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.

Responding to an old thread BUT.....
I was going to get a voodoo 3 but by the time I got around to it they were pulled from ALL the stores - I wound up getting one at a "computer show"

I had a Monster Voodoo 1 in 3D, then a Voodoo2 and then a Voodoo 3... I remember drooling over these TNT2!! I never had the chance to buy one, but it really made an impression on me. So much so that 10 years ago, back when retro gaming wasn't even on my radar (I never thought it could be), I bought a Creative TNT 2 pro on eBay for $10; like it was something on my bucket list... So yeah, even back then Voodoo 3 was just okay. But Voodoo 2 was a whole different story!

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

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.

(Since someone else already woke up this thread...)
And I would probably add two things:
1) it wasn't clear in the moment what would be left behind. I doubt anyone went and bought a TNT2 or a PCI sound card or whatever and thought "oh great, now I won't be able to play game X, Y, and Z ever again"
PC world is so compatible that you don't generally have those moments - it's more X years later that you're like "oh, this game I really liked in 1996-7, it... doesn't seem to run in XP"
2) unless you were starved for real estate, you still had your old hardware. Let's say you had a Pentium 90 with an S3 video card and an ISA sound card in 2000. That machine had effectively zero resale value. Maybe it could be used for school stuff like word processing. You certainly couldn't give it to grandma as her first computer to get on the Internet because it wouldn't handle that acceptably - certainly an elcheapo emachines Celeron 466 would get grandma on the Internet a whole lot better than your old P90. So, if you cared about your DOS game from 1995, you... just walked over to the Pentium 90 and played it there. But it wouldn't really have occurred to you to care whether your shiny new Pentium III could play that game. If anything, the fact that you could play it on the old hardware helped with family dynamics - another person could be using the new shiny new Pentium III to do modern stuff while you were playing the old game on the P90.

And the other thing is, new stuff was better. On a then-modern OS (which, itself, was better than the previous OS, at least after its first service pack), an SB X-Fi was better than an Audigy 2 which was better than an Audigy which was better than a Live which was better than an AWE64 which was better than an AWE32 which was better than a SB16. It's more in the past 10-15 years that... new stuff... hasn't been released, and if anything, higher end stuff gets discontinued with no replacement.

To go back to the original question, I never had a Voodoo, it wasn't the type of thing I could have gotten past my parents in the late-1990s. It was something some people had for a year or two that was cool, then it was just... forgotten about... almost as quickly as it came in. Keep in mind that in 1999-2000, many people were still playing games with no GPU acceleration, and those people went straight from that to TNT2 M64s and GeForces and whatnot and those played the older software-rendered games just fine.

One final observation I will make, though - the Voodoo marked the end of being able to play games well on a computer that your parents had bought for serious purposes. In the days of software rendering, you got the best processor you could afford, and that was the end of it. By 2000, the world had become separated into two camps - the elcheapo onboard i810/no AGP slot world, which included almost all the large OEM systems you could buy at the worst buys of the world, and the enthusiasty-AGP-discrete-graphics systems that actually had the horsepower for the new 3D-accelerated games. And long-term-wise, I suspect that was very unhealthy for PC gaming, massively raising the barriers to entry.

I guess I was the one that woke up the thread 🤣

I still have never used any NVIDIA cards. I have several Voodoo 3 cards, but when I moved on from there I went with Radeons

I was totally ignorant to dedicated GPUs then. First pc in 99 had onboard ati rage 128 which played the bundled games packed with the pc, e.g red alert. 2003 also ignorant to what was placed in pc by custom build order Vs what dell was offering. Custom built pc had an mx440se, unstable sh** show. Currently have voodoo 3 2000 agp in 440bx build which does the job and opens up comparability. Have a whole lot of cool hardware now being more tech savvy

I think that I went directly from a budget box with a K6-2 with integrated SiS530 (6236) to a still yet cheap Geforce 2mx PCI, and somewhere along there to a Duron with the same Geforce card (later a Radeon 7200). I had a few friends that had 3dfx cards, I can remember being jealous of a buddy who could play Unreal with nice texture filtering and smooth framerate on his Pentium II 233. He had upgraded from a Rage of some kind that already kicked my SiS around pretty hard.

I guess I mostly missed the 3dfx during it's hey day. But like others have already said, it wasn't so much of being aware that we were watching history. It was just another tech company/product biting the dust. No one was upset when Nokia stopped making cell phones either. Or Aiwa gave up on home stereo's. It was just a product that was there, and was replaced by something else that worked better.

In short, no one cared.

The most important thing to understand about the rise and fall of 3dfx is that one, it was an extremely short period of time (around 2 years), and two, it occurred during a time of incredible and rapid change in the PC industry overall.

Every other day something new and amazing would emerge - be it some revolutionary tech, a genre-redefining game, some new buzz sensation on the internet. 3dfx was one story among thousands of similar stories that were saturating the mindset of young gamers at the time.

So what was it like watching it die? Well we could barely notice, not because we didn't care, but we were too busy playing half-life until 5am in the morning. Do you get it? As amazing as 3dfx was, it was just one amazing thing out of a world of amazing things we were being hit by almost every day.

When it finally did die, we could barely even remember those days just a few years earlier. Why? Because that's what happens when you experience rapid change. You are still adjusting to the new awesome world you have woken up to, and you have still yet to fully comprehend the change that has taken place, or properly realized that 1997-1998 might just have been the two greatest years in your life, with 3dfx at the heart of them.

It has basically taken 20 years of watching the PC industry rise and then stagnate to the point of boredom...most of us now have steam libraries of thousands of unplayed games from previous gaming eras...still working through playlists of games 10 years old....to suddenly look back on that time and remember the first time you fired up GLquake and saw the future for the first time, and realize, yeah something incredible happened then. And for me it wasn't even on a 3dfx card (yet), it was a Riva 128.

The point is we care about the rise and death of 3dfx now more in retrospect than we did at the time. The question for me is...why 3dfx? Lots of other companies rose and fell, why don't we talk about them as much and wonder what if they had survived? I personally have a greater affinity for Sierra and often wonder what would have happened if it didn't sell out (and then go bankrupt due to fraud), and imagine if we had seen more sequels to all those amazing adventure games from the era. And to be fair there is a lot more being done about the history of Sierra than 3dfx...multiple books written, and a new movie is currently being produced (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WqaPCJRwko).

But if you really want to get a feeling of the spirit of the time of 3dfx, I would look no further than this mind-bogglingly good youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@quakespeedrunsexplained). The fact this channel exists to me means that time is still alive and captured so perfectly in these videos. Also too see an even earlier time is still alive and well, check out this (https://www.youtube.com/@doomwads).

As discussed many times, imho the Voodoo 2 already felt like an old concept in a time where next gen specifications where expected even when not fully usable. 3dfx felt like waiting for a next gen design that would take like forever and clearly after the SLI already out of time concept, came the Voodoo3 with huge expectations for such powerful brand/name and single chip high end product and instead felt a Banshee II and nothing more. And for a second time then came the VSA-100 as late as possible and feeling what the Voodoo3 was expected to be and still running on that 250nm process. Same marketing seen before with high prices and taking time for an impossible future in such complex and fast industry.

I honestly disagree with the sentiment that Voodoo 3 was late and slow, it was everything I wanted and expected it to be. I could run Freespace 2 in 1024x768. 32-bit gaming was a joke. It was an absolutely fantastic card with great backwards compatibility with the glide library. I really don't know what people wanted. People are still falling for the same dumb Incoming 32bit benchmark...