HunterZ wrote:

Interesting. I would guess that you must have been playing a bunch of earlier Glide-optimized games when you got the TNT1, or that you didn't get the later ones running in 32-bit color with trilinear filtering?

TNT isn't that much superior to Voodoo2 in the end. It didn't quite make the clock speeds they hoped to reach. The 32-bit color mode has a nearly 50% speed impact. Trilinear filtering was fake for awhile ("fast trilinear" looks like alpha stipple). And the uphill battle against games designed mainly for Voodoo cards wasn't helpful.

Some TNT cards are also blurry and could have color problems too thanks to cheap board manufacturers.

HunterZ wrote:

tincup wrote:

My own experience was similar to HunterZ but reversed. I started out S3 + V1, moved up to a V2, then gave the TNT a shot but found IQ a real disappointment and went back to 3dfx with a V5, which stayed in service until a P4 motherboard upgrade without an AGP 2x slot forced me to give up 3dfx entirely. Looking back that point was the unofficial start of my interest in 'retro' as I always maintained a 3dfx compatible box to supplement my main rig.

Interesting. I would guess that you must have been playing a bunch of earlier Glide-optimized games when you got the TNT1, or that you didn't get the later ones running in 32-bit color with trilinear filtering?

That may well have contributed, but I remember a lot of driver instability issues and the overall lackluster IQ drew me back to 3dfx. AA was important with my flying and driving games, another draw [European Air War and Grand Prix Legends for example].

That said I'm planning a retro project to re-acquaint myself with the early TNT stuff. I still have the old gear and with the benefit of itchy clean W9x installs and well configured hardware I'll be able to more clearly judge. TNT + V2 would be a good place to start.

TNT is probably most at home with OpenGL games. I spent a lot of time playing Daikatana, Half Life, Quake 2, and Hexen 2 on one last fall. I was on a video card binge and experimented with about 8 different cards with various games.

That makes sense. I was after higher resolution with AA for the flying/driving simulators - and as good frames as could be mustered of course - the big battle. Back then 3dfx felt like the best for that. Longbow 2 3dfx was stunning for the time. AA is important in these kinds of games for long range visual accuracy and it was often beneficial to enable some level of AA even at the expense of frames just to be able to see clearly in the distance - whether it was an oncoming formation of planes or making out the turn markers of an upcoming corner.

Well you don't get to enable any forms of AA on a TNT in any game that I know of. It probably supports some kind of edge AA but D3D and OpenGL games didn't bother back then.

Glide and Rendition RRedline were the ways to go for anti-aliasing.

On the other hand even my V5 chugged at times with Half-Life max-ed out especially during pitched battles with the energy emitting monsters. When I moved to a Radeon 9700 Pro [after the AGP 2x slot misstep] it was an entirely new era performance wise, but appeal for the visual aspects of Glide soldiered on as it still does.

So I did a little bit of quick testing to see performance differences on the few cards I have laying around:

P2 350MHz, 392MB Ram.

3DMark 2000
800x600x16
Default settings

ATi Rage IIc
121 Marks

Voodoo 2 12mb SLI
1032 Marks

Trident Blade3D 9880
880 Marks

NVidia TNT 2 M64
1256 Marks

3DMark 99
800x600x16
Default settings

ATi Rage IIc
177 Marks

TNT2
2841 Marks

Voodoo 2 SLI
2303 Marks

GLQuake
640x480

ATi Rage IIc
DNF (Black screen/ screen turned off)

Voodoo 2 12mb SLI Glide
139.5 FPS
140.4 FPS
140.7 FPS

Trident Blade3D
.6 FPS

NVidia TNT M64
40.7 FPS

I must say I'm relatively happy with my PIII @450 + Matrox G450 + 2x Voodoo II SLI – G450 maybe is not a beast, but works well in my configuration. Motherboard is Asus P3B-F.

Indrid Cold wrote:

I must say I'm relatively happy with my PIII @450 + Matrox G450 + 2x Voodoo II SLI – G450 maybe is not a beast, but works well in my configuration. Motherboard is Asus P3B-F.

Not surprising.. nice system!

Thanks mate - I love simple-but-no-problems builds and when I was young (and poor) I loved Matrox ones: great colours and 2D, 3D acceptable.

Indrid Cold wrote:

I must say I'm relatively happy with my PIII @450 + Matrox G450 + 2x Voodoo II SLI – G450 maybe is not a beast, but works well in my configuration. Motherboard is Asus P3B-F.

Actually, this is beast for it's time. One of the best parts! P3B-F is reliable and stable, SLI no comment and other parts are good. Have you connect two or single monitor to Matrox? You can play a ton of games on this

Edit: Matrox is the first card that introduced environmental bump mapping technology with their G400 model (remembered expendable demo). I like it!

Godlike wrote:

Indrid Cold wrote:

I must say I'm relatively happy with my PIII @450 + Matrox G450 + 2x Voodoo II SLI – G450 maybe is not a beast, but works well in my configuration. Motherboard is Asus P3B-F.

Actually, this is beast for it's time. One of the best parts! P3B-F is reliable and stable, SLI no comment and other parts are good. Have you connect two or single monitor to Matrox? You can play a ton of games on this

Edit: Matrox is the first card that introduced environmental bump mapping technology with their G400 model (remembered expendable demo). I like it!

Yes, good old times - Asus P3B and P2B models were great in those times - and I remember very well how Matrox marketing pushed bump mapping innovation for its time. For now I'm using only one monitor, I'm waiting to move in my new house/garage-lab to accomodate everything as I would. Matrox + Voodoo II (best in 2x 12mb SLI like I'm lucky to own) is a good "nostalgic" and time-coherent choice.

Godlike wrote:

Indrid Cold wrote:

I must say I'm relatively happy with my PIII @450 + Matrox G450 + 2x Voodoo II SLI – G450 maybe is not a beast, but works well in my configuration. Motherboard is Asus P3B-F.

Actually, this is beast for it's time. One of the best parts! P3B-F is reliable and stable, SLI no comment and other parts are good. Have you connect two or single monitor to Matrox? You can play a ton of games on this

Edit: Matrox is the first card that introduced environmental bump mapping technology with their G400 model (remembered expendable demo). I like it!

Unfortunately for Matrox, nVidia introduced the first GeForce card around the same time and that was much faster than G400, had hardware T&L and DX7 support so it was a more future proof investment than G400.

Indrid Cold wrote:

Matrox + Voodoo II (best in 2x 12mb SLI like I'm lucky to own) is a good "nostalgic" and time-coherent choice.

That's correct. This is good example for timless classic gaming experience. With PC like this you can play ton of fantastic games. DOS same as till winXP 3D games. I like your statment: garage-lab. For now I can look around my room and see parts everywhere, same as living room. This reminds me to do something with it 😀
I can get cheap as 5USD P3B-F and I think I will go with it as I owned CUSL2-C and think to do some benchmarking between them on various settings and different graphics.

sliderider wrote:

Unfortunately for Matrox, nVidia introduced the first GeForce card around the same time and that was much faster than G400, had hardware T&L and DX7 support so it was a more future proof investment than G400.

You are right. And that was good time for nVidia, especially transform&lighting technology (eg. Max Payne). I don't think there were any drivers to support T&L on Voodoo's that time. With Amigamerlin 3dfx products can see this from a different angle. 3D cards companies had a poker game that time

I don't think he was trolling guys. 3Dfx marketshare was nowhere near 85% though, that's would never happen. ATi, S3, Matrox and eventually Nvidia made huge profit on OEM sales and as such had a huge marketshare there.
3Dfx cards were very popular among gamers and you cannot deny that, it is a fact. Glide was very popular, all the way to 1999 and even a little bit in 2000 (Deus Ex anyone?).
Perhaps HighTreason has been unlucky with 3Dfx cards for one reason or the other and has frustrating memories of them.

HighTreason, you accuse everybody of not providing any facts, why don't you make a start? You haven't really provided any hard evidence to support your claims.

Deus Ex was an Unreal Tournament engine game, and all of the Unreal games had support for at least one graphics API other than Glide (D3D and/or OpenGL) as well as software rendering that could be used in a pinch.

My (not necessarily accurate) recollection is that only Unreal 1 started out specifically targeting Glide (as far as the Unreal engines), and then Epic realized that was a bad idea and hired someone to write a (OpenGL?) renderer for them. That company dropped the ball, and Epic ended up making a Direct3D renderer in-house. This was brand new when I got my PII-450 with a TNT1 (Diamond Viper V550), so it had some issues for a few months.

F2bnp wrote:

I don't think he was trolling guys. 3Dfx marketshare was nowhere near 85% though, that's would never happen. ATi, S3, Matrox and […]
Show full quote

I don't think he was trolling guys. 3Dfx marketshare was nowhere near 85% though, that's would never happen. ATi, S3, Matrox and eventually Nvidia made huge profit on OEM sales and as such had a huge marketshare there.
3Dfx cards were very popular among gamers and you cannot deny that, it is a fact. Glide was very popular, all the way to 1999 and even a little bit in 2000 (Deus Ex anyone?).
Perhaps HighTreason has been unlucky with 3Dfx cards for one reason or the other and has frustrating memories of them.

HighTreason, you accuse everybody of not providing any facts, why don't you make a start? You haven't really provided any hard evidence to support your claims.

Let's bury the hatchet. Every one has it's own opinion and experience of the past. Providing new evidence will be worthless. History disputes in some cases are difficult to solve or provide any facts conjuncted with. Nobody have been with companies at that times and see It on own eyes to say this and this is true. The facts are 3dfx is dead and Glide wasn't future API. I know as HunterZ wrote:

HunterZ wrote:

Epic realized that was a bad idea and hired someone to write a (OpenGL?) renderer for them.

Glide was getting outdated and some game companies with open eyes and well budgeted like Epic Games realised that and overwrite thier product for other than Glide renderer support. I know Pyl 1998 (pył) the polish fps game have been primarily written for Glide, nowadays authors are re-writing this game to newer thechnology as Glide is no more widely and officialy supported

Godlike

HunterZ wrote:

Deus Ex was an Unreal Tournament engine game, and all of the Unreal games had support for at least one graphics API other than Glide (D3D and/or OpenGL) as well as software rendering that could be used in a pinch.

My (not necessarily accurate) recollection is that only Unreal 1 started out specifically targeting Glide (as far as the Unreal engines), and then Epic realized that was a bad idea and hired someone to write a (OpenGL?) renderer for them. That company dropped the ball, and Epic ended up making a Direct3D renderer in-house. This was brand new when I got my PII-450 with a TNT1 (Diamond Viper V550), so it had some issues for a few months.

Unreal D3D was first released specifically for the Matrox G200. The OpenGL renderer was actually intended for some other cards that wouldn't be ideal for the D3D side for whatever reason, like it was specifically written to work well with Rendition V2200 and (I think) Riva 128 for example.

Epic never got their D3D or OpenGL to a point where it was equivalent to playing with Glide or S3 Metal. Features were missing, quality was usually worse and varied across the buggy cards of the time, and there is a lot more CPU overhead. I'd blame Direct3D 6 and the limitations of the cards they had to support. OpenGL was a similar story at the time. Unreal Engine games are most definitely best played with Glide, Metal or one of the modern OGL/D3D9 renderers.

HunterZ wrote:

Deus Ex was an Unreal Tournament engine game, and all of the Unreal games had support for at least one graphics API other than Glide (D3D and/or OpenGL) as well as software rendering that could be used in a pinch.

My (not necessarily accurate) recollection is that only Unreal 1 started out specifically targeting Glide (as far as the Unreal engines), and then Epic realized that was a bad idea and hired someone to write a (OpenGL?) renderer for them. That company dropped the ball, and Epic ended up making a Direct3D renderer in-house. This was brand new when I got my PII-450 with a TNT1 (Diamond Viper V550), so it had some issues for a few months.

Yes, Deus Ex did offer support for most APIs, however if you were really serious about playing it you went with Glide. Voodoo 5 can play this game mostly without a hitch, where as GeForce 2,3 and even 4 have major speed hiccups. The newer renderers for UE1 are truly a godsend!

Dark Engine have also great support for 3dFX hardware eg. 1999 System Shock 2. Whole Voodoo line+Matrox G200+most newer D3D cards.