Intel486dx33 wrote on 2024-05-14, 16:24:

If someone wants to Save these Voodoo cards from the Recycle bin you need to design a NEW PCB board kit
To rebuild these Voodoo cards.

Your wish is my command… Voodoo 2 4444SX

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-05-14, 18:34:

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-05-14, 08:32:

Diablo 2 also ran much better in Glide mode on contemporary systems. And especially on the Voodoo 3, since there was no texture thrashing like on Voodoo 2 cards.

By the time Diablo 2 was released, 3dfx was hardly interesting for most buyers.

My first reaction was, "Really? " But then I thought about it, and Diablo 2 launch was summer 2000 (ie. the summer I never got out of home) and that was not only only well more than a whole year after Voodoo 3 released but also right around geforce 2 gts launch window (which was actually the final nail in the coffin for 3dfx). So yeah, 3dfx had lost most relevance by then. I suppose Diablo 2's 3dfx path being as good as it was is probably a result of its long development period..

megatron-uk wrote on 2024-05-13, 19:47:

I actually think 3dfx were doomed from the outset.
<snip>

really interesting post, thanks, good to see this explanation

kolderman wrote on 2024-05-13, 16:06:

I was there. The thing you need to realize is just how rapidly the scene evolved at that time. I remember the voodoo banshee being hot shit for a while, then the TNT happened. The TNT basically ended 3dfx for all but the most hardcore who could afford v2sli. And that was still 1998! When TNT2 landed the next year it was already over for 3dfx. From the first meaningful 3d accelerated game (quake) in 1996 with the voodoo1 to virtual irrelevance by 1999 shows how quickly things changed. You don't have to go all the way to the year 2000. I actually recall seeing ads for the voodoo4/5 in the early 2000s and remember thinking to myself "oh yeah remember that company called 3dfx?". Like they were basically a forgotten brand even before nvidia bought them. It was all geforce by then. You also need to understand is we were NOT nostalgic about stuff back then! People couldn't chuck out there DOS PCs fast enough. ISA? Eww. I wanna TNT and a SBLive! thank-you very much. Gravis ultrasound? In the bin. 3dfx? Ma I wanna geforce. And I wanna play half life. Literally no one was thinking about the 3dfx that could have been. There was just too much other stuff to think about and play. And then socketA came out with athlon/duron/sempron cpus ... the number of budget builds around that time combining semprons with gf2mx and sblive! Value was astronomical. Counter strike, baldurs gate, bf1942, cod, moh, efcw.

Short answer? We had moved on.

I agree with this... The speed of advancement at that time was really crazy, every year new stuff would come out that would completely outclass whatever was on the market before. And pretty much everyone believed the new stuff was simply better - unlike now when lots of us appreciate aspects of old tech that new stuff doesn't provide.

Also I think at the time most people were really focused on whatever gave the best performance (or value) at the time, and weren't very brand loyal. I remember around the early 2000's there were camps of "nVidiots, FanATIcs, and 3dfx Lamers" who roamed the forums, but these people were the minority. Nowadays I think more people pick their favorite tech brands and cheer / self-identify / flame / troll as if they're sports teams...

bZbZbZ wrote on 2024-05-21, 19:47:

Also I think at the time most people were really focused on whatever gave the best performance (or value) at the time, and weren't very brand loyal. I remember around the early 2000's there were camps of "nVidiots, FanATIcs, and 3dfx Lamers" who roamed the forums, but these people were the minority. Nowadays I think more people pick their favorite tech brands and cheer / self-identify / flame / troll as if they're sports teams...

I agree about brand loyalty wasn't the norm. 3dfx just happened to be first at making an accelerator that worked and have much game support. It could have been easily S3, SiS, Matrox, or ATI instead during the 1998 development window of the opportunity. I could have suggested Nvidia in that list, but we know what happened. But maybe that almost didn't happen. The thing is, Nvidia screwed up really bad with NV1, and the first Riva cards were kind of meh. So even they weren't a certainty. But all those companies made mistakes. There were even others that failed at trying.

Things were changing so fast, and there were so many options, and even then 3d wasn't really a mandatory requirement in playing games, and support was still maturing. It really did turn into about what game was coming out and getting the 3d card for it. You didn't know until it happened. 3dfx messed up because they lost that support war, and fell behind in tech, and mismanaged money. This was still the time when people bought their first 3d card. There couldn't be loyalty because no one could fall back on anyone's history on the 3d market, we only knew the early poor attempts at 3d people wanted to forget about. It's hard to say 3dfx could have garnered tons of loyalty going into 2000, because their primary success was the short lived accelerator add on, and then they faltered very quickly so that there wasn't much time to build loyalty in the brand. Their shortcomings were apparent in 99-00 leading to the decline, and then crash. It wasn't that much of a surprise, except in they were out of money too which caused them to immediately disappear. Today the leaders have had decades to build loyalty into their brand. The popular opinion now of something like 3dfx is nolstagia and wanting to play the games in their native form, of which there are quite a few.

I want to note, since people may point out, my nick is not a nostalgia thing. I created my nick back in 97-98 when I had got my first 3dfx card, primarily to taunt my opponents that I had good frame rates 😀 And it stuck for no good reason at all.

the3dfxdude wrote on 2024-05-21, 20:47:

The thing is, Nvidia screwed up really bad with NV1, and the first Riva cards were kind of meh. So even they weren't a certainty.

Apparently nVidia was really close to bankruptcy back then. Kinda crazy considering where they are now.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-05-21, 21:01:

the3dfxdude wrote on 2024-05-21, 20:47:

The thing is, Nvidia screwed up really bad with NV1, and the first Riva cards were kind of meh. So even they weren't a certainty.

Apparently nVidia was really close to bankruptcy back then. Kinda crazy considering where they are now.

That's what happens when you can almost consistently bring successful products to market for 25 years. From TNT2 (1999) onward, Nvidia only had a few moments where they faltered like the GeForce 5X00, Fermi, and Turing. And those were still commercially successful, even if they weren't the best performers and/or the best value at the time. They also managed to lock in a significant portion of the now incredibly lucrative GPU computing market by making CUDA easy to use at a time when AMD's GPUs needed pseudo-assembly code, and have continued making some of the most powerful GPU computing hardware on the market for well over a decade. Back in 2011, if you wanted a lot of compute for a problem that could be expressed as matrix math you bought as many GTX 580s as you could afford/could deliver power to. AMD's GCN 1.0 was incredible for gaming and compute, but by the time it was released a good chunk of the non-mining code in popular use was written for CUDA, and that meant you needed Nvidia hardware to do it.

As others have said, watching 3dfx die wasn't very remarkable at the time since everything just kept advancing so quickly; they had been behind for a while, and my reaction was along the lines of a Jeremy Clarkson "Oh, how terrible! Moving on..."

I started with a Videologic Apocalypse 3DX (PowerVR) as I thought Ultim@te Race looked amazing! But the technology was terribly supported and pretty soon my younger brother's 3Dfx Voodoo 1 card was running everything much better!

I think we had a Voodoo2 at some point... I owned a Voodoo 5 5500AGP for a while; the anti-aliasing on that was amazing for the time! Better than many other implementations around then.

I can't really remember what happened after that. I think I went from my 300MHz Pentium 2 to a Pentium 4 3.2GHz Extreme Edition which came with an ATi card, then I moved eventually to Nvidia, who consumed 3Dfx anyway, and stuck with them.

i admit i never really thought much about 3dfx voodoo stuff back when it was happening. i spent the period on cheap pci 2d cards and all the games i played looked fine, then when voodoo was ending i got a pc with a tnt2 card and everything 3d looked great!

I seem to recall that while 3dfx was still "popular" when the Voodoo4 was around, it was either too expensive or hard to get. I did not know anyone who had a card newer than Voodoo 2, everyone I knew just had other cards. I think by that point the sheen has worn off and there wasn't enough exlusives that were really worth buying a Voodoo card for. I also remember that Voodoo 5 did not even get carried in stores in my area, and I had to get a 5500 from some other method. I don't think I bought it from the internet, perhaps I did, I really don't remember. I knew some people at disty so it is possible I got it that way.

Anyways, it was just kind of sad that there wasn't anything newer than that card. By the point I had to buy a new video card in 2001 I just had bought an nVidia card because it was only really them or ATI.