquest wrote:

Voodoo graphics cards, what's so special?

I was wondering the same thing a while ago, then I got a Voodoo3 3000 AGP. Put succinctly, the advantages of 3dfx hardware seem to be:

The Voodoo 3+ does have a lot that the previous Voodoo's didn't including plenty of VRAM, a 2d core and decent support for 2000/XP
The lack of a 2d core and poor driver support is kind of a turn off for the VD1/2 for me

I've noticed that with my 128, at 640x480 quake stutters with the menu overlay on during the demo and when playing the death animation stutters no matter what res its on.

dacow wrote:

I take it dosquest that you didn't experience that era between software rendered games and hardware rendered games?

Funny thing about that. I didn't get or expierence a graphics accelerated cards and gaming until 2006. So before then it was usually pitiful intergrated mostly software based rendering.

konc wrote:

I thought Quake 1 never got 3dfx support? I'm not talking about Quake 2 or other windows versions (GLQuake etc), just Quake 1 that's mentioned twice already in this thread having a 3dfx patch and drivers optimized for it.

GLQuake is Quake 1. Being for Windows doesn't make it "not Quake 1".

It didn't have a 3Dfx patch, rather it worked with any OpenGL card, but was shipped with the 3Dfx MiniGL. Delete opengl32.dll from the Quake folder and it works fine with Renditions and whatnot.

That might be my problem...I'll see if deleting that dll fixes it.

The thing is, when I was as kid hardware magazines were the only source of information for me. There was no Internet yet, at least for me or at my School.

3D accelerators like ATI or rendition, I swear, those names ring no bells. I do remember some Matrox Mystique articles but, at least to me, there was nothing like the Voodoo 1. It just dominated and it was THE birthday / xmas present to get.

I remember Ati always had bad drivers, blocky smoke etc.

Rendition was good only when directly supported in a game, while 3dfx just worked in every accelerated game. Never failed to amaze me at the time.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

3D accelerators like ATI or rendition, I swear, those names ring no bells. I do remember some Matrox Mystique articles but, at least to me, there was nothing like the Voodoo 1. It just dominated and it was THE birthday / xmas present to get.

The name 'Rendition' rings a bell for me because of this (from the wiki):

... one of the first 3D chipset makers to directly work with Quake developer John Carmack to make a hardware-accelerated version of the game (vQuake)

Getting John Carmack's endorsement was a huge deal at the time, the fact that they weren't able to capitalise and were instead overrun by 3DFX always suggested to me that the Voodoo was a better product. I don't have any hard facts to back that up, nor do I want any 😀

I remember seeing articles about the Voodoo, but when I saw how much it cost in a store, I couldn't believe that it had any chance of ever succeeding. I figured it was going to be the SegaCD or 32X of the PC world, and blew it off. I figured the moderately priced combo 2D+3D cards were more realistic. I seriously underestimated the amount of money people were willing to pay for this stuff.

I was into Papyrus' NASCAR Racing at the time, and saw mention of a 3D accelerated version for one of the cards, I think Rendition. That automatically made me interested in those, more than Voodoo, but I never got either of them.

I wish I still had my magazines from ~1996. It seems I threw them all away.

badmojo wrote:

The name 'Rendition' rings a bell for me because of this (from the wiki):

... one of the first 3D chipset makers to directly work with Quake developer John Carmack to make a hardware-accelerated version of the game (vQuake)

Getting John Carmack's endorsement was a huge deal at the time, the fact that they weren't able to capitalise and were instead overrun by 3DFX always suggested to me that the Voodoo was a better product. I don't have any hard facts to back that up, nor do I want any 😀

It says here that Carmack regrets that decision and would of went with 3dfx.

dosquest wrote:

That might be my problem...I'll see if deleting that dll fixes it.

If you have the DLL and no 3dfx card glQuake won't run slow, it won't run at all.

meljor wrote:

I remember Ati always had bad drivers, blocky smoke etc.

Rendition was good only when directly supported in a game, while 3dfx just worked in every accelerated game. Never failed to amaze me at the time.

ATI chips up to Rage Pro (probably also Rage XL and derived mobile chips) could not filter bilinear textures with alpha (ie. transparency). Depending on the source they can't do alpha at all, this is emulated in the driver, which doesn't bother to do filtering (possibly because of performance).

Rendition: That depends on the driver. Mature drivers were quite good, see http://www.vintage3d.org/verite1.php:
"From a compatibility view V1000 did well in my selection." ... "Watching reasonably rendered Quake 3 on V1000 makes me appreciate the driver effort behind it." ... "For all the other games V1000 produced usually admirably high image quality."
I suppose that a lot of games were tested on 3dfx cards and not (or not very thorough) on Rendition cards so they will certainly have more issues.
OTOH I have read that the reason why several games support both Direct3D and Glide is that there were issues with Direct3D on 3dfx cards and this was the easiest workaround.

From a 1998 tomshardware review of the Rage 128 card

1998 will be their by far best year in history, companies like NVIDIA, Matrox, Diamond, Creative, STB and also 3Dfx can only dream of the revenues ATI was making this year. The reason for this success doesn't come from nothing. It does not take the fastest and shiniest chip on the market to be successful in this business.

That's more of a preview. Rage128 had a 1999 launch and should be competent enough to run GLQuake at a very smooth framerate. It's one of the cards I test OA on and I get 40-70fps at most areas and that's a much higher poly and very asset inefficient game.

And yes, 3dfx's rise is something that needs context to understand. When Voodoo launched, the 3d accelerator market did not quite live up to the name 'accelerator' 😀

and finally to address something earlier here, quake's software renderer is awesome awesome awesome.

leileilol wrote:

And yes, 3dfx's rise is something that needs context to understand. When Voodoo launched, the 3d accelerator market did not quite live up to the name 'accelerator' 😀

Yup, Verite and RRedline really slowed down 3D opertions. What was nice about Voodoo was that Glide was a subset of GL, using only the real-time effective operations, and that subset ended up being small enough to implement completely in hardware. That was also the source of later limitations in the API (16 bit color, and small texture sizes among them).

I still think it's crazy that Sega *almost* went with Voodoo2 as the graphic subsystem for the Dreamcast. The US team wanted 3dfx, JP team wanted NECs PowerVR CLX2. What really scotched the deal with 3dfx was that they let the deal with Sega slip in an SEC filing, and that *pissed* SOJ off badly.

In hindsight, I'm glad they went with NEC. Compare arcade games based on Naomi/Naomi2/Hikaru to the ones that used Voodoo2s, and it's pretty clear that SOJ made the right choice.

/Did any arcade games use the Quantum3D Obsidian Bricks? I don't think I've seen any of those first-hand. I vaguely remember talk of using them in rendering /visualization, like Sony did when they gang-banged multiple EE+GS boards into a box, ostenably for render farm work.

The Dreamcast/Naomi/etc systems owe a lot of performance to the crazy SH-4 assembly though. PowerVR CLX2 itself is quite weak IMO. A 3dfx Dreamcast would've just been as awesome, or maybe more capable since it's not held back by tile refresh techniques, could've had a longer life that way since texture buffer effects would be more supported (you know, the kind of effects PS2 allowed from it)

leileilol wrote:

The Dreamcast/Naomi/etc systems owe a lot of performance to the crazy SH-4 assembly though. PowerVR CLX2 itself is quite weak IMO. A 3dfx Dreamcast would've just been as awesome, or maybe more capable since it's not held back by tile refresh techniques, could've had a longer life that way since texture buffer effects would be more supported (you know, the kind of effects PS2 allowed from it)

I was under the impression that the tile-based deferred rendering (AT THAT TIME) was far more efficient (especially with z-depth calculations) than the Voodoo series "brute force" techniques.

They did add extra PVR chips to Naomi2/Hikaru, so maybe there's something to what you say.

I need to dig up some shot comparisons between those games, and the ones based on 3dFX (I think Atari used them for a while), for some subjective observations. Might get around to it this weekend.

/BTW, a lot of the newer GPUs and research projects since then have incorporated aspects of TBDR, so there's still value to be found in the tech.
//At least we aren't stuck with PixelFlow or Talisman. 😜

If the slow UT and Q3A ports on the Dreamcast are any indication... 😀

leileilol wrote:

The Dreamcast/Naomi/etc systems owe a lot of performance to the crazy SH-4 assembly though. PowerVR CLX2 itself is quite weak IMO. A 3dfx Dreamcast would've just been as awesome, or maybe more capable since it's not held back by tile refresh techniques, could've had a longer life that way since texture buffer effects would be more supported (you know, the kind of effects PS2 allowed from it)

Oh, also, using 3dfx wouldn't have added to the longevity of the Dreamcast platform. SOJ was already eyeing getting out of the console equipment market, due to financial reasons. The massive PS2 marketing blitz, compared to the minimal dreamcast marketing did help either. The real nail in the coffin was Sega choice of using proprietary GD-ROMs, instead of DVD-ROMs, so not only were the games smaller, the DC couldn't be used to watch DVDs like the PS2 and XBOX could.

That's similar to the massive PS3 uptake. Many people bought them, because they were perceived as low cost Blu-ray players (first) that also played games (second).