Even without a 3d card there's many great software rendered games to play. All the good ones in the RTS genre didn't support any 3d hardware.

Also if you stuck with Nvidia from the Riva128 up, you're grand for the rest of that decade, no 3dfx is no big deal. especially with the sudden explosion of glide wrappers during 1999 which was meant for MUST PLAY ZELDA64 ON MY RAGEPRO etc

The only real pain is the lack of the best UnrealEngine performance, but frankly most of the UE games during the 90s weren't that significant. You had a Quakeish, you had a scifi Quakeish, you had the worst reviewed 3d hunting game, and you had some sort of children's 3d puzzler. OK OK i'll mention the shitty platformer alpha some people seem to obsess over too. The engine only gained significant use toward the end of 99 so surviving wasn't much of an issue then.

Another significant popular Glide game was Starsiege Tribes. Its OpenGL support wasn't very polished and very belated. Given that it's a very twitch multiplayer shooter, you're dead meat without a 3dfx card.....but on the other hand, smoe servers ran mods that had cloaking devices which was only effective to 3dfx users since it used a fadeout function only created for supporting that API 😀

I actually didn't have any fancy graphics cards in the 90's (Or for that matter until 2008 when I finally bought a new computer), just the S3 that was built into my 1996 Packard Bell. I played DOS games for the most part anyhow but I always wondered what things like GlQuake were for. 🤣

It's pretty cool now that I have examples of both the Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 to play around with and see what I was missing out on. 😁

leileilol wrote:

The engine only gained significant use toward the end of 99 so surviving wasn't much of an issue then...

When I read this post, all I could think was "Hmm... maybe I'll start a thread entitled 'Things You Know a Little Bit Too Much About But Probably Shouldn't'". For years I felt my DOS experience was wasted, so imagine my joy when finding this place. Are there many other forums in which people would have the first idea what you just said? I think most of us speak gobbledegook most of the time (not to each other of course. Although sometimes...) 😉

Also started with a Diamond Stealth II S220, later i added a daimond voodoo2 12mb. Later my s220 got replaced with a matrox g200

chinny22 wrote:

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.

Also used a 486 (DX2 66MHz, my family's) until I built my own computer early '98. I hadn't heard about the Voodoo 2 when I built it, so I wen't for the ATI Expert@Play 8MB AGP (ATI Rage Pro) for my new Pentium II 300 rig. My first card of choice were the Hercules Thriller 3D (Rendition Verite V2200), but I couldn't find any shop who got it in stock. The Expert@Play survived until Christmas '99 when I got the Creative 3D Blaster Annihilator Pro (GeForce DDR), which survived until late summer of '02 when I got my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro.

A friend of mine bought a Voodoo 2 12MB right after I built my new rig back in '98 (he initially had a NVIDIA Riva 128, but he could't disable the integrated graphics on his Packard Bell Pentium 133). Compared to my newly bought Expert@Play I was amazed by the performance even on a Pentium 133.

brostenen wrote:

Was it creative that had those extremely beautifull black uniformed boxes for GF2's?

My GeForce DDR also had a black box, still got both the card and the box. 😀

I got a 486 machine (I'm sure that's what it was considering how it ran stuff) when voodoo 1 was out, then moved up to what I assume was a p1 machine in the late 90's. Early 2000's I got 950MHz Celeron PC which had some sort of 8MB integrated 3d accelerator. So that's how my voodoo era was going - not so well. Unreal Tournament was pretty much the only big 3d MP shooter I could play.

Worst part was that the 8MB integrated chip was agp so it used the slow system RAM for memory.
When Mafia came out I was really hyped for it, however it was a slideshow so my uncle actually got me a GF2 MX400 as a gift 😎 ...buuut since the 8MB piece of crap was using agp, there was no agp slot and I was stuck with a card I couldn't use 😵
I had that until sometime in 2003 my uncle helped me again, this time to build my first gaming machine (1333MHz Athlon + the gf2 mx). Mainboard was Nforce2 and it HATED everything I had. Constant crashes, bluescreens, the works. However it was the first time in my life that I had a machine that played EVERYTHING I threw at it. Not at high settings, obviously, but I didn't mind that much.

I don't know much about our first computer. I heard that it had an Athlon in it, but I don't know more than that. I still have the GPU that we upgraded to (dunno what the first was), and it's a Diamond Viper V770U (looks to be RIVA TNT2 Ultra) with 32MB. Unfortunately, this card doesn't really work too well anymore, the signal looks very degraded and has massive ghosting, along with the fan no longer spinning.

I didn't get to experience any 3dfx hardware until after the turn of the millennium. Around '98, we had the P166 Compaq Deskpro that my dad's work let him use at home. Looking at the specs, it had an integrated S3 Trio64V+. Can't remember what I played or if I played any games on that system. Only other system that our family had at the time was the old 486SX-33(?) tower, dunno what graphics it had. Eventually, in '99, we moved up to an AMD K6 233MHz system with Trident graphics IIRC, after my dad gave the Deskpro back to his work.

I didn't have a 3D accelerator at all. Used some onboard SiS chip with 1MB memory. I really wanted a 3D accelerator and a more current CPU, but had to wait until 2003 when I could buy that kind of stuff with my own money.

Played a lot of Duke Nukem, Transport Tycoon Deluxe, Sim City 2000, Theme Hospital, and Heroes of Might and Magic. Anything that didn't need a 3D accelerator to be enjoyable.

Unfortunately, in those times I could not afford the luxury of owning a legendary Voodoo I or II... I went ahead with my trusty Olivetti M300 for a long time, and I still believe that I was always more attracted by MS-DOS titles that those accelerated 'new' ones on Win9x platform. This does not take away the fact that I was dying of envy for my lucky friends: I can still remember how I dreamed after seeing one of these playing with his PC to Nintendo 64 emulator without any problems, thanks to its configuration Intel 740 + Voodoo II... Only very later, and thanks to the loan of a friend of mine who gave me for a bit of time his 133 with Voodoo I, I could afford to play Half-Life decently.

I did have 3dfx hardware in the late 90's. I'm just telling you it wasn't much to miss, and still couldn't run Unreal very well anyway. 😀

The magazines of the time, featuring those early 3D accelerated games: The screenshots showed low poly worlds with washed out textures. It did not appeal to me much. Not until the time of the Riva TNT (Diamond Viper), which was recommended by a friend. Before I managed to get one of those, the TNT2 Vanta/M64 was introduced and I bought that one instead.

32mb ATI all-in-wonder agp card. Ran everything I threw at it until Tribes 2 came out, lots of artifacts but ran at 15-20fps so I still played online with it. Even used to play Halo CE on it which ran amazingly terrible. Star Siege Tribes, UT99, Doom, Motocross Madness, Midtown Madness and a whole bunch of other games were fantastic on the ATI card and 450mhz P3.

The Mystique did me proud for a long time. Going from 320x200 to 640x480 and with a higher framerate was astounding which ever way you look at it. The bundled games like Mechwarrior 2 and Scorched Planet looked amazing. The card also had enough grunt to play Motoracer perrfectly well, but compatibility was the biggest issue in other titles, especially as the months progressed and every developer adopted 3Dfx and Glide. Made it harder to hang on to my beloved Mystique each passing day. I eventually bought a VooDoo 1 and kept the Mystique as my 2D card, and to play Mechwarrior 2 from time to time.

To be honest, 3Dfx was the best hands down in terms of performance, price and compatibility and it was just too difficult to avoid for the latter. Once the TNT came out it was definitely not a one horse race anymore in terms of power and visual quality, but it took devs a while to shift their priority away from Glide. The VooDoo 2 was strong but expensive, SLI was insane in terms of speed but cost an arm and a leg. By the time VooDoo 3 arrived there were some real alternatives (better, dare I say?) and the developers finally offered a nice D3D compatibility as well as OpenGL etc.

But from 1997-1998, to get the *most* from PC gaming, one had to own a VooDoo. And just to be cool, and for the case stickers etc...

I guess I'm another Matrox supporter. My G400 treated me quite well through this time.

I went through a variety of video cards in the late 90s - early 2000s. I don't remember them all. I never had a 3Dfx card until later, in the mid-2000s I got a V3-3000 mostly out of curiosity, and I was kinda disappointed (at that time my main card was a Geforce4-4200, no wonder the disappointment). I started with a ATI Rage Pro, went through others such as G200, TNT2-M64, GF3-Ti200 (which was a hand-me-down from a friend), wanted a Radeon 8500 but couldn't afford it, eventually managed to get the GF4-4200 which I held for a long time, skipped a few generations... at some point I played with a Radeon 9700 for a while which I flashed with Apple firmware and used in a home-built Mac G3... Made the jump from AGP to PCIe with a Radeon X800 which was disappointing, got rid of it and tried a Radeon X1300, another disappointment, then found my groove with a Geforce 8800 GT which finally gave me the good OpenGL support I had been looking for. When that one burned out (guess the fanless design on a powerful card had something to do with it, thank you very much ECS) I went to a Radeon 5870, and then to my current Radeon 7970. Whew.

Out of all of these I still have the 4200 which I'm using in my PII retro machine, the 5870 in a secondary desktop and the 7970 in my main desktop.

I survived the 90's with only a Voodoo 1 for a 3d card along with 2mb Diamond Stealth 2000(S3 Virge) and p200mmx. After the Chernobyl Virus wiped out the BIOS on my
DFI Intel HX motherboard I bought a Super socket 7 Epox board and a Gigabyte TNT2 Pro and wasn't particularly impressed with what 500mhz of K6-2 500 could do, so a few
months later Sept or OCT 2000 I upgraded to a Duron 650 which when underclocked to 500mhz doubled my 3d mark 2000 score from the K6-2 500.

In 97 I bought a Matrox M3D and installled it in my Cyrix PR166. 😢
Ultimate Race and a handful of others (POD, Nightmare Creatures, MDK) ran OK. Everything else ran like crap.
In 99 I got a Voodoo1 & Cyrix 233 which improved things a lot.
Yes, my PC purchases were heavily cost influenced back then 🤣

I'm quite surprised, thought I was the black sheep with my g200 without opengl