Excellent write up!

I use my Virge mainly as a 2D card, because it has excellent DOS game compatibility. But I do occasionally play some S3D games out of curiosity, even if the frame rates aren't that great. It's not a card that I would recommend for Win9x gaming, but it's pretty solid for DOS.

Very interesting, thanks!

Excellent write-up, very fun to read through!

Really good! Do you plan to do more?

vetz: Definitely yes. I plan to add an in-depth article about the SGI IrisVision 3D accelerator for PCs soon. It should have been released with the current ones (Virge, OpenGL MCD, Toshiba Libretto), but there was still too much work remaining, so I postponed it. Given my current interests, I assume that I will write something about the 3D hardware in SGI Indy and SGI O2 workstations in near future… or maybe about my TIGA-compatible SPEA card (which I am developing a vector game for). Other consumer 3D accelerators are planned too, but I cannot promise any date as I am very slow...

Looking forward to that.

One little OT question from that article- Matrox Millennium II had a triangle setup?

Thank! Great reading 😀 Did You measured fillrate of these cards?

Putas: My fault. I've just fixed it in the text. I always thought there must be a triangle setup engine inside it, because the card provides good triangle-rate results even with period correct computers, but based on the dev docs, you need to send precalculated slope parameters to the card.

BigDaddyM wrote on 2021-04-11, 19:35:

Thank! Great reading 😀 Did You measured fillrate of these cards?

All the results we* measured are accessible here: http://swarm.cz/gpubench/_GPUbench-results.htm
... the pixel fill-rate numbers mentioned in the article are all based on our own measurements. More info about the benchmark here: http://retro.swarm.cz/gpubench/

*) This is a collaborative effort of multiple people.

I really enjoyed this, excellent effort. You are probably right that very few people can appreciate it, but they're definitely not non-existent.

I had a great time using my Virge DX (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro) in terminal velocity s3d edition which produced a reasonable framerate with some of the settings effects turned down. Much more enjoyable than software graphics. I didn't bother using it in any other game but maybe this article has maybe changed my mind 😀

Cheers

The S3D version of Tomb Raider is fairly nice too.

You get a 16-bit color palette (up from 256 colors in software mode), perspective correction and bilinear filtering. In terms of performance, an overclocked Virge DX can reach ~20 FPS at 640x480. Not too bad considering the game is capped at 30 FPS. Swaaye has some gameplay recordings on his YouTube channel.

that framerate is rough for TR and drops way under 20fps, but what can be said in virge's favor is that it doesn't seem to run with that stupid high washed out gamma like voodoo1 did.

as hinted at in the article 400x300 would be a much more sane resolution for this chip... but with the lack of features it seems like a lost cause anyway. there's also the case of later software renderers - in the article there is a comparison of needing a 1ghz piii to match virge's performance in software opengl for quake, but unreal's software renderer will deliver much more impressive results on a cpu half as fast.

wow what an impressive article! kudos!
I did not know about the real benefit of the VX variant , indeed a misunderstood chip!

auron wrote on 2021-04-12, 07:07:

that framerate is rough for TR and drops way under 20fps, but what can be said in virge's favor is that it doesn't seem to run with that stupid high washed out gamma like voodoo1 did

Swaaye was using an original Virge for that video, not the DX.

My overclocked Virge DX stays closer to 20 FPS most of the time, according to the built-in frame rate counter (activated via F2 key). If you lower the resolution to 512x384 it can even overshoot 20 FPS at times. Of course, you get a locked 30 FPS at 320x200 but that's too pixelated for my taste (in that game).

So apparently the (Dell branded) STB Nitro3D I have is one of the 'best' Virge cards, cool.
In 1996 my dad got a store-bought P166 MMX with an S3 Virge (original chip) and Aztech 2320 soundcard. In retrospect neat components being that they were common OEM fodder but also very compatible.
The S3 card came with the special version of Descent 2, however that crashed quite often. At the time I wasn't aware of any other games that could utilize the chip (such as Pod, which also came with the computer because of MMX). I tried GlQuake using a wrapper but it lacked textures. I also remember somehow, just once, getting Turok 1 to work on the card - I remember being really surprised at the time, and frustrated that I couldn't get it to run a second time. But it seems so strange that I might just be misremembering.

Very interesting writeup! Learned a lot from this 😀

I really like my S3 Virge DX card for its fantastic 2D compatibility in DOS.

Interesting writeup. I suspected that the DX with EDO mem is preferrable to the GX with SDRAM, and now I know why.

As someone who tested the faster Virge DX in many 1990s 3D games, my impression is that it was OK for 1996 - 1997 simple 3D games, especially if you use a lower resolution like 400 x 300. The 3dfx Voodoo set high expectations for 640 x 480 at 30fps, but it was in a league of its own, and other 1996 3D cards including the Virge never promised such performance.

However, S3 and the Virge series as a whole is not without blame. Other companies like Ati and Nvidia made great improvements in their products every year from 1996 to 1997 and 1998. But S3 milked the Virge series until 1998 when the Savage3D got released, and even that was plagued by buggy drivers and was an overall disappointment. Playing 1998 games like Half Life, Blood2 and NFS3 on the Virge is just painful, no matter how you tweak the settings. And you can forget about Unreal on the Virge.

Overall, I think generally bad cards do deserve the bad reputation they get, even if typical youtubers like to exaggerate things. But Virge is not alone in that regard. Many graphic card makers like Matrox, Trident and CL had a rough time keeping up with the times as 3D games complexity and consumer expectations grew every year.

and other 1996 3D cards including the Virge never promised such performance.

Virge and 3dfx were never direct competitors to begin with. Voodoo 1 was not a video card and Voodoo Rush was a joke. It started to get really toasty for S3 after Riva 128 and Rage Pro were released.