First post, by 3dprophet
Hi Retro Hardware Enthusiasts,
I wanted to get more information on the S3 Trio 3D 4MB AGP video card. What 3D games can this card run comfortably or was meant to run when it was released?
I remember having this card in our family computer in 1998-2000 when I was growing up. I never got any 3D games to work with it and I wanted a Voodoo 3 card badly. I remember trying the Need for Speed 4 demo in 3D acceleration mode, the game would load, work like a slideshow for 5 seconds, and the PC would freeze. Other games froze on the menu when using 3D mode or the mouse cursor was very slow and it froze after loading the game. At the time I concluded it's a 2D card only, however now that I think about it, it was rendering NFS4 in glorious 3D for 5 seconds before it froze so that can't be. I'm guessing with only 4MB the card was running out of VRAM? Sadly I don't have the system/card anymore but I am curious what was happening to make the PC freeze. Once I upgraded the card to a Hercules 3D Prophet 4000XT everything worked fine. That is until the thermal paste failed on that card and it started overheating/artifacting.