Ah, why did you spring that on me when I didn't have the parts dug out to play along at home yet, I know where the creative nomad is for the tunes, and a 600Mhz PIII in a Compaq, but I'm coming up short on a Diamond Monster 3D that's wandered off and nested somewhere secluded....

It was interesting, but lots of it were factually incorrect. Some random thoughts.

1. More than just 3 players in 3D. Matrox and S3 were very much into the high end 3D business in 1998. They exited about a year later or more later.
2. Coppermine 700 was way more than what was available for Voodoo2 SLI at the time. Realistically, we'd be looking a a P2-450. However, it takes about a Coppermine/Athlon 700 to not be CPU bound at lower resolutions.
3. 3dfx went for brute speed up until Voodoo 3. For their VSA-100, one could argue their pursuit of higher image quality led to their downfall.
4. Most PCI modems were soft modems. So a hardcore gamer would likely use an ISA one, such as a USR Sportster.

Edit: He also said Voodoo2 SLI wasn't surpassed until GeForce 256. That's false. TNT2 vanilla, Matrox G400, and ATI Rage 128 was on par with it for the most part. And voodoo3-2000 (the lowest tier) was regarded to be as fast as a voodoo2-sli.

dexvx wrote:

1. More than just 3 players in 3D. Matrox and S3 were very much into the high end 3D business in 1998. They exited about a year later or more later.
2. Coppermine 700 was way more than what was available for Voodoo2 SLI at the time. Realistically, we'd be looking a a P2-450. However, it takes about a Coppermine/Athlon 700 to not be CPU bound at lower resolutions.
4. Most PCI modems were soft modems. So a hardcore gamer would likely use an ISA one, such as a USR Sportster.

I think they did pretty good for a modern hardware channel, He kept calling it that other guy's PC, rekon he's into retro goodness, maybe he's even here somewhere?

1. Safe to say they were only talking about gaming here, and neither of other 2 were serious contenders by then.
2. Cant double check, but they were going for 1998 (not that the 700 fits that criteria either)
4. Hardcore used external modems all the way!

But overall I thought is was quite well done, not completely clueless or look how crap old hardware runs modern stuff like other modern hardware channels efforts

I watched it and found it interesting... It's funny... I too never actually seen a V2 SLI in person. I have the necessary parts but haven't installed it yet. Nor do I know if I ever will 😲 Just way too many interesting items to play with in a very limited time frame at the moment.

I saw the video and liked it, though it wasn't exactly on the level of Phil's Computer Lab when it comes to this retro stuff. I also have a V2-SLI in my system, but the CPU was definitely a bottleneck to performance with the old 350MHz Pentium II, so I got a 600MHz Pentium III (fastest Katmai that my MB can run) and it really gave me a serious bump in the benchmarks and framerates. I'm also running a TNT2 32MB AGP card which is pretty much on-par with the V2-SLI in terms of performance. It does better with DirectX when the V2s don't have access to Glide.

FFXIhealer wrote:

I saw the video and liked it, though it wasn't exactly on the level of Phil's Computer Lab when it comes to this retro stuff. I also have a V2-SLI in my system, but the CPU was definitely a bottleneck to performance with the old 350MHz Pentium II, so I got a 600MHz Pentium III (fastest Katmai that my MB can run) and it really gave me a serious bump in the benchmarks and framerates. I'm also running a TNT2 32MB AGP card which is pretty much on-par with the V2-SLI in terms of performance. It does better with DirectX when the V2s don't have access to Glide.

When you say also, do you mean the TNT is acting as the 2D for the Voodoos? ... For some reason I thought PCI card was needed.... (I am a n00b to V2 setups, I skipped them in the day, picked up cards later to get around to trying it sometime. Still gotta figure out cables/make them.)

My TNT2 AGP card does act as my 2D card, yes. The output of that goes into my Voodoo2 and then goes to my monitor. If I use the TNT2 card for DirectX gaming, that's what I see. The V2 cards are simply in bypass mode unless they get activated via drivers. I only use my V2 cards when the game has been optimized for Glide.

kixs wrote:

I watched it and found it interesting... It's funny... I too never actually seen a V2 SLI in person. I have the necessary parts but haven't installed it yet. Nor do I know if I ever will 😲 Just way too many interesting items to play with in a very limited time frame at the moment.

I bought my 2x Voodoo II 8MB around 2003 (when Voodoos were seriously cheap) with the intention to run a SLI and never actually managed that, I don't have the SLI cable (which I know it's not difficult to make with a floppy disk drive cable), but I discovered after a while that one of my cards crashes after a few minutes of quake 2, and the other requires active cooling not to give me artifacts (also it took me a while to figure it out that the moded drivers I got were overclocking the cards to 95 or 93Mhz and giving me problems), so... I also have the cards and never seen a V2 SLI working in person, kind of funny.

well, it's cool to see a major "youtube celebrity" digging into it I guess.

dexvx wrote:

It was interesting, but lots of it were factually incorrect. Some random thoughts. […]
Show full quote

It was interesting, but lots of it were factually incorrect. Some random thoughts.

1. More than just 3 players in 3D. Matrox and S3 were very much into the high end 3D business in 1998. They exited about a year later or more later.
2. Coppermine 700 was way more than what was available for Voodoo2 SLI at the time. Realistically, we'd be looking a a P2-450. However, it takes about a Coppermine/Athlon 700 to not be CPU bound at lower resolutions.
3. 3dfx went for brute speed up until Voodoo 3. For their VSA-100, one could argue their pursuit of higher image quality led to their downfall.
4. Most PCI modems were soft modems. So a hardcore gamer would likely use an ISA one, such as a USR Sportster.

Edit: He also said Voodoo2 SLI wasn't surpassed until GeForce 256. That's false. TNT2 vanilla, Matrox G400, and ATI Rage 128 was on par with it for the most part. And voodoo3-2000 (the lowest tier) was regarded to be as fast as a voodoo2-sli.

Yeah, there's more nuance than can be fit into a <10 minute video that's primarily about the cards themselves. You can really only include a Cliff's Notes version of the history, and at the later stage of 3dfx's life, ATI and NVidia were the two that were in the best position to move forward, while the others were declining.

The system as a whole was one of Ivan's from his youth, not put together from scratch for the video, so some of the components being anachronistic is an artifact of that. There are at least two staff members who have a serious passion for old hardware now, so it's entirely likely this won't be the last foray into earlier PC gaming hardware...

chinny22 wrote:

1. Safe to say they were only talking about gaming here, and neither of other 2 were serious contenders by then. 2. Cant double […]
Show full quote

1. Safe to say they were only talking about gaming here, and neither of other 2 were serious contenders by then.
2. Cant double check, but they were going for 1998 (not that the 700 fits that criteria either)
4. Hardcore used external modems all the way!

But overall I thought is was quite well done, not completely clueless or look how crap old hardware runs modern stuff like other modern hardware channels efforts

Matrox and S3 were quite serious about the gaming market until 2000. For S3, Savage4 was decent mid-range solution. The Savage2000 was great on paper, but both products were plagued by driver issues. Matrox G400 was arguably the fastest 3D card until GeForce256. It too was plagued by driver issues, mostly in OpenGL.

I was reading a Gf256 thread yesterday, where it was pointed out that that wasn't even fast until drivers matured and games/demos/benches came out that took advantage of it's features and by then GF2 was faster.

I also think people thought the geforce 256 was more future proof (compared to the 3dfx rival) because of hardware tnl and the claim that it lowered your cpu usage

The problem with GF256's advantage, is by the time games that actually do use HW T&L came out, the GF2 was already out and the GF3 was just around the corner...

There's also that other underutilized advantage: hardware cubemapping. I have never heard of a game from that era with support for it.