I managed to survive with no computer at all. Lucky you, that's what I say 😁

I had an S3 Virge and a Cyrix 6x86. 3D was not my friend.
I mostly didn't care much. 3D was still pretty new, I didn't have many of those games and I found them tolerable in software mode, though noticeably laggy. But in 1999 I started playing a European football game that was in 3D and I was kind of annoyed how badly it ran. 3D accelerated mode sort of worked and was a bit faster than software mode, but it gave me some ugly image quality. As I recall I think the players ended up being flat shaded.

I didn't get a K6-3 until Christmas 1999. Software 3D worked a lot better, but I still had the Virge. My Geforce2 MX came another year after that. So it wasn't really until 2001 that I was able to play 3D games properly.

I missed 3Dfx at both ends, the start and their death. I got my Virge at a time when the original Voodoo was the killer card, but it was too expensive. I got my Geforce2 MX when 3Dfx was collapsing. In fact, their death had just hit the news, and as I was in the store to get that MX card, I remember seeing a bit of a run on the Voodoo4 and 5 series cards, including some people with multiple boxes under their arms. They're worth a tad more money today than my MX. 😀

Went from S3 Trio 64 V+, then added a V1 (in a P133). Then got a PII and got a V2. Then took a break from computing for 4 years and picked up with a P4 and Radeon 9800 😀

I remember standing at my local PC store and looking at two boxes - one for a 3dfx card and one for the Matrox M3D PowerVR card. I was already very happy with my Mystique and the M3D was a bit cheaper than the 3dfx so I went with the M3D. Big mistake. I remember being quite disappointed when playing Thief: The Dark Project and it refused to use the M3D - so I had to play the game in software only mode. In fact almost nothing apart from the ID games and a few bundled demos really used it much at all. It looked and performed great in those games that did support it though.

Eventually I replaced both Matrox cards with a TNT2 AGP card and I even actually threw out the M3D card eventually - I wish I hadn't done that because it actually wasn't a bad card in games that supported it. At least I still have the Mystique - which works nicely as a purely 2D card.

Yup, never had any 3dfx card myself.
My first 'accelerator' was a Matrox Mystique. It didn't do a whole lot, aside from the special patch for Tomb Raider.
Then I had an Apocalypse3Dx with PowerVR PCX2 chipset.
After that a Matrox G200, then a G450, and finally a GeForce2 GTS.

I still have not ever owned a 3dfx card. It's a shame the prices are so ridiculous, else I'd just pick up a few for my old boxes, just for teh lulz.

When in 1999 I got 1st 3D card on TNT2, Voodoo was not the best choice already. Never missed Glide support. The last competitive 3dfx card was Voodoo 2.

My first 3D card was a Rendition V2200. Pretty cheap at the time, probably near EOL. Drivers were somewhat unstable at the time (I experienced the beta driver releases).
I also got an M3D which was extremely cheap (35 DM IIRC, must have been at EOL). The only native games I tried with it were Tomb Raider and maybe Unreal. I wasn't faster than the Rendition in glQuake/Quake II.
Then I upgraded to a TNT2 which was probably not a wise decision, my CPU being a K6-2 380 so it got bottlenecked.
Only after I heard about the 3DNow patch for Quake II I got a used Voodoo2 cheaply from a friend, I suppose it was obsolete at time. IIRC didn't really run Quake II any faster than than the TNT2, but that probably depended on the resolution.

If I only had known more about support for proprietary 3D APIs at the time. I think I didn't even try Unreal with the Voodoo2, and I tried UltraHLE with a Glide wrapper, though that might have been before I got the V2.

Survived until mid-99 with a K6-200/Virge DX 4MB. Then bought a used Voodoo 1. It was incredible, I didn't know what I was missing before! Soon after that upgraded to a K6-2/300 and Voodoo 2. And soon after that, bought a new computer with Duron 700 and GeForce 2 MX, which was so much faster than the Socket 7 platform it was ridiculous.

So, struggled with software mode from 97 to 99, then had the amazing Voodoo experience, and a year later it was already over. But it left an impression that lasts to this day.

In about 1998 I upgraded from a 486SX 25MHz to a P2 266MHz; unfortunately it came with an AGP S3 Virge. I lusted after a Voodoo 1 or 2 but I was young and couldn't afford it. I played pretty much all my games in software mode. It was the best I had to I persevered and finished Quake 1 and 2, Half Life, Unreal, plus various demos from magazine cover discs. I also played plenty of rounds of Counter-Strike at LANs (I was terrible at it).

Sometime just after the turn of the century a friend of mine upgraded his rig to a Geforce 2 MX, and I bought his old TNT2 Vanta. The difference was night and day. I could finally enable hardware mode!
Later I bought an Sis Xabre 400 off after another after he bought it and found his KT333 board was incompatible. I later sold that and bought a GF4 Ti4200.

So unfortunately I missed the 3Dfx heyday; I could only salivate over the screenshots in magazines. I have a pair of Voodoo 2's and a Voodoo 5 here now though, so I'm finally filling that missing hole from my youth 😀

Never had a 3Dfx until 2002, when I bought an V1.

For the Late 90's.
Got a new computer in late 97 or really early 98, with a S3-Something.
Then in 1999 I got a TNT2-M64.

I remember wanted V2, V3, G400 when they came out, and in 2000 (April-June) i wanted a GF2.
Was it creative that had those extremely beautifull black uniformed boxes for GF2's?
Had a girlfriend at that time, wich could not see anything interresting about computers, other than as a workhorse.
(and yeah... She got hooked on Internet-pr0n) I just wanted that V3.

I started out in 1998 with a Pentium 166 MMX with a S3 Virge (can't quite recall which one).
However, it had very poor 3D performance for my gaming needs.
So, not long after that, I bought my first Voodoo card - a Creative 3D Blaster Banshee 16 MB (PCI).
I upgraded in late 2000 to a Voodoo 3 AGP.
After 3dfx's demise, I went over to ATI (the Radeon 8500 64 MB being my first one).
I still have all the cards.
My brother bought his Voodoo 2 in mid 1998 and, fortunately, I also kept that card.

I had a Diamond Stealth 64 Video 2001 (Trio64+) in an AMD DX4-120 for my DOS gaming years, so nothing in resolutions above 320x200. Having a 15" monitor that couldn't do more than 640x480 didn't help much anyways. The game that impressed me the most in terms of software performance was Screamer. I didn't get far in Quake before giving up on the postage stamp.

Around '99 I got a PIII system with, IIRC, a TNT. The next time I took PC gaming seriously was when GTA III came out, and I bought a Radeon 8500 to run that on.

I used to have a cyrix 586 + cirrus logic 54xx or 53xx pci up until december of 1998. I got the machine in october 1995 if I remember correctly. 800mb hdd, 8mb of ram, no sound card, no CD-ROM, and obviously no 3D for me until the end of 97 - early '98 when I bought a 12mb creative voodoo 2. Before that I was happy to play early 90s games like doom, descent, duke3d, dune 2, jazz, prehistorik, supaplex and alike. I still remember getting my first sound card (Yamaha based Genius Soundmaker Value)... good times 😀. Before I bought the voodoo, I gradually upgraded the PCs ram to 16 the 32MB, and bought a Creative CD-ROM drive.

In 98, the only 3D games I could play on my machine were GLQuake witch ran ok, 3DFX Carmageddon and Descent witch ran great. I remember getting the 3dfx executables for the latter games from local CD Magazines like Level and XtremePC. First 3D Accelerated game I ever played was GLQuake tough. It looked awesome at the time and I spent all of my winter vacation going trough all the levels.

I never had a riva, TNT or Rage card. My first 3D-capable video card was a Trident Blade 3D built into my second computer's VIA MVP4 chipset (witch I got in late 99). It ran Quake 2 well with a overclocked K6-2 and to me it seemed to look better then on my voodoo 2. (Default OpenGL vs 3DFX OpenGL witch is too bright and a little washed). Performance-wise, in default OGL it was about as fast as a voodoo 2 (of course, the V2 was quite a bit faster in 3DFX OGL than the Blade 3D in Default OGL). After that I had a radeon 7000 DDR in my socket A rig, but that was in 2002.

I'm too young
I started out in 2000 when I was 8 gears old 😜
My first computer was really slow
IDT Winchip 200
Amptron Baby AT
16mb ram EDO
An integrated IGP trident blade
4gb hard disk

Was really cheap but I played a lot of games ( monkey island II, Unreal software mode, Claw, Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver ( Software mode) I remember that I was not able to play OpenGL games.
From this computer I stored only the IDT WinChip that is working even now 😀
In 2002 my main board died and in 2004 when I was 12 years old I bought:
Case and PSU Oem
Celeron 2.4Ghz Northwood 478
AsRock P4VT8+ 512MB A-DATA PC3200 CAS 2.5
GeForce 4 TI 4200 64MB

Never had a 3Dfx until 2008, when I bought a stock of:
Orchid VooDoo I
Banshee PCI and AGP
VooDoo 3 2000-3000-3500 AGP
VooDoo 3 2000 PCI

Only during the last week I bought my first VooDoo II made by Diamond with cable and CD Driver in excellent condition

My first 3D card was an S3 Virge ... for about two days. I brought it back to the shop and got a Diamond Stealth II S220 (6MB Rendition V2100) instead. That was a great card for early 3D games, yeah I missed Glide but most things I wanted to play got a Rendition port, even DOS stuff - especially Descent II which I was nuts for at the time. I bought the card when it was already a year or so old at some massive discount and got a copy of BattleZone (the pseudo-RTS remake) along with it. I think I had a K6/200. The LAN party boom was just getting started and I lugged that thing around to a few of the big ones, where I got my ass handed to me.

Eventually I upgraded to a K6-2/450 and a 16MB Voodoo Banshee long after everyone had moved on to Voodoo3s, but it was becoming apparent that Glide was dead by then. Finally I got a Radeon DDR that used that strange new AGP port.

I don't really remember what I did after that, there was a Duron 750 or something in there that got the Radeon - I think I still have it. I probably still have the Banshee and the Diamond Stealth too but sadly am afraid I ditched the K6 stuff.

At some point around 2000 I re-built my pre-K6 system, a Cyrix 5x86/100, for DOS stuff, and it got a Matrox m3D that I think I found at a garage sale(!) after a while. I forget what's in there for 2D. I definitely still have that whole machine intact.

EDIT: incidentally, a fun memory from the famous Uberfest '97 (or was it '98??) - during the Half Life: Team Fortress tournament (this is before it was standalone game!) some of my teammates asked me why the hell my character was moving in slow motion. He wasn't - my poor K6+Rendition just couldn't keep up! Eventually I was given a loaner PC for the rest of the tournament and we did okay.

486DX4-100 from 1995 to Dec 1998 with some Tseng and then Cirrus VLB video card. Upgraded the video card for Mechwarrior 2.
K63-400 with Nvidia TNT1 from 1999+

Plenty of games to play on both so I "survived" just fine.

Got my 1st computer in august 1998 (AMD 486 DX4 100Mhz, 32MB Ram, Oak Oti077 1MB ISA), due to finantial problems my dad sold it in june 1999, so no computer until the end of 1999 (this time was a pentium MMX 166Mhz, 32MB Ram, S3 Virge DX 4MB)

It wasnt until late 2000 that i could afford a S3 Savage 2000 16MB for my then Pentium MMX 233Mhz. The difference was HUGE and NFS Porsche 2000 ran beautiful

It wasn't until I bought my own PC in 1998 that I entered the world of hardware-accelerated 3D, thanks to a very reasonably priced Intel i740 paired with the venerable Gigabyte GA-6BXC and a Celeron 300A. Overclocked to 450MHz, that was one hell of a machine for the price at that time. After that I went to a GeForce 2 MX (on an AMD with a VIA chipset) and never again knew the rock solid reliability I had enjoyed with my i740. I still have those parts so one day I hope to have the space to set them all up again and get lost down memory lane for a while!

Before the i740, when I had a P100 with an S3 Trio 64, a friend of mine did have a 3Dfx card but he seemed to spend all his time stuffing around with drivers and settings just to get games working. My P100 somehow ran those games at almost the same framerate so I never really saw the point. I did see a cheap 3Dfx card on eBay a couple of years ago though, so I bought it to eventually put in a retro PC so I too can stuff around with drivers for a while. Actually I bought it because it's such a big piece of PC gaming history. Now if only I could find a cheap GUS...

Surprised how many people are similar to me and had a 486 up till 98!
After that I got a Gateway P2 400 where my friend recommended paying the extra for 16MB TNT.
I remember him showing me his Voodoo with a passthough cable and thinking it was messy! NFS3 was my big 3d game and the TNT was up to the task.